Interviews by Brainard Carey

Jeanette Doyle is an artist and  PhD candidate.  Solo exhibitions include: 'Cf' @ The Research Pavilion Venice, 'Jeanette Doyle: Fifteen Days' @ The Andy Warhol Museum Pittsburgh, Location One, New York, The Chelsea Art Museum New York, mother's tankstation Dublin, The Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art  Helsinki and the 2009 Beijing Biennale.

Group exhibitions include: PS1 MoMA, Pristine Gallery Mexico, TamTam Artspace Berlin, the 798 Art Festival Beijing, A-SPACE 1ARTBASE Beijing, LUX Gallery New York, Y Gallery New York, White Box New York, Kochi Museum of Art Japan, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, The Crawford Municipal Art Gallery Cork, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts Paris, Museum of Modern Art Croatia, Brisbane Institute of Modern Art, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the ICA and Studio Voltaire London.

Jeanette Doyle, Pearls 8"x10"; digital print on water colour paper, 2016

Jeanette Doyle, Pearls 8"x10"; digital print on water colour paper, with the addition of water and pastel 2016

Joshua Rubin in his studio, photo: Anne Murray

Joshua D Rubin is a painter who currently resides in Brooklyn New York with his wife , son, and two dogs.

After an idyllic childhood in the scenic Rocky Mountains of Colorado, he received an undergraduate degree from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston Massachusetts.

Following this he moved to New York City and received his Masters Degree in painting at Pratt Institute. New York City’s energy and its unparalleled cultural and ethnic diversity, has become his home, but also an inspiration to him both in terms of creativity and social awareness.

450 West 17th Street #9, oil on panel, 5 7/8” x 7 13/16”

Plaza Hotel #15, oil on panel, 4 9/16” x  5 7/8”

Lamis Saidi (born on 4 September 1981) is an Algerian poet and translator.

In 2004, she graduated as a computer science engineer from the university of sciences and technology in Algiers. Adding to Arabic, she is fluent in French, English and Spanish.

She has published three poetry books (As usual, I forgot my suitcase / to the movies / like a devastated city) and a biographical essay on her father entitled : Room 102.

She has translated many poets such as : Anna Gréki, Yamina Mechakra, Rabah Belamri, Henri Michaux, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Emily Dickinson.

she’s been working for more than two years, on the translation(from French into Arabic) of the work of Algerian poets that wrote between the 50s and the 90s of the last century, as an ambitious project to redefine part of the Algerian modern literature history.

Her poems are translated into French, English, Dutch and Spanish.

She has also worked as an organizer and a moderator of cultural debating spaces, in the National Algerian Library and the National Algerian Theater in Algiers.

She participated in many literary festivals such as : WRITERS UNLIMITED (in the Hague 2008\ South Africa 2010), TRANSMEDIALE (Berlin 2009), VOIX VIVES (France 2011\ Spain 2014).

The Balcony View referenced in the interview

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the award-winning author of a memoir and three novels, and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies.

Her memoir, The End of San Francisco, won a Lambda Literary Award, and her previous title, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, was an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book.

Her new novel, Sketchtasy, is just out—Sarah Schulman says, “If Sketchtasy doesn't become a classic, we are doomed.”

For her current tour schedule, click here.

She was interviewed a second time and that interview can be heard here.

Alison’s work includes oil paintings and ceramics that depict women engaged in mysterious ceremonies. Presented as installations, with objects positioned on the floor or on stands like altars in front of the paintings, the works together tell a story. They suggest that the viewer has entered a sacred space, and that they are seeing remnants of a mystical happening that took place there. Vessels are repeated throughout the paintings and ceramics, and suggest the cosmic egg. These vessels are carefully tended to, guarded, and used by the women who inhabit the scenes. Figures pose in trance-like, choreographed movements, reflecting Alison’s belief that art making is ritual, and that all ritual is performance.

“I'm interested in creating images of women supporting and connecting with one another. I am part of a community of incredible women~ herbalists, witches, midwives, artists, and revolutionaries, and it informs my work big time.”

