Interviews by Brainard Carey

A “one-time refugee from punk and sometime band member,” Ted Riederer has armed himself with painting supplies, electric guitars, amplifiers, old LPs, record players, drum kits, hard disk recorders, photography equipment, a vinyl record lathe, and long-stemmed roses as he’s ambled artistically from the Americas to the Antipodes.

His work has been shown nationally and internationally including exhibitions at PS1, Prospect 1.5, Goff and Rosenthal Berlin, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery (San Francisco), Marianne Boesky Gallery, Context Gallery (Derry, Ireland), David Winton Bell Gallery (Brown University), The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, the Liverpool Biennial, and the Dhaka Arts Center, Bangladesh.

His “Never Records” project has traveled from New York, to Liverpool, to Derry, to New Orleans, to Texas, and to London, which was sponsored by the Tate Modern.

Ted Riederer is the Founding Artistic Director of Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project, non-profit gallery/performance space in the East Village. The New York Times has described Howl! Happening as, “Instrumental to the history of the area.” Howl! Happening’s thriving publishing imprint A/P/E has included essays by: Ai Wei Wei, Dan Cameron, Anthony Haden-Guest, Robert Nickas, Michelle Grabner, Michael Musto, C. Carr, Nicole Rudick, John Lyons, and James Wolcott.

Never Records, installation

Drums and Roses, performance

La Gallera Abandonada from ted riederer on Vimeo.

Photo: Michael Wilson

Sarah Rose Nordgren is a poet, teacher, and multiform text artist. Her two books of poetry are Best Bones (2014), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and Darwin’s Mother, which is recently released from University of Pittsburgh Press (November 2017).

Her poems and essays appear widely in periodicals such as Agni, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review Online, Copper Nickel, and American Poetry Review, and she creates video and performance text art in collaboration with Kathleen Kelley under the name Smart Snow.

Among her awards are two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and fellowships and scholarships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Conferences, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

Originally from North Carolina, Nordgren earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA in poetry from University of North Carolina Greensboro. She’s currently at the University of Cincinnati where she is a doctoral candidate in poetry with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  Nordgren serves as an Associate Editor at 32 Poems.

The books mentioned in the interview by poet-mothers are Every Room in the Body by Kerri French, want-catcher by Adra Raine, and Let's All Die Happy by Erin Adair-Hodges.

 

Still from "Territory" (2018)

Here is a link to "Territory" (above) her most recent video collaboration with artist Kathleen Kelley.

Darwin's Mother (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017)

Carol Becker is Professor of the Arts and Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts. She received her PhD in English and American Literature from the University of California, San Diego. Before coming to Columbia she was Dean of Faculty and Vice-President of Academic Affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she was also on the faculty.

This is the second interview of Carol Becker, in this interview she discusses her book Losing Helen. The first interview is here.

She is the author of numerous articles and several books including: The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change (Macmillan (1987) Reissued by Amazon (2014); The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility (Routledge,1994); Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety (State University of New York Press, 1996); Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002); Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production (Paradigm Publishers/Routledge, 2009); and Losing Helen (Red Hen Press, 2016).

She travels widely, often lecturing on art, artists and their place in society. Working closely with the World Economic Forum, she has helped to build their art and culture program as well as to bring arts training to their Global Leadership Fellows Program.

Self-Portrait of Michael Jacobsen

Michael Jacobson is a writer, artist, and independent curator from Minneapolis, Minnesota USA. His books include The Giant’s Fence (Ubu Editions), Action Figures (Avance Publishing), Mynd Eraser,  The Paranoia Machine,  and his latest collected writings Works & Interviews; he is also co-editor of An Anthology Of Asemic Handwriting (Uitgeverij). Besides writing books, he curates a gallery for asemic writing called The New Post-Literate, and sits on the editorial board of SCRIPTjr.nl. Recently, he was published in The Last Vispo Anthology (Fantagraphics), and curated the Minnesota Center for Book Arts exhibit: Asemic Writing: Offline & In The Gallery. In 2013 he was interviewed by SampleKanon and Asymptote Journal, and in 2016 by David Alan Binder . Currently, he created cover art for Rain Taxi’s 2014 winter issue, and as of 2017 he has become a publisher at Post-Asemic Press. In his spare time, he is working on designing a cyberspace planet dubbed THAT. His Ello studio can be found here: @asemicwriter.

The book mentioned in the interview that is currently reading is The Voynich Manuscript, author unknown. He speculates the author to be Annius of Viterbo.

Ghost Moon Calligraphy by MK JCBSN

Fire Breathing Action Figure: An Asemic Graffiti Hieroglyph Poem by MK JCBSN

Dr. Ignassen Mather engages in the study of history, literature, film and social communications, which led him to create a diet for the mind, where a selection of proverbs, books and film replaces the regular content received by the media; what he terms "media fat" for 30 Days, allowing the user to step out of context, garner new trains of thought, and therefore realize the importance of curating what the mind receives on a daily basis.

He is working on a series of essays on other important subjects such as entitlement, equality, and sustainability. He resides in the Berkshires.

If you want a copy of this book you can buy it in NYC at Maison 10 or you can buy it in kindle form here or print form here.

In the interview, the book he mentioned he was currently reading is Leonora Carrington - Complete Short Stories.

Todd Mrozinski acquired his BFA in painting and drawing from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 1997 where he was the recipient of a Fredrick Layton Scholarship and attended The New York Studio Program. The natural elements, as well as his home and everyday objects are his subject matter.

