The Napping Wizard Sessions

GRAPHITE AND DIAMONDS: THE ALLOTROPIC DRAWINGS OF RACHEL BACON

Have you ever crumpled paper just right, or covered a sheet from edge to edge with graphite, or, otherwise, protected a clean page from damage at all costs? Rachel Bacon has, and from the sound of it, she’ll continue doing so. She’s been experimenting with materials for decades, and she’s gotten it down to a science – the science of paper and pencil, trees and graphite, wood and carbon, pulp and powder. Just like diamonds and coal both come from carbon, and folklore spins yarns of devils shitting gold or turning gold into shit, Rachel’s drawings act out allotropic roles. They’re unique works that play with our perceptions of reality and confront us with lightness and dark, weight and scale, and encourage us to take responsibility for the materials we exploit. Her drawings operate on subliminal and individual levels and position us as guests on a planet that allows us to inhabit it for now.

She was born in NYC and moved to the Netherlands after earning a BFA at Pratt Institute in 1990. She currently lives and makes art in The Hague where she teaches drawing at the Royal Academy of Art. In 2016 she earned an MA in London at the Wimbleton College of Art. She reappears in New York City often as well as travels the world taking advantage of artist-in-residency programs. Most recently she participated in the Banff Centre for the Arts, Mass MoCA and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Art Center on Governors Island (where we met in 2010). In addition to The Netherlands and the United States, she has had exhibitions in France, the United Kingdom, The Czech Republic, Turkey, Lithuania, Finland and Sweden, among others, and she has been nominated for and received several public art commissions.

I encourage you to explore her website while we’re chatting: http://www.rachelbacon.com

Record Date: 15 April 2018

Air Date: 02 December 2018

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In the pilot episode of this new series, PREMISE, David Colosi and his guests consider a New York City public elementary school staging a theatrical production of The Wizard of Oz by casting the role of the Cowardly Lion as a real lion.

Release date: 2018 August 28

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David Colosi talks to Jeremy Sigler about … poetry.

Jeremy and David explore questions that arise from My Vibe: In the poet’s attempt to reach an audience, can one avoid succumbing to self-censorship, on the one hand, and fabricated outrageousness on the other while remaining true to oneself, flaws and all, and leave the campsite unmarred for the next campers? Are the dual desires to be read and to remain invisible at odds? Today, how does persona construction differ between a self-revealing literary book and a social media identity? What’s the impact of a poetry book footprint any more? 

In My Vibe, through the device of hyper-personal prose poems, Sigler explores the loneliness of the poet. With reference to Cheech and Chong, Marcel Duchamp, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Peter Saul, Franz Kafka and others, in this conversation and in My Vibe Sigler takes us on a slapstick Broken Flowers-esque journey of the poet (and maybe Poetry itself) in mid-life crisis, reminiscing, revisiting and rewriting personal scenes of failed rock-n-roll, sports and sexual attempts, savoring the joys of married life and parenthood while comically entertaining the desire to remain a sole and smooth operator.

His pants stick to the wall, slices of American cheese are dyed black and scaled to wrestling mats and the swimming pool becomes the site of a confrontation with Heath Ledger. Like Freddie Mercury who is the only musician Jeremy knows who carried along with the mic half of the stand “like a Shakespearean dagger,” Sigler is the only poet Colosi knows of who utilizes an intern for dictation.

Jeremy Sigler is a poet based in Brooklyn, NY where he has lived since 1991. His new collection of writings, My Vibe, is published by Spoonbill Books. He has written numerous collections of poetry, including To And To and Mallet Eyes published by Left Hand Books; Crackpot Poet published by Black Square Editions; and ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ published by Kingsboro Press/For the Common Good.

Release date: 2017 June 21

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David Colosi digs through his live music collection and edits gems of wisdom musicians shared mid-performance with their audiences. “Bright moments is like making love to a moonbeam,” “No one going on a business trip would be missed if they never arrived,” and “If you got it today, don’t wear it tomorrow.” 

Gil Scott Heron having enough of police violence, Bruce Springsteen advising teens about blind faith, Janis Joplin getting it while she can, Anohni hoping for matriarchal systems of governance and Tom Waits on vultures and shrimp; these and other nuggets from Arrested Development,Guru, Negativland, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, David Bowie, Sonny Rollins, Peter Gabriel, Madonna, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Jeff Buckley, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Lou Reed, John Lennon, Concrete Blonde, John Cale, Cheap Trick, Sam Cooke, Alicia Keys, Jim Morrison, Paquito D’Rivera, John Giorno, Jimi Hendrix, Iggy Pop, Stevie RayVaughan, Neil Diamond, Leadbelly and Ian Hunter.