Alison Blickle has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, with recent solo exhibitions at Kravets Wehby Gallery in New York and Five Car Garage in Los Angeles. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at MOCA Tucson, Nassau County Museum, Deitch Projects, New York University, The Hole, and Beers London. Alison received an MFA from Hunter College in New York in 2009, and a BFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2006. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

The Return of the Divine Feminine, 76" x 90", oil on canvas & ceramics, 2018

Hunter's Moon, 70" x 80", oil on canvas & ceramics, 2017

Sara Driver adapted, produced and directed the film version of Paul Bowles’ short story, YOU ARE NOT I (1982, 48 min.). It premiered in the U.S. at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre in New York City and was featured at many international film festivals, and museums. In 2011 it was presented in the Master Works section of the New York Film Festival.

Her feature film; SLEEPWALK (1986, co-writer, producer, director, 78 min.), won the prestigious Prix Georges Sadoul (1986) given by the French Cinémathèque. SLEEPWALK also won the Special Prize at the 1986 Mannheim Film Festival, and was the opening night selection for the 25th Anniversary of the Semaine International de la Critique at Cannes (1986). SLEEPWALK was also featured at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1987 New Directors New Films Series.

In 1993 she made the award-winning feature film, WHEN PIGS FLY (co-writer, director, 94 min.), starring Marianne Faithfull and Alfred Molina. It premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival and was shown at Toronto, Rotterdam, as well as many other international film festivals.

She wrote and directed the short documentary, THE BOWERY - SPRING, 1994, part of “Postcards from New York,” an anthology program for French TV.

Driver’s other film credits include Jim Jarmusch’s, PERMANENT VACATION (1979, producer, production manager) and STRANGER THAN PARADISE (1984, producer). She produced the Tom Waits music video, “It’s All Right With Me” (1990, Jim Jarmusch), as part of the “Red, Hot & Blue” AIDS benefit television broadcast. In 2016 she co-produced Aaron Brookner’s film Uncle Howard.

Her films have had retrospectives in Denmark, Buenos Aires, Anthology Film Archives NYC, Thessaloniki International Film Festival and in TIFF Cinematique, Toronto and Maine International Film Festival. In 2015 she was given a tribute for her work in cinema by the Lisbon and Estoril (Leffest) Film Festival in Portugal. Her films are available in a boxset from Filmswelike.

Her most recent film as director/producer, Boom For Real The Late Teenage Years of Jean Michel Basquiat (2017) was released Spring of 2018 in the States and is in distribution throughout the world. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was selected for the New York Film Festival; it is being shown at a variety of international film festivals. The NY Times called it a ‘Beguiling Look at a Teenage Basquiat’.

Photo by Damon Dahlen

Jo Confino is a journalist and a photographer.

Jo is inspired by the Japanese Wabi Sabi art movement that sees great beauty in impermanence and decay.

He is fascinated by taking pictures of small and insignificant objects that are often falling apart.

By focusing on them and giving them a monumental quality, these objects gain he attention and love that otherwise would pass them by.

Jo also takes a particular interest in photographing reflections, either in water or glass, that bend our sense of reality and allow us to look below the surface of life.

Building reflected in an Amsterdam canal 2017

Remnants of tape stuck to a door frame on the Lower East Side, New York 2018

photo by Carson Davis Brown

Stacy Switzer is curator and executive director of Fathomers.

From 2004 to 2015, Switzer was artistic director of Grand Arts, where she curated and produced more than two dozen projects by artists including Glenn Kaino, Sissel Tolaas, Stanya Kahn, Pablo Helguera, Mariah Robertson and Sanford Biggers.

She has been a visiting lecturer, critic and consultant for Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, Smack Mellon, Mildred’s Lane, Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative and many other organizations throughout the United States. Switzer is co-editor, with Annie Fischer, of Problems and Provocations: Grand Arts 1995-2015, published by Grand Arts and available from Artbook/DAP.

