From the category archives:

Interview

Paradise Interrupted: An Interview with Jennifer Wen Ma and Guillermo Acevedo

by Joyce Yu-Jean Lee on July 20, 2016

In the words of composer Huang Ruo, “The installation opera Paradise Interrupted integrates opera, theater, dance, music, poetry, made-up words, interactive multimedia, and cross-cultural operatic spirits, all into one entity.”

Sound ambitious? It is. This stunning opera combines more media than I’ve ever seen in one work of contemporary art, while gracefully navigating Chinese-English translation.

For this reason, I wanted to talk with the artist mastermind, Jennifer Wen Ma, Director and Visual Designer of Paradise Interrupted, which kicked off Lincoln Center Festival.

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Sugar Shock: An Interview With Jessica Stoller

by Emily Colucci on July 15, 2016

Dainty and delicate, porcelain is not the typical medium for radical feminist art. However, Brooklyn-based artist Jessica Stoller’s porcelain sculptures seem closer to Karen Finley’s chocolate sauce-drenched performances than precious Royal Doulton figurines.

Depicting oozing glaze, dripping sickeningly sweet confections, rippling flesh and cavorting nudes, Stoller’s sculptures shatter the normally quaint porcelain subject matter. She subverts long held standards of female beauty, consumption and femininity by using this historically charged medium to portray the grotesque.

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How To Turn a Museum Into An Arcade

by Rhett Jones on July 7, 2016

Now that our culture has crossed the hurdle of recognizing that video games are more than just a time-wasting triviality that rots your brain, institutions have to grapple with how to preserve and present the rapidly forming canon. The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens was the first museum to collect video games and its currently showing off some prime gems in the exhibition, “Arcade Classics: Video Games from the Collection.” (on through October 23rd)

Art F City sat down with the museum’s Curator of Digital Media, Jason Eppink, to discuss the difficulties of preservation, how VR may become the new social medium and exactly why Duchamp was such a dedicated gamer.

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Teenage Daydream Bedroom: An Interview with Nick Alciati on “xoxo, Darlene”

by Emily Colucci on July 1, 2016

Artist Nick Alciati’s bedroom installation xoxo, Darlene feels immediately familiar to anyone who was a teenager in the early 2000s. Photographs of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Madonna and Alicia Keys almost completely paper the walls. Trendy clothes lie strewn on the bed and floor. High school yearbook photos are wedged in a mirror above a row of cutesy thrift store tchotchkes. Even if your bedroom wasn’t a pink shrine to mainstream pop culture, Alciati’s contribution to the SVA Photo, Video and Related Media’s 2016 MFA Thesis Exhibition is accurate enough to spark memories of classmates’ similar spaces.

Between images ripped from magazines, Alciati hangs posters of his glamorous alter ego Darlene. Darlene, with her long auburn hair, sultry poses and crop tops that reveal just a little chest hair, represents Alciati’s attempt to embody the pop idols he worshiped as a teenager in Syracuse, New York. In addition to the cheesy centerfold photographs, Alciati also presents Darlene’s recreation of three music videos from that era–Britney Spears’ Everytime, Mariah Carey’s Honey and Ashanti’s Rock Wit U (Awww Baby).

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Scary Stories To Tell In A Gallery: An Interview with Langdon Graves on “Spooky Action At A Distance” at Victori + Mo

by Emily Colucci on June 24, 2016

Walking the darkened halls of 56 Bogart Street, a pulsating pink glow radiated from the open door of Victori + Mo. I felt like I was in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel and told artist Langdon Graves as much when we met to speak about her current exhibition Spooky Action At A Distance. “Yeah,” Graves responded, “That’s not the first Kubrick reference I got.”

Spooky Action At A Distance is nothing if not creepy. Based on her grandmother’s experiences with ghosts, Graves’ exhibition immerses viewers into a dreamlike but distinctly familiar space of a mid-20th century home covered in flowered wallpaper and a jarring candy-colored palette.

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Why Artists Make Better Landlords: An Interview with Akin Collective’s Oliver Pauk and Michael Vickers

by Rea McNamara on June 20, 2016

The belief that artists are too independent or focused on their career to self-organize needs to die. Artists have the capacity to be both generous and great.

