The Earth is changing. Quickly. Should we be afraid? Or can we embrace the changes and challenges and boldly look ahead? Can we build a new, better life on this planet? Ryan and Brian sit down with curator Nick Butcher and artists Allen Moore and Kat Jarvinen of The New Earth to find out.
Artists duo Sans façon (Charles Blanc and Tristan Surtees) began working together in 2001 in Glasgow, Scotland. Their diverse practice responds to the relationship between people and place. Collaborating with architects, composers, geographers, or perfumers, they work internationally on projects ranging from ephemeral performances, temporary installations in public space, large scale permanent artworks, to developing and implementing city wide strategies. Their approach renews awareness and tempts interaction, inviting one to look and think differently about our relationship to our surroundings and one another.
In this conversation we trace the core of Sans façon’s work and use their almost decade long residency with the City of Calgary to open up the dimensions of what is truly a unique and singularly impactful practice.
Selina Trepp—visual musician, collage animist, radical recycler—talks time, process, performance, material and more on the occasion of An Instrument in the Shape of a Woman at the Chicago Cultural Center. Our dynamic and inspired conversation zooms through the multiplicities of ways Selina’s playful practice breaks open the forms and formats she’s drawn to (and drawing on). Once again we’re joined by curator Annie Morse and the ambient sounds of meaning being made and publics being formed.
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!