About Fathomers:

Fathomers is a creative research institute dedicated to producing sites and encounters that challenge us to live and act differently in the world. As the successor to Grand Arts (1995-2015) — the influential project space that produced the Propeller Group’s A Universe of Collisions, William Pope.L’s Trinket, and Tavares Strachan’s Orthostatic Tolerance, among many others — we cultivate the ideas of diehard dreamers, commission projects that seem far-fetched, and enlist expansive thinkers across disciplines to redefine the limits of scale, scope and support for artist-led projects. We do this because we value discoveries made absent predetermined outcomes, and we believe in the power of the realized dream as a model for visionary change.

Here are two video links with captions:

MYCO-COSMOS from Fathomers on Vimeo.

In November 2017, as part of an ongoing project with Phil Ross, Fathomers produced "Myco-Cosmos," where famed mycologist Paul Stamets and new age legend Laraaji captivated hundreds of the myco-curious under a full moon at Los Angeles State Historic Park.

Michael Jones McKean: Twelve Earths (first look) from Fathomers on Vimeo.

A first look at Michael Jones McKean's long-term, round-the-world collaboration with Fathomers, Twelve Earths -- filmed at the remote Caribbean site of the Teignmouth Electron.

Michael Jones McKean and Fathomers on site at the wreckage of the Teignmouth Electron, Cayman Brac, spring 2017. Photo: Fathomers.

Paz Perlman was born and raised in Israel and currently lives and works in New York.

She got her BA at Central St Martins, University of Arts, in London. She regularly exhibits in the US and Europe.

Her statement on her work;

Art has an authenticity when it is forged from the crucible of life’s experiences. My practice seeks to reflect this, with my childhood having been shaped by war, loss, and migration. This has created an urge, through my works, to heal the space where time and events leave their traces and scars; a fragile and unfolding process of discovery.

This exploration is expressed via bricolage, paintings, prints as well as sculptures and installations. I am attracted to discarded objects, which I often combine with more traditional materials ranging from metal and wood to textiles, paint and paper. While the finished works can appear diverse, they are linked through cultural and personal references drawn from life, history, and a chance methodology. The foundation of them all is a yearning to convey the inexpressible.

I am like a scavenger, picking up ideas, materials and objects wherever I am in the world, then penetrating, unravelling and breaking them down to free them from the stranglehold of their conventional meaning. By transcending familiar elements from our everyday lives and creating challenging juxtapositions between them, their useful significance disappears, and a new thought is created. This often results in works that are not necessarily beautiful in a traditional sense, but seek to convey vulnerability and the melancholic transient beauty of the fragility and non-solidity of our existence. This suggests a continuous process of decay and rebirth.

My fascination with impermanence comes from my 26-year study and practice of Zen Buddhism and Taoist philosophy, which relate to time as a cycle of transformation.

I am particularly interested in the concept of the void, not just as a metaphoric black hole of the unknown, but as a space of infinite potential. I often express this via the minimalistic gesture of ruin-like grid structures, which also highlight imperfection and the collapse of linear time.

By putting an emphasis on the process rather than the end result, these works are more of a question mark than a statement and allow the viewer to be part of my questing.

Transit, Wood and metal 6m x 3m 2015

My Guts Tell Me Mixed media 2017

Alex Braidwood is a sound artist, media designer & design educator.  He maintains a practice centered around a process of play, experimentation and research through making.

His work explores methods for transforming the relationship between people and the sounds in their environment. Alex has been an artist in residence in an Australian National Park, on an Iowa farm and at a mid-western biological field research station.

Alex has exhibited work, led creative technology workshops, lectured on his research process, and performed live at a variety of events throughout the US, Europe and Asia. He is currently Associate Professor in the Graphic Design, Masters of Sustainable Design and Human Computer Interaction PhD programs at Iowa State University and is director of the Artist-in-Residence program at the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory biological field research station.

Nature Sound Recording at Lakeside Lab Field recordings from these different locations are collected as documentation of the location’s soundscape. The focus is on the dawn chorus, the most active time in the wilderness soundscape

Based on a True Story An 8 channel installation comprised of naturesound recordings collected from northwest Iowa performed and manipulated by real-time water quality readings from the Des Moines River