Thea Liberty Nichols: While trying to determine how to define what it is that you do, I hit upon the idea of just describing all of your activities in one long run-on list, which might look something like this: publisher–distributor–writer–editor–curator–blogger–teacher. (Hopefully I haven’t made any glaring omissions?) I like the idea of employing awkward hyphenations in this instance because it not only emphasizes the reach of what you do— it also creates a sort of horizontal organization of things, were all of these different forms of expression and modes of production are recognized as equals, rubbing hyphenated elbows. Can you tell us a little more about the sum of these parts, or some of these parts?

Garden by Yuichi Yokoyama

Dan Nadel: You summed it up pretty well! I see all these activities as interlocking. Basically I look for as many outlets for my sensibility, and those of my artists, as possible. The parts you reeled off are linked by my desire to present both the work of artists I’m interested in and the lineage they’re a part of. So, it’s important to me to not just publish, say, Gary Panter, but also to curate a retrospective of his work, and then look at his art history and publish or curate around that, too. So from Panter I got to the Hairy Who and Karl Wirsum, for example. And likewise, when publishing a younger artist, like C.F. or Yuichi Yokoyama, I’m interested in their total sensibility: in comics, in drawing, in music. The artists that I’m most involved with by necessity require the above linkages — I have to be all those things just to keep up with them. But I’m a bit evangelical, so while they prod me, I like to think I’m prodding them out into the public — and trying to create a space, both contemporary and historical, in which they can exist.

TLN: The works that you’ve produced over the years feature a wide-ranging slew of multi-generational and cross-disciplinary makers. In your collaborations with others on these projects, do you see yourself as a maker too, or more of an indefatigable fan and promoter?

DN: I definitely see myself as a maker, or a maker by way of facilitating. What keeps things interesting is the making — working with an artist or group of artists to determine the best way for their work to be experienced in the world. And as a writer/curator, I like to think I’m making ideas, or spaces for ideas — making the context in which this work lives. In other words, I’m not interested, for myself, in just dropping raw material into the world. I want to help form and inform it, and, to some degree, inform the response to it.

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Thea Liberty Nichols: I’ve had the pleasure of curating one of your self-published books into a show I put together a few years ago, and recently you were kind enough to have me over for a studio visit where we got to rifle through your flat file. Can you detail for us your process of taking a work from creation through to production— whether it’s an animation, inking a comic, printmaking, or book-binding— and on out into the world, either through screenings, publishing, or what-have-you?

Lilli Carré: For whichever medium I end up choosing for a project, I usually start with scribblings in my sketchbooks and loose little notes and ideas all over the pages, which end up looking something like this:

When I work on a comic, I’ll start with these ideas and start to form a narrative thread, and from there I start making thumbnail storyboards for how I’m going to draw and structure the final comic. Here’s one of my loose storyboards for a page from my story “The Carnival”:

and here’s the final page:

When I work on animation or printmaking, it’s sometimes carefully plotted out, but lately I’ve been enjoying working much more intuitively in these forms. For animation, I’ll just start drawing frames, maybe starting with a particular little motion or simple scene and then build on it as I go. This whole animation Head Garden was made in this way— just starting with the idea of a man losing his head and drawing straight-ahead as I went.

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Thea Liberty Nichols: I have to bashfully admit that, despite it being just a bike ride away, I’ve never visited Roxaboxen Exhibitions before. But, for a while now I’ve been keeping tabs on all of the various events you have going on, such as the openings, performances, classes and studio space you have for working artists. Can you tell us more about all the stuff you house under one roof, and let us know what motivated you all to open your doors, add a new voice to Chicago’s exhibition space topography, and cultivate the community that orbits around you?

Liz McCarthy: I wanted to leave Asheville, North Carolina, where I had been living and going to art school. I had been selling my work and doing well there but it was a small community and I wasn’t satisfied with what I was making and wanted to expand my practice and feel more challenged. I grew up outside of Chicago and went to North Carolina a lot to visit my Dad— both these places have resonated as home, but I decided to return to Chicago to be close to my Mother again. Also the rent prices were a third of the prices of other places I was looking at moving (New York and Philly). I had read a lot of articles about Pilsen and artists who rented storefronts for art spaces in college, and I had gone to Pilsen as a teen to wander. I decided that I wanted to have a storefront arts space in Pilsen.

TLN: I see from the list of ten names involved in operating your space that there’s a healthy team of folks supporting your organizational efforts. Are all of them artists? And do all these voices and hands embed themselves into the character of Roxaboxen Exhibitions as a collective, or are things more parsed, delegated and individuated?

