A journal for storytelling, arguments, and discovery through tangential conversations.
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
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Luther Konadu
The manipulated photographic image gained recognition as far back as the Surrealist movement with artists like Man Ray. It can refer to that of photos without any perceptible imagery or a prominently obfuscated subject. Or in the case of Gursky or even Wall, with the help of technological advances the photograph’s original state is seamlessly altered-- in some of Wall’s cases even before the image is captured—in doing so, it opens up ideas of objectivity that photography promises and rather offering alternate worlds. Johanne Teigen’s work falls somewhere in the continuum of this image/reality manipulation lineage. Teigen is only interested in the captured imaged as a starting point. She is not satisfied with the image’s ostensible objective representation. Instead, using digital means she stretches, over saturates, crops, blends, twists, skews,...
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
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Luther Konadu
In a text on Dana Schutz's bio, The Saatchi Gallery described Schutz's paintings as "teetering the edge of tradition and innovation." I don't think it will be too much of a stretch to designate the now Toronto-based artist geetha thurairajah’s works in a similar accord. It’s really no wonder Canadian Art Magazine included her as part of a group of creatives making “Forward Thinking Practices.” Like Schutz, thurairajah’s forms call to mind other weirdo painters like Philip Guston and even Nicola Tyson. Unlike Schutz’s deceptively whimsy worlds that tend to be filled with beach orgy scenes and self-eating characters thurairajah’s seemingly makeshifty loose airbrush surfaces (each matched with curiously unexpected titles) can range in explorations around her own hybridity –sometimes via good ol' Bugs Bunny and/or pop icons like Drizzy—to...
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
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Luther Konadu
Danièle Dennis is a keenly cognizant and inquisitive individual. Of self, of self as an African descendant, of self as a Jamaican, of self as Canadian, Of self as an African/Jamaican/Canadian living in North America, Of self as an African/Jamaican/Canadian artist working within a Western art historical context, of self in relation to her environment and community. Dennis is cognizant of her own potential biases and seeks to diverge away from them. “What is constantly marinating in my mind is the notion of learning and unlearning.” She tells me this in talking about freeing herself from previous predispositions about what she might know so as to open herself up for change and knowledge. Dennis is currently in the middle of her graduate studies in Philadelphia and she’s quick to point...
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
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Public Parking Staff
Parking Lot is our lax interview series where we get to really know a creative. We get to learn about what they've been up to creatively, some random facts about them, some telling ones, and just about anything else that comes up. In this episode with got in touch with multi-directional creative, Agnes Wong. The Eindhoven via Toronto-based creative share with us her experience living in the Netherlands and how that is informing the way she thinks through her work, where she would like to see her creative pursuits go in the future, some of her earliest impulses, and what she's been curious about lately.
Public Parking: Are you currently in the Netherlands?
Agnes Wong: Yes! I am in Eindhoven currently, a smaller city in the southern part of the...
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
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Luther Konadu | Robyn Adams
Part way through the second verse in that Jenny Hval track, we hear her declare to a partner in a very matter-of-fact way: "My heartbreak is too sentimental for you" and as she does her voice soars upward and at once, we are in the middle of her cry. She brings us in the middle of a cascading end of what sounds like a relationship or her actual life or perhaps both. "I'm high, high on madness/These are my combined failures/I understand infatuation, rejection/ They can connect and become everything, everything that's torn up in your life." In different contexts these same exertions Hval makes can sound needlessly grandiose if not hifalutin. And yet, it seems like the only way to utter what is being felt in that moment. Winnipeg...
Monday, January 23, 2017
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Public Parking Staff
Photo by Joshua Storie
Parking Lot is our lax interview series where we get to really know a creative. We get to learn about what they've been creating, some random facts about them, some telling ones, and just about anything else that comes up. In this installment, we had the pleasure of speaking with Edmonton's Nathan Levasseur. We learned quiet a lot from Lavasseur as he shared with us how he thinks through his predominately design based approach to his practice, his thoughts on emotional labour, male vulnerability, and bit on what he was like as kid among other talking points.
levasseur:
"it’s really interesting that people who produce most of the visual language we engage with are not trained or pushed to dismantle or reject harmful stereotypes— I wonder...
