The Weird Show Broadcast

Charles Wilkin is an artist and beekeeper based in Narrowsburg, New York.

Wilkin is one of the artists who propelled collage in the 90s and early 2000s. With Index A, the monograph published by Gestalten in 2003, his personal way of combining found elements, photography, drawing, and handwriting became iconic, turning into a template for a new generation of artists working with found material. But Charles' path did not end here. Rather than repeating what had made him known worldwide, he decided to continue on a personal quest for a form of producing art that connects with his deepest concerns and interests.

From there, Wilkin strove to use collage as a means of uncovering the beauty and empathy that lie hidden within us all, revealing intangible aspects of what makes us human. Movement, depth, and a tactile feel are some of the features found in his work, which, despite utilizing vintage imagery, possesses a timeless quality and a highly personal touch.

He is one of our all-time favorites, so we caught up with him to discuss his work, life, beekeeping and music.

Leonardo Sousa is a visual artist based in Lisbon, Portugal. After working for many years on wood and iron pieces, moving from his hometown to Lisbon to pursue a master's degree caused Leonardo to change the focus of his practice. Faced with the impossibility of working with the materials with which he had used in the past, he felt the need to look for something new, and in the immediate surroundings, almost by chance, he found collage. From that moment on, his artistic practice and research work focused on investigating what collage is and how it should be understood in the context of contemporary art.

Today we will be talking with Leonardo to learn more about his thinking and theoretical studies on collage as a medium. We will review the evolution of the concept and its historical adaptation to new social and cultural landscapes. We will also learn about Leonardo's projects, which include, among others, the creation of a collage dictionary.

David Henry Brown aka David Henry Nobody is a NYC-based artist whose work resists categorisation by the more traditional labels of the art world. Interventionist, Immersive Performer, Social Sculptor or Reality Hacker are some of the ways to describe David's career, who since the early 1990s has developed a highly provocative and political body of work that acts almost as a mirror in which we see reflected the world we live in.

Resemblage, the union of the words resemble and collage, is the term Brown has coined to describe the work he has created in recent years where he uses social media to create a living performance. From his Instagram profile David uses his body to attach found objects, discarded items and remnants of our consumer society to create elaborate living collages that confront us with who we are as a society.

Valerie von Meiss is the Zurich born and Berlin based mastermind behind The Curve, the renowned art space and nomadic gallery dedicated to the promotion of contemporary collage.

With a fresh approach and a fearless attitude, in 2017 Valerie turned her odd shaped apartment into a gallery to exhibit the work of few artist friends. This was the starting point of a project that grew organically championing contemporary collage and re-thinking traditional art world practices and the relationship between artists and galleries.

Today we’re speaking with Valerie to learn more about The Curve’s history, philosophy and curatorial approach. And we also asked her for some tips on how we can start collecting collage if we are passionate about this medium -and don’t have a huge budget.

Omar Barquet is a Mexican artist based in Mexico City. Born in the Caribbean city of Chetumal, Barquet's upbringing, surrounded by wildlife, family, music and the sheer force of nature, made his curiosity a way of relating to the environment, and his childhood, marked by hurricanes, freedom, chaos and joy, a primary source for building his artistic practice.

Barquet’s interests cannot be reduced to a single artistic discipline. He is way more than a visual artist. His work includes fragments of poetry, dance, music, performance, painting, sculpture, architecture, jewelry among other fields.

His approach to art is deeply influenced by music, and his largest project so far, The Ghost Variations, started in 2012 and still on-going, is organised like a symphony, with different elements interacting in time and space creating something much larger than its separate parts.

-

There are few names in the collage scene (if we can speak of a scene, but that's another story) that almost all of us agree belong to the prestigious category of a contemporary classic. John Gall is definitely one of them.

Although his main work is related to book cover design (and he’s one of the best doing that), since the mid-2000s John has worked and experimented with collage, developing his own signature style that has been evolving ever since. His exploration with collage has fed back into his design practice and at the same time has generated a parallel path as a visual artist and illustrator.

Michel Lamoller is a Berlin based German artist. His work can be described as three dimensional collage.

After growing up with an amateur photographer parent, having the chance to be an intern at Magnum in New York City and going to art school in Hamburg, experimentation and the search for his own artistic voice led Michel to discover how to work with layered images to construct pieces that are located in the imaginary crossroad where photography, sculpture, installations and collage meet.

To balance the technical nature of photography, Michel developed a material-based process that allows him to improvise and create always leaving room for the unexpected.

Michel is one of those artists who defy the limits of the medium they work with and that is why his work is as difficult to classify as it is fascinating.

TWS Broadcast: S02E06: Pablo Serret de Ena: The Great Explorer.

Pablo Serret de Ena is a Spanish Copenhagen based artist. Pablo is a fearless, obsessive, anarchic, restless, poetic, and, above all, curious person.

Classifying his work is an almost impossible task, since every time he finishes decoding an artistic discipline, he decides to abandon it in search of new knowledge and adventures.

He is an explorer for whom public art, sound installations, drawing, video and short films are just excuses that he uses in order to shape his questions and, if possible, find some tentative answers.

Pablo is not a collage artist by any means. He is an artist with a collage mindset, which allows him to stitch together seemingly unconnected areas of reality to create unique artistic pieces.

To learn more about Pablo's work, we reviewed with him the particular meaning of these 5 concepts that, in our opinion, are key to his career: Exploration, Error, Sound, Technology, In-between-ness.

China Marks is a New York based artist who hacks machines to create drawings using fabric and thread.

-

This episode was produced by Máximo Tuja / Max-o-matic

Catalina Schliebener is a New York based, Chilean born artist. Their mixed media work lives in paper collages, site-specific installations and murals.

The Weird Show Broadcast is a podcast about art, context, appropriation, paper, artists, ideas, places, sounds, people, stuff, and, sometimes, collage

The Weird Show Broadcast is sponsored by NEW, a project based art collection designed to foster artist collaboration and empower creative expression. To learn more about their program and the artists they work with, go to www.newcollection.com

This episode was produced by myself, Máximo Tuja aka Max-o-matic. Edition and sound design by Matías Rossi. Mix and mastered by Adrià Navarro.

For further information, feel free to go to theweirdshow.info and find more episodes, interviews and reviews that we’ve been collecting there for the last eleven years.