LM: Roxaboxen was extremely disorganized in the beginning, getting into it I had this idea that we would all have jobs and function more like a collective or business. After about 6 months where I had been doing most, if not all, of the administrative work, I realized that I had developed this major role as director. I began taking more ownership of the space, and was more committed to trying to really curate and schedule in a more intentional way. The others sort of let this happen and an unspoken agreement developed wherein I did what I wanted and others could schedule stuff they were interested in whenever there was free time. So Roxaboxen has evolved over the past few years out of this original situation. I am back and forth about making money on the space, sometimes I feel like I should be, sometimes I don’t care.

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Jasmine Justice, "Uranium Leak," 2010. Acrylic and vinyl paint on canvas.

Thea Liberty Nichols: I had the pleasure of getting to know you while working in my previous post at 65GRAND gallery, and it was lovely seeing you in town again for your last show their. Since the last body of work of yours I saw, the physicality of the knobby linen and metallic paints and the way it interacts with an almost intuitive sense of framing, patterning and imagery has gotten stronger and more intricate. But there was a new, figurative element to some pieces— can you tell us a little more about that?

Jasmine Justice: The events that appear in my paintings largely result from an opening of my subconscious into the painting process. I discover new meaning as a result of this opening. I have always considered the experience of making and reading my paintings to be very bodily, although if a form would arise that seemed too literally figural I wouldn’t keep it. Then faces started popping out more than usual. I think my paintings were teasing me. I have finally given in to allowing some face imagery.  I find them very inviting and I accept how human it is to read faces into everything.

Jasmine Justice, "Naughty or Nice," 2011. Acrylic on linen, 23.6 x 23.6 inches.

TLN: I know previously you were based out of New York but have spent the past year or so traveling and living abroad in places including Frankfurt, Berlin and Istanbul (if I’m not mistaken!). You featured the street view from your studio window in Istanbul on your 65GRAND exhibition poster, and I know when I was there a while back everything from the tile work, to the outline of minarets, to the color palate of cooking spices gave me aesthetic arrest. How have your experiences aboard in any or all of these places impacted your practice or made their way into your work?

JJ: I left New York in 2009 and have been spending a lot of time in Germany, but my current studio is in Istanbul. It’s in a district on the Asian side, where not-very-old furniture is renovated, mostly in a Baroque style. Nothing is ever thrown out here, and objects acquire unlikely identities through this recycling. The materials are simultaneously cheap and fancy and the shoddiness of the form doesn’t always correspond to the sumptuousness of material. Velvet, satin, jewels and metallic paint are routine. All these object of wonder are displayed in various stages of their creation out in the streets where the surrounding architecture is stark and modern, mostly from the 50s and 60s. The collision of these worlds is super exciting to me.

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Thea Liberty Nichols: On my first trip to Houston several years ago, I was able to visit Aurora Picture Show in its previous converted-church location. There was a palpable sense of community amongst the viewers gathered in the room that night, and I know since then your microcinema’s appeal has only grown. Can you tell us a little more about how Aurora Picture Show has embraced its present nomad-ism and translated it into the opportunity for successful collaborations with a number of host sites around Houston and beyond?

"Aurora Picture Show was originally based out of a former church building in the Heights, but now programs in unique settings all over Houston."

Delicia Harvey: Yes, as you may remember, our original location was also the home of our founder, Andrea Grover, and when she decided to retire and move her family to the East Coast, there was a mutual decision by the Board and staff to embrace our new library location (which is located across the street from the Menil Collection) and begin to program nomadically around the city.  Taking programming out of the church and into the community allowed us to reach audiences we had not before, create unmatched events at locations that were completely site-specific to a performance or screening (such as Luke Savisky’s E/X), and improve and expand our collaborations with all the other arts organizations in the city.  It has really improved our attendance and we have found that audiences seek out and enjoy the events that match a site to the screening content.

Screening from the backyard of Aurora Picture Show's library location, 1524 Sul Ross, Houston, TX.

TLN: Since its inception, Aurora Picture Show has focused on screening documentaries, shorts, and avant-garde artist-made films. As artists’ usage of available technology has expanded, so has your programming, which now encompasses other moving image technologies and multimedia events. Can you tell us more about the impact of this media on your programming and how you use tools like the Internet and streaming video to further Aurora Picture Show’s mission?

DH: For the past eight years, Aurora has presented a festival entitled Media Archeology, which focuses on artists using electronic media of the past and present in live performance.  Past artists have included Cory Archangel, Yacht, My Robot Friend, Shana Moulton, Tara Mateik, Brent Green, Negativland, and many others.  Recent versions of the festival include a number of live cinema performances, which we would like to do more of year-round, however, costs are usually prohibitive so we find ways to partner with other organizations to bring in artists we would like to work with.  For instance, we are working with a Houston Cinema Arts Society to bring in Braden King’s performance of Here this November.  In terms of how we use the Internet, we have just begun live streaming of our video salon discussions and recording workshops so we reach people who cannot attend. We hope to exhibit/distribute more work online in the future and this year have applied for funding for two projects in 2012 that use audience participation through the Internet as a large part of their project. So, we hope to use it more that way should funding allow.