Take, for example, the affordable housing movement, and the artists dispelling the traditional artist-as-gentrifier-enabler role. Theaster Gates transformed vacant and abandoned buildings in his neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side by establishing a foundation, and then partnering with the city and developers to rehab a public housing complex into mixed-income housing. In Houston, Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses covers six blocks in the Third Ward, providing affordable housing for low-income tenants. Mark Bradford’s Art + Practice not only brings contemporary art programming to Los Angeles’s Leimert Park, but also provides social services for youth in the city’s foster care system. Artists have the potential to readdress urban displacement and ensure affordable space still exists for art by pulling up their sleeves and playing a bigger entrepreneurial role in real estate development.

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The World’s Longest Game of Telephone: An Interview with Lexie Mountain

by Michael Anthony Farley on May 18, 2016

Artist, writer, curator, and musician Lexie Mountain is planning to break the Guinness World Record for the longest game of “telephone”, the childhood pastime wherein participants whisper a phrase from one end of a line to another. Along the way, the message might be misheard, mutate, and end up with a totally different meaning. It’s a fitting endeavor for Lexie Mountain, who has a prolific oeuvre of examining and manipulating meaning in a variety of media—from performances live-remixing audience-recorded tapes to dissecting the tropes and idiosyncrasies of art history.

This Sunday, (hopefully) more than 1,330 people will snake throughout the galleries of the Walter’s Art Museum in Baltimore, following a line of red tape, to pass along a phrase Lexie will whisper in one participant’s ear. We sat down to discuss the project, Egyptian gods, and documentation just across the park from the museum.

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Skin Game: An Interview with Michael Mahalchick

by Irena Jurek on April 27, 2016

There may be nothing more distinctive than a Michael Mahalchick show. In the past, his exhibitions have included a mural made during a performance in which he affixed piece of bacon to the wall with their own fat, a stack of Playboy Magazines topped with a hypodermic needle, a gallery full of objects arranged as though they were simply the refuse in a used hotel room of a rock star.

For his fifth solo show at CANADA Gallery, Skin Game, Michael Mahalchick continues to find inspiration in sex, appropriated media, and the history of rock and roll to create a gallery full of darkly romantic pop culture shrines.

We sat down and discussed the significance and the meaning behind the ephemera, and discarded objects he chooses. We also discussed his performances, which have always played a vital role in his work; the last iteration will be taking place May 1 at the gallery

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No Justice: An Interview with Jennifer Catron and Paul Outlaw

by Irena Jurek on April 15, 2016

Anyone who’s seen Jennifer Catron and Paul Outlaw’s work, has zero chance of forgetting it. In the past, their work has involved placing a dinner table and its diners on a hydraulic lift, live chickens, pig fountains, a crawfish food truck, a tour Chelsea tour bus that sold editioned knock offs of famous artworks, and a gallery-sized art-world themed Monopoly game board activated by actual players. That’s not even half of the work they’ve produced.

The point of all this, is to poke fun at contemporary American culture and question the belief systems that inform it. Their current show at Postmasters, “Behold! I teach you the Overman!”, uses their trademark high-energy approach to art making to great effect. It engulfs viewers in installation, video, painting, and performance that simultaneously criticize and celebrate the role of decadence in life and art. It includes a chair that lifts you upward into a ceiling mounted video viewing cube. Inside, a parade of morally ambiguous leaders and characters engage in heavenly glee while consuming mounds of food. In the middle of the gallery, a freestanding grove of trees cover an artificial pond with a functioning boat ride. The forest’s canopy consists of a multi-media video piece starring Catron and Outlaw. In it, an intergalactic sunbathing chair propels an orange-tanned woman towards the intense light of an overpowering tanning bed, alluding to either a nuclear doomsday, or spacial bliss.

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An Interview with Phoebe Founder Alex Ebstein

by Michael Anthony Farley on March 31, 2016

At the end of January, artist/critic/curator Alex Ebstein opened Phoebe, a new gallery in Baltimore that focuses on work by female-identified artists. I chatted with Alex about the importance of spaces for women artists, the challenges and rewards of being a gallerist in Baltimore, and Virginia Poundstone’s upcoming solo exhibition, which opens at the Phoebe this Saturday.

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