Since Featured Artist Interviews always fall on Thursdays and so does Thanksgiving, I'd like to take this opportunity to highlight some of my personal favorites from the last year in no particular order.
BECCA LOWRY
BECCA LOWRY's "carved warrior shields" are a harmonious orchestration of color, texture and pattern.
She carves away at planks of plywood with power tools, but the elegance
of her final forms belie the lumber yard origins of her materials. Read the interview.
KRIS GREY/JUSTIN CREDIBLE
Performance Still (Clifford Owens Seminar at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY)
2013
Gender queer artist KRIS GREY/JUSTIN CREDIBLE’s interdisciplinary practice includes video and ceramics, as well as a variety of performance modes: storytelling, drag, educational lectures, social interaction in public space and endurance. They explore the intersection of gendered embodiment, authority, intimacy and social justice. Read the interview.
SABINA OTT
Vulgarity, beauty and contemplation meet in the materially-driven practice of artist and educator SABINA OTT. Hanging, body-sized sculptures sport light fixtures, clocks and mirrors. Carved slabs of styrofoam, embellished with faux house plants, rest on flat, astroturf rugs/pedestals. The bizarre scene creates a compelling hybrid: part home decor, part monument. Read the interview.
COURTNEY KESSEL
Mother, artist and academic COURTNEY KESSEL collapses the divide between public and private by performing with her daughter Chloe and bringing the objects of her everyday life into the gallery. In performance, video and installation, she "strives to make visible the quiet, understated, and often unseen love and labor of motherhood." Read the interview.
SELINA TREPP
Dismount after the Win Interdisciplinary artist SELINA TREPP creates illusions of physical and conceptual space, conflating a variety of distinct artistic disciplines. She makes videos of herself painting her own portrait on a two-way mirror and creates immersive environments in which life-sized projections interact with tangible objects and sound. Most recently, she's been creating photographs of constructions in her studio which include paintings, her body, mirrors and sculpture. Ultimately, she expertly synthesizes each of these disciplines, highlighting the natural and imagined boundaries between them. Read the interview.
MATTHEW SCHLAGBAUM
If I could have feelings at all, I'd have feelings for you
MATTHEW SCHLAGBAUM's sculptures, installations and photography explore the muting effect of romanticism and expectation on our lived experience. Various visual filters like frosted plexiglass, colored mylar, screens obscure clichéd imagery of natural phenomena including sunsets, rainbows, lightning bolts. The viewer is repeatedly viewing one thing through another, which creates a frustrated desire to experience the imagery directly, and this perceptual frustration is echoed in titles that add interpersonal, emotional narratives. Read the Interview.
ADAM MATAK
ADAM MATAK employs decidedly mundane media—BIC pens, graffiti markers and rubber stamps— to complicate notions of cultural value. His allegorical paintings of museum goers, for example, use the style of comics to question our always-changing relationship to esteemed art objects. Read the interview.
MARIA GASPAR
MARIA GASPAR seeks to make "what is invisible more visible, what is unknown known." As a studio artist, facilitator, collaborator, performer and audio archivist, she explores power and the social and political meanings of geographic spaces, especially in Chicago’s West Side, where she grew up. Read the Interview.