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Selina Trepp, "The Painter," 2011. Archival inkjet print, 19.5" x 27.7".

Thea Liberty Nichols: I left your studio, which you were kind enough to have me visit the other day, inspired to make new work because hearing about the “instructions” you give yourself really resonated with me. Rather then functioning as rules or restrictions, it sounded like they seeded your impulse to experiment and improvise, and, as you noted, the outcome of your work could still surprise you in the end. Can you recount a series of instructions for us and tell us how they’ve shaped this new body of work alongside the other mysteries and happy coincidences that come along with innovating and problem solving?

Selina Trepp: In the past year, I have been focusing on my relationship to painting. Focusing on painting in my case means addressing my relationship to my mother and grandmother. They are both painters.

Grandmother = Artist – Painter
Mother = Artist – Painter
Me = Artist avoiding painting

Thinking about the above I realized that the most challenging thing I could do within my own practice, was to paint.

To help me in that endeavor I came up with a framework, a physical construction consisting of a crude one-way mirror and a camera, as well as a set of instructions to work with.

Instructions to myself:

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Wangechi Mutu. Photo: Flora Hanitijo.

“I’m really trying to pay homage to the notion of the sublime and the abject together and using the aesthetic of rejection, or poverty, or wretchedness as a tool to talk about things that are transcendent and hopeful.” (Aimée Reed, “Interview with Wangechi Mutu,” Daily Serving, Apr. 12, 2010)

Wangechi Mutu was born in Kenya and lives and works in New York City. As the inaugural recipient of the Deutsche Bank Prize, Mutu had a large showing of her work up at the Deutsche Guggenheim this past June that included several of her signature strategically scatological collages and assemblages.

Having followed Mutu’s successes from early on in her career, it’s been dazzling to see her develop her present mode of working wherein she pieces together imagery culled from vintage medical illustrations, fashion and lifestyle magazines, pornography, and anthropological photographs and then embellishes them with glitter, paint, ribbon, and beads. Recently, for her exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery in New York, she also incorporated 3-D sculptural works as well. A close examination of Mutu’s 2D pieces reveal mylar resisting penetration from paint washes, with swirling pools of pleasing colors and curious microcosms of recognizable image fragments in unrecognizable contexts. Mutu’s work is beguiling and uncanny in the ways that it simultaneously entices and repels.

Dominated by depictions of the female figure, Mutu’s women are shape-shifting, hybridized forms whose meticulously reworked surfaces often belie their contorted postures, amputated limbs, flayed flesh, and stringy hair follicles.

By re-ordering disparate imagery of the natural world, such as bits and pieces from National Geographic, and splicing it together with mechanical imagery from Motorobike magazine, Mutu creates beings that blend all phylum of the animal kingdom together– or ones that look like they’re mostly machine-made cyborgs or out of this world aliens.

So, I think it’s sort of trying to slowly place this image up front yet again, and again, and again. A lot of work is about repetition; repeating the same thing, repeating the same image by going at it from different angles. I also think it takes a while for some things to be understood. I feel that what happens is that I have to keep continuing the work in order for it to be understood, ‘Oh, she kind of means it.’ When you are criticizing a culture from within, it is a little bit harder sometimes for people to accept it. (“Interview with Wangechi Mutu,” Daily Serving)

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Tobias Putrih, "View of Siska International," 2010. Mixed media installation. Installation view at Espace 315, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photo credit: Georges Meguerditchian. Courtesy the artist and Meulensteen Gallery, New York

“I don’t think art is about consistency. It’s about complexity … The key question for me is how to make an object that expresses its own self-doubt, questions its own existence.” — Tobias Putrih, in Tobias Putrih 99-07 (JRP/Ringier, 2007)

Tobias Putrih isn’t a filmmaker, but several of his site-specific installations have re-imaged cinema interiors through the creation of  life-size environments, where actual films are projected for viewers to sit and watch. One of the things I respond to the most is Putrih’s usage of every day, ephemeral materials such as paper, cardboard, tape, twist ties, and plastic foam to create, among other things, usable structures. Putrih also uses these materials to create maquettes, many of them also cinemas, but the small-scale models often represent structures that would be impossible to construct or use.