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
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Public Parking Staff
Parking Lot is our lax interview series where we get to really know a creative. We get to learn about what they've been up to creatively, some random facts about them, some telling ones, and just about anything else that comes up. In this installment we speak with Toronto based artist Shellie Zhang
We first got in contact with Zhang right around the onset of US presidential elections late October into early November. In our chat we find out how the US's new presidential administration personally affects Zhang, her experiences growing up between China, the US and Canada, where she'd like to see her creative pursuits go, some of her earliest creative memories, and also we talk about her ongoing photo series that tracks the history of a Chinese delicacy...
Monday, January 9, 2017
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Luther Konadu
"Currently I live in Orlando, Florida and we are about to get hit by a hurricane and I'm not exactly sure what that is going to entail. Let me get back in touch with you in a few days." That's artist and educator Brooks Dierdorff back in October when we first got in contact with him. Category 5 Atlantic hurricane--Hurricane Mathew--had formed and was just about to pass through Lesser Antilles and Southeastern United States among other adjacent regions. Hurricane Mathew was set to bring widespread destruction and damage through high-pressure winds which it did in its dissipation. It caused a catastrophic amount of fatalities as it moved through Western Atlantic. For us living in central Canada where hurricanes are rare, all of sudden we were no doubt tuned in...
Thursday, December 15, 2016
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Luther Konadu
It's about 8am in Winnipeg and 9am in Montreal. I wait as Zinnia Naqvi gets online to begin our video chat. My internet stream is cooperating, within moments Naqvi appears on my screen. "Hi there, don't mind me. I'm just having my breakfast" she declares. When I first got in touch with Naqvi mid autumn, she'd just been settling in after relocating from Toronto to Montreal to begin her graduate studies at Concordia. At the root of her work is documentary based photography and video. Naqvi is aware of the social and political drawback that surfaces out of this medium and the complexity of this is what her work investigates. Naqvi's work has developed to include sculptural and installation components that taps into cross-cultural translation and identity-based politics. Naqvi's work...
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
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Luther Konadu
We asked Scott Kemp how often he raises his voice and he tells us: "not often. I speak softly." We only asked because of how seemingly passive and visually subdued Kemp’s art objects are in first view. It got us wondering how much of one’s personality shows up in their art and, like in Kemp’s work, where the logic of a piece starts and where personal tastes come in.
The Vancouver-based artist recently exhibited Master and Apprentice, Lobster and Leaf at the artist run centre Duplex. The show takes an ostensibly nonlinear route to talk about complex ideas of social structures as they relate to his personal experience and upbringing. We talk to Kemp about the show and among other topics, his experience at Emily Carr, Ira Glass, Corn Pops,...
Friday, December 9, 2016
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Wale Owulade
As we all do our part to somehow keep the global economy engine running especially this time of the year, here is one piece of literature that will certainly make for a thoughtful present this gift giving season.
Publishing house Phaidon recently put out a pocket-sized hardbook cover of over 300 pages featuring insightful quotes taken from interviews, documentaries, memoirs, letters, and diaries on some of your favourite creatives all over.
It is carefully curated with sections on topics like money, failure, beauty, fame, sex, the creative process, discipline , and originality just to name a few. It’s a perfect resource for any emerging practice. It is opens up some honest and forthright advice, life lessons, and inspiration directly for those who’ve already experienced and established themselves through creating.
Art...
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
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Public Parking Staff
Parking Lot is our lax interview series where we get to really know a creative. We get to learn about what they've been up to creatively, some random facts about them, some telling ones, and just about anything else that comes up. In this episode, we talk to Alison Postma. After spending the last couple years in Guelph finishing art school, Postma is out on her own, she relocated to Toronto, she's been experimenting with her work by push out of her familiar working conventions while also figuring out how/where to direct her own independent practice. Read our full conversation with the AIMIA AGO Photo Prize winner below.
