asmaa al-issa (b. Baghdad, Iraq) immigrated to Mohkínstsis/Calgary, Alberta, Canada with her family in 2001. Her interdisciplinary practice engages her lived experiences with the land, materials, and people around her. She is continually building knowledge of recipes, traditions, philosophies, theories, and histories of the Middle East while developing her practice as an artist and educator. asmaa holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from the University of Calgary (2013) and a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies from Simon Fraser University (2017).
Our wide ranging conversation seeks the roots of her practice and voice, post-colonialist futures, the nature of interdisciplinarity, and what we think when we speak of home.
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Socially engaged watercolor sampler and plein air painter extraordinaire Leslie Baum and curator Annie Morse join us for part two of our series interviewing the three artists featured in An Instrument in the Shape of a Woman at the Chicago Cultural Center. Baum’s sumptuous, joyous paintings are attended in this exhibition by a “pedagogical shelf”, a vitrine that runs perpendicular (both physically and conceptually) to her work, revealing the nestled, intimate process by which they are made.
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.
