Today, your Bad at Sportscenterers take refuge in Diane Christiansen’s room at the Chicago Cultural Center’s exhibition An Instrument in the Shape of a Woman. Her enrapturing paintings and animations play tricks in the cosmic sands as we feel and laugh our way through the existential biggies, buoyed by bodies, icons and acorns. Curator Annie Morse helps lead our sense of the exhibition and takes us through the long, pandemic-wrought fraughtness that permeates the space. Part one of a three part series!
Nura Ali’s wide-ranging practice investigates the linguistic scaffolding upholding the assumptions we bring to the act of reading and writing. We speak about her most recent exhibition, blackness, whole-ness, the power of language, and the power of cultural unions.
Today on Bad at Sportscenter: Kelly Lloyd! Yes, that one. Kelly and Jesse sit down in the cupola at the Ox-Bow School of Art — mere hectometers from where they met almost a decade ago — to talk about practice (and practice talking), about the naming of the thing, about art education and parties. Kelly’s practice spans genre and form and most actively in this moment revolves around her research and its public instantiation, the (excellent) podcast This Thing We Call Art, for which she interviews artists about their livelihoods and labor. You can probably find it wherever you found this (including on WLPN).
Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett explore the interspace between seemingly polarized entities: light + dark, nature + culture, DIY + institutional, individual + collective. Based in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, the duo centres their practice in relational space, conceptualizing installations and interventions primarily for the public realm. Their projects beckon viewers with novel materials and participatory contexts, inviting strangers to share in collaborative viewership. Beautiful, subversive, playful, and radically inclusive, their works transform the everyday through a critical shift in perspective.
We talk through hibernation, place as space, the magic of light, a physical glitch art (the show image is an image of the work “Carbon Copy”, 2022)and the magic that could be in post-social practice “New Genra Public Art.” Oh, and Duncan tries to defend the Stampede.
This week, a little nod to the Lore is Ness sector of our collective imaginary as John Rossi and Mac Akin join Jesse in a conversation about their practices, their lives at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist Residency in Saugatuck, MI and their intersects. Through a meandering exploration of the psychic and physical, we learn more about the folk horror legend of the Prickerman, the strange shibboleths of souphead and some of what it takes to make and maintain a community of openness and improvisation.