"I really like photography’s ability to remove objects from their context, and I’ve been very conscious about everything I include in (and...
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
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Laina Brown
We met Beth Schellenberg during her stay at Ace Art's Cartae Open School residency which Schellenberg completed along with four other resident creatives earlier this summer. A lot of what Schellenberg is interested in the work she investigates into centers on how we identify ourselves in digital spaces and how that changes our perception of ourselves in tangible reality.
Schellenberg speaks further on her research and her experience in the residency:
I'm exploring this liminal space between our virtual realities versus our physical realities. That place exists on our phones or on our computers or with our webcams before we actually post it; this in-between phase where we are trying to find the right version of ourselves to put out there. And I’m really curious about that—the moment when that...
Wednesday, November 23, 2016
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Luther Konadu
Parking Lot is our lax interview series where we get to really know a creative. We get to learn about what they've been up to creatively, some random facts about them, some telling ones, and just about anything else that comes up. Over the last couple months we've been keeping up with multi-displinary artist Kyle Alden Martens as he packs his belongings and transitions to Montreal after years of residing in Halifax. For a while, we though we'd lost touch with him but he would assure us he hadn't. Over the course of roughfully four months of long distance internet communication we felt like we really got know the guy and what makes him want to create. We talked to him among other topics, a bit about his childhood, living...
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
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Luther Konadu
Jessica Karuhanga is having a steady incline of a year. From getting the chance to be part of Archives Matter Conference at Goldsmiths in London UK to presenting work at the Art Gallery of Ontario, to getting the break to teach and share her knowledge on the very medium she's been thinking through over recent years at Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto, Karuhanga is a persistent force. Her performance-based works developed out of working through drawing and object-making which then led to installation-based work that would later implicate the body and in turn opening up possibilities for articulating her cultural histories, racial and gender identity. Karuhanga was nice enough to engage in a conversation with us where we talked among other topics, a bit about...
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
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Luther Konadu | Photo Contribution by Mary Rose
For just about forty minutes earlier this summer, we got to have a sit down with Zahra Baseri. And in that amount of time we were fortunate to have learnt a great deal from the Iranian-born, Winnipeg based artist. Her individual experiences and observations living in an oppressive Islamic regime has stirred her to take a bracingly honest and critical look in the society she lived through. The absence of the female voice in the Islamic society she grew up in is a palpable assessment in Baseri’s recent BMO’s 1st Art! award-winning Outcry series. Below is our conversation with Baseri: we go into the nuances of her work, her creative process, and where her earliest creative inclinations came from.
Zahra Baseri On Outcry:
The current body of work is related...
Thursday, October 27, 2016
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Luther Konadu
Katrina Mendoza's new series of studies liberally yet diligently disintegrates seemingly anonymous forms into disparate individual parts and then culminates them back into a new whole. A new whole she refers as ‘pseudo-structures’ which do result in an unresolved and irregular finish. Check out the series below and as well, read more about her and her work here.
Thursday, October 20, 2016
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Luther Konadu | Danielle January Fenn | Kelly Campbell | Photo Contribution by Wale Owulade
"A while back I worked for Lower Fort Garry which was an old Hudson Bay Company Fort between Winnipeg and Selkirk. It was a summer job where I was a historical interpreter. I had to dress up like it was in the 1850s and pretend that I lived in that era which is in a way ridiculous. It is this history or fiction that we were trying to portray to people and that got me thinking a lot about my own family and our history. The history that actually exists and the history that we portray along with the official government influence. The complicated mixing pot of history and identity; what’s real and isn’t. What voices are heard, what is given as a standard, and what voices are suppressed. It's...
Wednesday, October 5, 2016
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Luther Konadu | Photo Contribution by Laina Brown
We caught up with artist Madeline Rae during her stay at Ace Art's Cartae Open School residency which Rae completed along with four other resident creatives earlier this summer. The seven month independent learning program allows for creatives working from distinct directions of interests to share and produce work in a single environment and subsequently exhibit their work at the end of the program. In the below conversation, we speak to Rae on her keen pursuit for working through film photography, her interest in performance, and video as way of working through ideas of sensuality and intimacy.