Release date: 2017 May 22

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David Colosi, with the accompaniment of Jake Nussbaum, compiles a DEVO tribute as a companion to his interview with Mark Mothersbaugh.

This selection covers DEVO’s roots in Akron passing through Kent State, punk rock, American New Wave, MTV, then into selected Mothersbaugh tunes for films like Life Aquatic and The Lego Movie, then to the 2011 DEVO return in Something For Everybody – with a few other oddities mixed in – and finishes with Mark’s newest project Mutant Flora, a box of six seven-inch records for growing mutated plants without a nursery or greenhouse.

To listen to Colosi's interview with Mothersbaugh about Myopia.

Record date: 2017 April 26

Release date: 2017 May 04

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David Colosi talks with Mark Mothersbaugh about Myopia, Mutato Muzika, broken instruments and De-evolution. Mark Mothersbaugh: Myopia, collects for the first time a representative body of Mothersbaugh’s visual and audio artwork before and after his seminal work with DEVO. The exhibition is on view at The Grey Art Gallery at New York University from April 26 - July 15, 2017.

Mark Mothersbaugh has been part of the contemporary art conversation since the 1970s. As an art student at Kent State during the charged movement of war protests and the killing of fellow students on May 4, 1970 by the National Guard, Mothersbaugh co-founded the paradigm-shifting band DEVO.

Since that seminal period he has consistently challenged and redefined boundaries in music and visual art with a keen eye on social commentary, political awareness and self-controlled marketing. Spanning the punk and MTV eras, Mothersbaugh and DEVO mastered the concept of image construction through costumes, video and electronic music technology, and merchandising with a healthy dose of humor. Mothersbaugh parlayed his avant-garde musical background into a leading role in scoring for filmed and animated entertainment, interactive media and commercials.

His credits and awards as a composer include work with Paul Reubens and Wes Anderson and productions like Pee Wee’s Playhouse, 21 Jump Street, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, the Rugrats franchise and Yo Gabba Gabba where he can be seen as the Art teacher.

Committing himself to art making over celebrity, Mark has consistently maintained a visual practice through drawing, collage, postcards, notebooks, photography, constructed static and interactive musical and media objects and environments. For the first time, this exhibition situates his visual art practice from DADA to Jeff Koons and with comparable rustbelt connections between Mark’s Ohio roots to Warhol’s Pittsburgh with parallel lines drawn to Robert Williams and Raymond Pettibon and others in the Los Angeles scene where Mark and Mutato Muzika are based.

Mark Mothersbaugh: Myopia was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and travelled to Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati Art Museum; The Austin Contemporary; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland/Akron Art Museum and will be on view at The Grey Art Gallery at New York University from April 26 - July 15, 2017. You can see more of Mothersbaugh's artwork on his website.

Record date: 2017 April 26

Release date: 2017 May 04

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Host David Colosi talks to artist Hidemi Takagi about her photo and video projects. Growing up in Japan, she adored American films from the 1950s and ‘60s. The George Lucas classic American Graffiti made a significant impression. Her projects reflect this influence as she recreates that characteristic vibrancy and hyper-saturation of color as a nostalgic throwback to what was then her future dream of America. As a resident of New York City since 1997, living in various neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn, she finds the established cultures within her new homes – the Dominican population in Washington Heights, barbershop culture in Bed-Stuy, a senior home in Crown Heights – and photographs the color, joy and life of the people who came from diverse communities around the world to become Americans in this city. Visit her website here. Hidemi Takagi was born in Kyoto and currently lives in Brooklyn. She has exhibited internationally (London, Madrid, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Paris) and nationally, most recently in New York at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Queens Museum, BRIC Media Art Center, White Columns, Momenta Art, The Nathan Cummings Foundation and NYFA Gallery. Takagi has participated in the Artist in the Marketplace program at The Bronx Museum, the Immigrant Artist Program at NYFA, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space program, Engaging Artist Residency by More Art and BRIC New Media Arts Fellowship. Her Blender project was selected for Times Square Public Arts 2011, and Hello It's Me was awarded Seed Grant funds from More Art.