Born in Kranj, Slovenia, Putrih represented his native country at the 52^nd Venice Biennale in 2007. He now lives and works in New York and his fascination with process and the endless series of permutations that are possible when designing and constructing something is ongoing. Putrih recognizes that vision and experimentation are required to produce both functional structures and provisional objects, and has noted as much by saying:

“Blueprints, maquettes, models—these are all representational forms that describe the structure and proposed function of something. I’m interested in these forms as substitutes through which we can explore the potentials of an idea. It is much easier for me to justify the production of an object if I can insist that it is not a finished thing but rather just a proposal for an object or architectural space that will probably never be built… for me to float an idea in a provisional form that can easily be remade or disposed of makes sense, because such makeshift objects still beg questions about their own existence.” (in Tobias Putrih 99-07)

Tobias Putrih, "View of Siska International," 2010. Mixed media installation. Installation view at Espace 315, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photo credit: Georges Meguerditchian. Courtesy the artist and Meulensteen Gallery, New York

In riffing off of works by artistic and architectural titans such as Robert Smithson and Buckminster Fuller, Putrih has also revealed that his influences and inspiration aren’t solely confined to the fine arts, and include physics, science fiction and anthropology.

I like how several of his works have a collaborative component to them, with viewers often invited to construct models of their own or inhabit built environments. And like several of the other speakers from VAP’s Spring series of lectures (Muñoz, Bartana) Putrih is fascinated by experimental utopias and this permeates his work; “art and design (are) manipulative but also potentially therapeutic and socially ameliorative practices” (in Tobias Putrih 99-07).

Tobias Putrih, "View of Siska International," 2010. Mixed media installation. Installation view at Espace 315, Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photo credit: Georges Meguerditchian. Courtesy the artist and Meulensteen Gallery, New York

I’m really looking forward to hearing Putrih articulate some of the tension between the functional and the imaginative in his work when VAP welcomes him to speak in person soon. Please join us if you’ll be in Chicago!

Yael Bartana. Courtesy of the artist and Annet Gelink Gallery Amsterdam

“It’s not that I have concrete solutions to the problems … I’m constantly mirroring human conditions and political situations. Is it possible to create this reality or not, that is the question for me. All the time I’m playing with reality and fiction, constantly mirroring back and forth. It’s very ambivalent. You can read it as a solution, but for me it’s more a proposal and a questioning whether it’s possible to reverse history.” (“Interview: Yael Bartana,” Maria Kjaer Themsen, Kopenhagen.dk blog, 2010)

Yael Bartana creates photography, sound pieces, and installations in combination with her film and video practice.

Bartana was born in Israel and lives and works in Amsterdam and Tel Aviv. She was a recipient of the prestigious Artes Mundi prize in 2010, and it was recently announced that she’ll be at the upcoming 54^th Venice Biennale, where she may run into another one of SAIC’s Visiting Artist Program’s guest speakers Lisa Freiman! Bartana will be representing Poland and screening selections from her And Europe Will Be Stunned series.

Yael Bartana, still from "Mur i Wieza," 2009. Shot on RED, HD video projection. Duration: 15’00”. Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery Amsterdam

Bartana’s work is centered around the complex, multi-valiant issues of Zionism, anti-semitism, and nationalism, and she finds endlessly clever and moving ways to symbolically illustrate how those things impact the individual and inform their political identity. As she puts it, “…I also try to create discussions. My work becomes more and more political, and more and more disturbing — but also more complex.” (“Interview: Yael Bartana”)

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"Kori Newkirk: 1997-2007" (installation view), 2007. Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy The Studio Museum in Harlem.

“No one can make a better Kori Newkirk about Kori Newkirk than Kori Newkirk.”(Kori Newkirk: 1997-2007. Los Angeles: Fellows of Contemporary Art, 2007, 29)

The Visiting Artists Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (VAP) is especially excited to welcome back Kori Newkirk, who earned his BFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As part of an ongoing, semi-annual “Distinguished Alumni Lecture Series,” VAP always looks forward to inviting notable alumni to return to SAIC, giving them a chance to reflect on their time here and also to share what they’ve been up to since.

For more then a decade Newkirk has participated in dozens of solo and group exhibitions, including the 2006 Whitney Biennial, but early in his career, back in 2001, he was part of the now legendary Freestyle show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Curated by Thelma Golden, it famously injected the term “post-Black” into contemporary art discourse.

In many ways, Newkirk’s work problematizes the identity politics of the 90s and refracts issues of race, gender, and sexuality through the prism of autobiography and self-portraiture. At the same time, Newkirk’s work also draws heavily from the visual vocabulary of Conceptual Art and Minimalism. His cross-disciplinary art practice encompasses everything from photography, video, assemblage, site-specific installation, neon sculpture and mixed-media painting, and as Newkirk puts it, “I’ve always considered myself a non-painting painter who sometimes makes paintings, but with absolutely no paint.”

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