Madeline Rae works predominantly with film photography, video, and performance. Her work tends to explore sensuality and all of its facets—different pronounced moments you might face in life whether it being grief, extreme...
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
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Luther Konadu
What is a queer environment? What does it entail? What does it look like? or what does it even mean to have a queer environment? These are just some of the questions multidisciplinary artist Adrienne Crossman's current work incites. Crossman is thoughtfully immersed with discovering what a queer space or object involves and what it's like to transverse through a society that is heavily set around binaries. Employing familiar pop culture objects like Tiger Electronic’s Furby toys, Crossman re-contextualizes them as queer objects situating the Furby aside from any binary category. Formerly Toronto-based and now living in Winsdor, Crossman recently exhibited new works that centered around these ideas as part of her solo show—Fear of a Queer Planet—at Toronto’s The White House Studio Project. Crossman is a very busy, having...
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
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Luther Konadu | Photo Contribution by Adam Collier
Parking Lot is our lax interview series where we get to really know a creative. We get to learn about what they've been up to creatively, some random facts about them, some telling ones, and just about anything else that comes up. In this instalment, we speak with the amiable Michael Mogatas. We had the pleasure of talking with Mogatas about his most recent one person show, his ambivalent relationship with images as an image maker, what his ideal breakfast is on Tuesdays, and where some of his earliest creative impulses came from.
Luther Konadu: Do you typically work from home?
Michael Mogatas: Yeah for the past year or so I have been working from 2 room apartment that I share with my girlfriend. We are both artists so some...
Tuesday, September 6, 2016
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Luther Konadu | Photo Contribution by Adam Kelly
Half way through our conversation with artist Hannah Doucet she suggests we take a quick pause. “Wait, I kind of want a beer, does anyone want one? I feel like I’m getting very warm because I’m talking about myself too much and that makes me uncomfortable” she modestly offers. Doucet’s self-deprecating tendencies are readily apparent throughout our visit to her work studio. “Sorry, but I’m getting ready for a show now so my studio is kind of a mess and it starting to get into John’s[studio-mate] space” she apologizes as we arrive at her studio. When she’s not facilitating workshops at Art City, a local community art center, she shares her charming studio with her friend and housemate where she spends majority of her time working away on new projects...
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
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Luther Konadu | Photo Contribution by Travis Ross
We had the great pleasure of speaking with the delightful and well spoken unrelenting writer, artist, poet, and all around creative thinker Jazmin Papadopoulous. Our conversation with Papadopoulous extended across a myriad of topics including why Papadopoulous prefers to be referred to by pluralist pronoun; 'them or they' instead of 'her or she' or 'him or he' and why that preference is not a politically driven one but rather a more personal protective choice. We further discuss Papadopoulous' one time foray at a clowning school, thoughts on marginalization and the stigmatization attached around that concept, video art, audience, victim-hood, and gender identity among other topics. Papadopoulous recently completed an artist residency at Cartae at the Winnipeg artist run center Ace Art. After speaking with Papadopoulous, I got a resonant sense...
Thursday, August 25, 2016
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Luther Konadu | Photo Contribution by Laina Brown
Somewhere during the latter half of this past spring, while perusing through Midwest America, I made my way through the Detroit area and then into bordering Canadian city Windsor, Ontario. For no particular reason, I've always wanted to visit that place. I didn't really have any imagination of the place. In my mind, it was just another place that exists in Canada. When friends relocated there, it became a reason to trip. For the first while there, I had to keep reminding myself I was back in Canada after crossing over. Not because it reminded me of the towns and cities I just journeyed through[maybe it did], but I suppose I thought I had a developed outlook of what the rest of Canada looked like from living and visiting different...