Release date: 2017 March 30

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Did you ever think you’d grow up to talk to a robot that looked like you? David Colosi discusses with artist Stephanie Dinkins her conversations with AI entity Bina48 (created by Martine Rothblatt’s Terasem Movement, Inc.). Is building a robot into a human-like sculptural bust a gimmick to seduce humans to engage with it, or do anthropomorphic features allow for essential discussions about dignity and care? With what respect do we need to treat objects, and how does this change when computers have a face, a race and a gender? When we want to become friends with robots, do they want to become friends with us? With the integration of Artificial and Human intelligence approaching, Dinkins explores the language we build into our machine learning systems: when programmers assign words like “master” to the relationship of AI to humans and later Bina48 implores Dinkins to protect her robot rights, on what ground do we stand? Who do we trust at the controls? When machines are programmed to learn at exponentially increasing speed, and we humans have difficulty learning from our mistakes, an inferiority complex seems imminent. Are we poised to approach it with humility or reproach it with brutality? The issue is not robot revenge, as our sci-fi plots like to exploit, but, as Colosi and Dinkins explore, rather an examination of dignity as we position ourselves in relation to other humans and, ultimately, objects. Stephanie Dinkins is an artist and professor at Stony Brook University interested in creating platforms for ongoing dialog about artificial intelligence as it intersects race, gender, aging and our future histories. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to develop deep-rooted AI literacy and co-create more culturally inclusive equitable artificial intelligence. http://www.stephaniedinkins.com

Release date: 2017 February 13

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David Colosi pays personal tribute to Lou Reed on the third anniversary of the poet-singer-songwriter supreme’s passing. Host Colosi on this special episode: “Whenever I’ve been invited as a visiting poet, students always ask me what poets I like. My first answer is always Lou Reed. They don’t get it. Neil Gaiman said it best when he spoke about his fans who respond to his characters by dressing or making-up like them. He said he’s touched to see that he contributed to furnishing someone’s internal landscape. Now I never took heroin, but all of Lou Reed entered my veins from the earliest Velvets through his collaborations with Metallica and John Zorn and Laurie Anderson, and those rivers have done some carving in my landscape – not in the way I look, but in the way I write, make art and navigate. Lou considered himself a literate rocker, and one of his goals was to pursue the good line. And he wrote many of them. His literary influences are well know, Delmore Schwartz, Hubert Selby, William Burroughs and Edgar Allan Poe. He never tried to rewrite them, except for Poe, but even then, he made it his own. And this is where I come in. Lou went from literature to rock, and I’m going from rock back to literature. If he demonstrated his path of influence from Poe, then I could show mine from him. I didn’t know Lou Reed, and he sure as hell didn’t know me, but I met him a few times, and we exchanged a few words. These are some of the songs that inspired me to write, make and be. They’re blended in my head like a Mayonnaise Soda (that’s what life’s like without Lou). This is Disco Mystic; this is Waves of Fear.”

Release date: 2016 October 27

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In celebration of the 80th birthday of the late jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler (July 13, 1936 – November 25, 1970), host David Colosi has compiled a two hour mix dedicated to the musician's life. Twenty tracks spanning multiple Ayler releases make up this tribute program. You will hear: Intro: Spirits (Spiritual Unity) Part 1: Interview with Daniel Caux for France Culture, July 27, 1970, Saint-Paul- de-Vence, France (Holy Ghost box set) Leap Frog with US 76th Adjutant General’s Army band (Holy Ghost box set) Summertime (with Herbert Katz) (Holy Ghost 1 box set) Part 2: Interview, France Culture (Holy Ghost box set) Old Man River, Take 2; Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen (Swing Low Sweet Spiritual) Good Bait (First Recordings Vol. 2) Going Home (Swing Low Sweet Spiritual) Part 3: Interview, France Culture (Holy Ghost box set) Ghosts: Second Variation (Spiritual Unity) Prophecy (Bells/Prophecy) Part 4: Interview, France Culture (Holy Ghost box set) Omega Is The Alpha (Live In Greenwich Village) Holy Family (Spirits Rejoice) Masonic Inborn, Part 1 (Music Is The Healing Force Of The Universe) Part 5: Interview, France Culture (Holy Ghost box set) Love Cry (Love Cry) Truth Is Marching In (Nuits De La Fondation Maeght) Part 6: Interview, France Culture (Holy Ghost box set) Love Cry – Truth is Marching In – Our Prayer (John Coltrane’s funeral) (HOLY GHOST 6) (Blues) (HOLY GHOST 6) Part 7: Interview, France Culture (Holy Ghost box set) New Generation; Everybody’s Moving (New Grass) Swing Low Sweet Chariot; Deep River; Old Man River, Take 1 (Swing Low Sweet Spiritual)

Release date: 2016 July 13

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