Todd's work is produced in series, each series relates symbolically to his life experience and grows out of present day observation and inspiration. He and his wife, Renee Bebeau, have a studio in The Nut Factory in Milwaukee, WI.

Todd was the 2015-16 Pfister Artist-in-Residence and curator of The Pfister Pop-Up Gallery. He is a contributing art writer for Urban Milwaukee and Wisconsin Gazette, is an exhibiting artist at Portrait Society Gallery, Milwaukee WI and is represented by The Woodman/Shimko Gallery, Provincetown, MA/Palm Springs, CA.

The article about Goya mentioned in the interview is here.

Summer Walk 1. 2018. Ink and graphite on paper. 89" x 42"

Bonfire. 2016. Oil on canvas. 96"x 48"

Philip Metres is the author and translator of ten books and a handful of chapbooks, including The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (University of Michigan 2018); Pictures at an Exhibition (University of Akron 2016), winner of the Akron Poetry Prize; Sand Opera (Alice James 2015), honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award; I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State Poetry Center, 2015), shortlisted for the PEN Translation Award and the Read Russia Prize; Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Poetic Texts of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014), longlisted for the National Translation Award; A Concordance of Leaves (Diode 2013)and abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine 2011), both of which won the Arab American Book Award; To See the Earth (Cleveland State 2008); and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (University of Iowa 2007).

His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, numerous journals and anthologies, and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Lannan Fellowship, the George S. Hunt, S.J. Prize, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Anne Halley Prize, the PEN/Heim Translation grant, a Russian Institute for Literary Translation grant, and the Creative Workforce Fellowship. He is professor of English and the director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Program at John Carroll University in Cleveland.

The book  mentioned in the interview is: Irish on the Inside by Tom Hayden.

Artist with son

Charlotta Westergren was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and lives in Brooklyn with her son Alec and her husband Mark. She studied architecture and worked in the field in San Francisco and NYC. Her first exhibition was in 2002 at the Dee Glasoe Gallery in New York. Since then, she's shown at Mary Goldman Gallery, Bellwether Gallery, Arin Contemporary, and Patrick Painter.

She has been in museum shows at the Knoxville Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum, and the Fort Worth Modern. Her work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Dagens Nyheter, Art in America, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, Modern painters, ART PAPERS among many others. She directs her own art school in New York City, Downtown Painting.

Carolyn Glasoe Bailey June 25, 1969- November 16, 2015 Oil on linen 60″ x 72″ 2017

Installation view at Gallery 106 Green, Jan. to Feb,. 2018.In foreground:  Gardening  glass, bulbs, brass and wiring Approximately 112″ x 84″ x 84″ 2018.  Background: Gut Renovation oil paint and papier-mâché on wallpaper 104″ x 190.5″ x 17″ 2018

Justin Anthony is one of the founders of Artwork Archive, an online resource that provides artists and collectors powerful, easy-to-use tools to organize and manage their artwork.

In this interview, Anthony explains how it works and why he and his co-founder began Artwork archive.

Born in sunny South Africa, Jessica Ballantyne moved to London in 2009 after graduating with a BA in Fine art from the University of Pretoria. Specialising in oil painting, Ballantyne creates art in a variety of mediums (such as collage, spray-paint and graphite) which all revolve around the main subject matter and passion of her work: The female body and human mind.

Jessica Ballantyne has, from an early age, been fascinated by the portrayal of subjective feeling and experience, especially in regards to the body. Her work is thus almost always figurative with a focus on the female body and transcendent experience.

Influenced by Surrealism and photography, Ballantyne creates bodies that are naked, unusual and autonomous. She combines her experience with philosophical, psychological and academic ideas about subjectivity and sexuality, with spiritual concepts like mindfulness, meditation and self-observation.

Sacred Nude is a series of eleven mixed-media drawings inspired by a mindfulness meditation practice that the artist learnt about through participating in a meditation workshop with an established neuroscientist and author. Sacred Nude is a series of works devoted to this practice of meditation, commenting not only on the intense feelings of peace and joy meditation can bring but also on the apparent struggles involved in undertaking meditation for the first time.

Sacred Nude combines the idea of the classical western nude with an uncanny twist, a distortion and doubling of bodies alongside Sacred Geometry, specifically the Flower of Life. The Flower of Life is an ancient, geometric shape made up of circles, which in this series, represents divinity, peace and the true self or subjectivity.

“I wanted to convey a sense of splitting the ‘self ’ from the ‘ego’, of a division that would not end with two separate entities, but with one. One self represented by the Flower of Life”

“As a culture we have become accustomed to looking at the female body in a particular way- that of the sexual object. I try to show a subjectivity, a presence, beneath the skin” As humans we have been bombarded with imagery of women. Unfortunately many of these images teach us to constantly view ourselves from the outside, as bodies and objects without subjectivity and presence. I rebel against this limiting portrayal of women and invite the viewer into a private, psychological space where I manipulate the physical body to speak about presence, transcending the ego and letting go of attachments to the body and mind."

The Book mentioned at the end of the interview is Mind to Matter.

Mindless Mindful | Sacred Nude Medium: Graphite, wax pencil and spray paint on paper Size: 59.4 x 84cm

 

Assimilated Self Medium: Graphite, wax pencil and spray paint on paper Size: 59.4 x 84c