Friday, March 29, 2024
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Summer Words and Pictures

“Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.” -Pablo Neruda

And so the longest day of the year has come and gone. We stretch into the light of summertime where day yawns long and lazy entreating night to keep its distance. When darkness does envelop the verdant summer land, it teems with life and draws us out into its depths. Here we celebrate the ancient rites of fire and kinship, claiming the still air of night. The world around us swells and blooms while we move slower, bent a little by the heat, savoring each moment of this season of life.

Audrey Chan creates public art in and around Los Angeles. Her work is based on politics and cultural identity and is often research intensive. Chan drew inspiration for some of her work from the seemingly impossible juxtaposition of the New Deal and the resulting WPA murals created simultaneously with the internment of Japanese-American citizens. She created work designed to be “a revision of images we see in capital A America.” During her tenure working at the Getty Museum, Chan was influenced by the iconography of European/Greco-Roman art. Her visual narratives in artwork created for a large part of a Los Angeles subway station draw from “hyper-specific cultural images that relate to the immigrant experience in LA and the US, indigenous experience, and the experience of slaves.” Chan has also been inspired by the vocality of the Japanese-American community’s support of and solidarity with Muslims during this time of turbulence.

Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer is nearly finished with her second manuscript. It is a series of poems imagining the brain as a collection of governing bodies overseeing specific functions of the mind. She works as a poet, installation artist, and visual artist often combining the three roles allowing them to inform each other. For her first book, Cleavemark, she worked with artist Cheryl Wassenaar to create installation pieces reflecting the poems. The book is a lament for her grandmother who was tragically killed when Ellis Schlaifer was eleven years old. Often, her poems juxtapose images of beauty with the grotesque as in the poem We All Wanted the Same Things but Things Ripped, “Golden avenues of sunset light/Gold in every helping of rotting flesh/The birds came to feast upon.”

 

A Few Words to Keep in your Pocket

Remember the feeling of bare feet in dewy grass, or listen to crickets serenade a lakefront. Summer is a fleeting privilege.

Interviews are available on iTunes as podcasts, and for Android please click here. All weekly essay pieces in a sharable format are here. The full archive of interviews here.

Books to Read

What are you reading? Add your titles to our reading list here. Audrey Chang, in her interview with MONA, discussed Who We Be: The Colorization of America by Jeff Chang and user Nadia Rausa recommends Real Artists Don’t Starve by Jeff Goins.

Opportunities / Open Calls

Artists are invited to submit their work for consideration as part of World Cup 2018. This year’s theme for Tschutti Heftli’s illustration contest is footballer Diego Armando Maradona. You choose how to portay him and convince the judges that your art is worthy of becoming an international collector’s item. Deadline for submissions is August 31.

 

Deadlines

Weekly Edited Grant and Residency Deadlines – review the list here.

More Resources – For Artists Only – (2 essays from last week)

Thoughts on Rejection — Read more here

Real Artist Case History: Rob Burden — Read more here

Popular Writings –

Non-profit spaces to know –

London, UK Non-Profit Spaces – read about some of the best.

Los Angeles, CA Non-Profit Spaces- read about some of the best.

New York City Non-Profit Spaces – read about some of the best.

Self Illumination –

Conquering Fear – read about methods and Pema Chodron.

The Trap of Self-Esteem and How to Break Free- read more here.

F*ck the Art World, F*ck Consumerism! – read more here.

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