Working (it) Out

Working (it) Out: Season Two

Louise Bennett – Everywhere

Welcome to the new season of Working (it) Out. This season, I’m asking artists “Where does art belong?” I met with Louise Bennett to discuss her practice, her involvement with the collective and artist-run initiative Accidentally Annie Street. Bennett’s work uses site specificity (be it the Australian landscape or a seven-minute ride in her car) in tandem with sound, video, performance and experimental ephemeral installation.

Music: Future Islands, "Seasons (Waiting On You)"

Postcommodity is Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist. On today’s episode, we discuss at length their work Repellent Fence. A project almost ten years in the making, Repellent Fence will appear floating over the towns of Agua Prieta, Mexico and Douglas, AZ, USA this October – bisecting the US/Mexico border. The work consists of oversized “scare-eye” balloons – an ineffective bird repellent product which functions for the artists as an indigenous readymade and semiotic vehicle. We discuss this work, land art, borders, and keeping one’s eyes open to the politics of place.

Time Codes:

11:40 Land Art’s positioning

13:12 Designing work to implicate audiences

16:35 Asking questions of one’s audience

17:05 Layers of noise as fertile ground

19:00 Pointing an indigenous lens and offering a view through it

24:00 Seeing and Looking back

25:00 Open eye iconography and indigenous readymades

26:20 Scare-eye balloons: Powerful semiotic vehicles of Indigeneity

28:00 Having eyes open to what is going on

36:00 Borders as microcosms

38:00 The potential politics of aesthetic choices

Music: Four Tet – Parallel Jalebi

Working (it) Out 8 Nicole Miller: Conducting Subjectivity

I met this week with video and installation artist Nicole Miller. Miller and I discuss her year and a half residency with LACMA’s Redland’s Art + Film Lab and commission to create a project in collaboration with community contributors from neighborhoods around Los Angeles, as well as her recent show at Koenig and Clinton in New York. Miller considers audience from the conception stage of her projects, and for this artist, the audience completes the work. We delve into the therapeutic effects woven into her practice, and her desires to evoke a bodily and empathic response from her viewers.

Music: Chromatics – At Your Door

4:00 Laughing Yoga

5:45 The audience completes the work

6:05 Show and Tell

7:42 The Borrowers

9:50 Anthony Aquarius the Jimi Hendrix impersonator and artistic witchery

12:25 “David” and the phantom limb

15:25 Invoking active viewing and bodily response

17:45 Therapeutic Practice for the Artist and Subject

19:15 Remapping the history of Hollywood and Black Actors via uncovering overlooked narratives.

21:40 The Artist as Conductor of her practice

23:14 “Daggering” and Ballet

Working (it) Out Ep 7 Roya Akbari: Destiny’s Child

Roya Akbari is an experimental filmmaker and visual artist. When we met to discuss her work, she brought up important issues around censorship and the politics of what is allowed to be shown where. For Akbari, discourse isn’t a precursor to categorizing a culture product as art. Akbari’s experimental films and installations feel intimate and personal, but withdraw just enough from the edge of explicit to allow space for audience to enter the work. Akbari doesn’t consider audience during process, but rather addresses an aspect of herself, or in the case of Only Image Remains, audience is addressed through a love letter to Iranian Cinema.

Music: War on Drugs: An Ocean Between the Waves

Working (it) Out Ep 6 Andrew Maize: The Tide is High

Andrew Maize has a thoroughly collaborative art practice producing both studio-centric work and participatory, socially engaged performance. He’s currently a nominee for the RBC Painting Competition, I caught up with him from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.

Music: Atlas Sound – Doldrums

photo credit: Matthew Carswell & Clare Waque

Kelly Jazvac is an artist living and working in London Ontario, where she teaches at the University of Western Ontario. She is the co-discoverer of the Plastiglomerate alongside geologist Patricia L. Corcoran and oceanographer Charles J. Moore. Plastiglomerate is a new substance that forms when plastic melts and holds together various debris and natural materials, and, the team argues, acts as evidence of the anthropocene. On today's Working (it) Out, we discuss Jazvac's current show at Diaz Contemporary, her interdisciplinary practice and an interdisciplinary audience.

Song Credit – J. S. Bach Concerto No. 3 in C major

Time Codes:

2:30 Variable considerations for variable audiences

4:20 Presenting art to Paleo Biologists

5:45 The WHOLE story of the plastiglomerate

9:35 The Anthropocene and Geologists

14:10 Current show at Diaz (find title) Culture Salon Spa

17:25 Public funding and accountability

21:15 PA-PA-PA-PATRIOTS

24:10 Weird Moon