Thursday, August 18, 2016
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Luther Konadu | Photo Contribution by Laina Brown
Over a span of roughly five years, after being out of the protection school, photo centered artist Ashley Gillanders has been making gradual advances in her photographic practice. Partaking in residencies and mentorship programs in Winnipeg, Bnaff, and New York, exhibiting in various artist-run centers locally, receiving artist’s grants and awards, Gillanders’ work has gone from exploring human interaction with the built environment to human interaction with the natural environment and the overlap of the two. Her work has developed onto a practice that joins conventional and experimental processes to photography. Gillanders’ new collection of work counter acts what we commonly know the lens-based medium to be—both in its form and function. Recalling her formative interest in human interaction with nature, she uses tropical plants that becomes domesticized in our...
Thursday, August 11, 2016
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Luther Konadu | Photo Contribution by Laina Brown
Parking Lot is our lax interview series where we get to really know a creative. We get to learn about their current work, some random facts about them, some telling ones too, and just about anything else that comes up. In our second edition, we speak with creative, Katrina Mendoza. Mendoza is sort of in between places--making choices, feeling creatively directionless, figuring things out as someone out of art school with a strong inclination to create but also someone questioning why she creates, what makes her excited to create, and if it's worth making work that benefits just her while disregarding the world around her. It was especially exciting to speak with Mendoza about such seemingly micro matters that in fact become major ones as you find yourself between paths...
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
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Luther Konadu | Photo Contribution by Laina Brown
Ottawa native, now Winnipeg based artist Talia Shaaked uses her paintings as a way of looking into intellectual and emotional encounters with architectural and urban environments. Shaaked's work acknowledges the poetics of the built environment and how perceptual place and space can be experienced through the human condition. After spending some years in Montreal and graduating from Concordia University, Shaaked jumped at the opportunity and rerouted her way to Winnipeg to join the eight month residency at Cartae to move her practice forward in a new setting. We caught up with Shaaked to talk about what she's been learning and producing during her time at the residency, we also learn a bit about psychogeography, and who Guy Debord is.
"Talia Shaaked is a painter first and foremost. She’s very interested...
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
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Luther Konadu | Photo Contribution by Mary Rose
At some point between the shift in temperature when we start to slowly do away with coats and sweaters, and dust begins to pick up, it can seem like entering into a new altered world by which we slowly have to adjust to. Some point between this shift we made some time to visit artist, Pablo Javier Castillo Huerta in his now former studio as he was in the middle of transiting out of his studio.“Sorry for all the junk on the floor. I moved a bunch of my books out so I have less junk now than I did yesterday, but I’m just in the middle of moving out of the studio” Huerta modestly explains as we make our way into his studio. For Huerta, his studio is not...
Friday, July 15, 2016
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Luther Konadu
From the series 'Every Bedroom I've Lived In' Alyssa Bornn takes an intimate and closely considered course to recalling from memory and presenting us with floor plans for the titular series by way of a flatbed scanner. Below are results of her experiments which employs an array of materials including plexiglas, wax paper, packaging plastic, glass and plastic protective film all of which she selected for their ability to manipulate light therefore helping retrace and draw on these architectural spaces she resided in.
Images Courtesy of Artist
Bornn speaks on the scanograph series:
Throughout the duration of a six-minute pass on a flatbed scanner objects are arranged to map out floor plans of bedrooms. Uncertainty and failures in memory are registered as glitches and replications on the produced image. As...
Monday, July 11, 2016
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Luther Konadu | Photo Contribution by Mary Rose and Annie Beach
We were very delighted to catch multifaceted Winnipeg-based artist Mariana Muñoz Gomez at her studio amid her tight schedule and deadlines inching closer. Gomez was in the middle of gathering and selecting work as part of a forthcoming group exhibition. The current collected work sees Gomez employing a wide array of media including printmaking, video and elements of sculpture to process and think through ideas of otherness, marginalization,language, and duality of identities. In our below chat with Gomez, she shows us around her studio, the pieces of work lying around her studio she's accumulated over the past year, and what she has been discovering about her own work.
[Gomez had been previously working on a book project that documents her interviews around experiences of immigrants in Canada.]
Public Parking: Tell...
