Interviews From Yale Radio / Artists, Curators And More

Vivienne Griffin (they/them) is an multi-disciplinary artist who uses sound, sculpture, drawing and text in various forms. Griffin works with the voice through digital post-processing and in a workshop format called Synthetic Voices. They work with sound alongside sculptures and installations. More recently they have used generative sound in videos of virtual worlds. Their current work looks at the opaque boundaries of human-computer relations; where does the mind end and the machine begin? Born in Dublin, Ireland and living in London, Griffin studied fine art at Hunter City University New York supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. They completed one year DPhil in visual art at the Royal College of Art, where they are now a visiting lecturer. They moved their research to the Sonic Arts Research Center, Queen's University, Belfast to pursue a PhD in Music with a focus on sound in an art context, noise, and the voice. Recent shows include Manchester International Festival, 2021, the AGM in Somerset House, 2021

Since the beginning of his artistic practice, Erik Lindman’s incorporation of anonymous found surfaces as compositional elements in painting has occupied a central place in his work. Reinterpreting and repurposing cast-aside materials such as shards of steel or canvas webbing, he combines a variation of surfaces in a cascade of decisions with a focus on scale and negative space. Lindman lays down and builds up marks and gestures, ultimately articulating value and attention while asserting the materiality and tactile nature of each painterly composition. His topographical surfaces become the final result of what is buried beneath them, and upon closer inspection, layers of paint reveal further color and traces of discarded elements. As Lindman states, his practice and methods are the most efficient means he has discovered to create a space of reflection and contemplation for viewers to generate their own meanings. His practice with its inherent content and subject matter intends to add to the complex discours

Erica Baum lives and works in New York. She is well known for her varied photographic series capturing text and image in found printed material, from paperback books to library indexes and sewing patterns. She received her MFA from Yale University in 1994 and her BA in Anthropology from Barnard in 1984. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Sparkassen Stiftung Collection, Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf; MAMCO, Geneva; Albright‐Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; FRAC Ile de France, Paris; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Erica Baum Bow, 2022 (Patterns), Archival pigment print, 15 × 13.9 in. (38.10 × 35.31 cm), Edition of 6 plus II AP Erica Baum Pant Pant Skirt, 2022 (Patterns), Archival pigment print, 15 × 14.23 in. (38.10 × 36.14 cm), Edition of 6 plus II AP

Edoardo Ballerini is an actor, narrator and writer. On screen he is best known for his work in The Sopranos and the indie classic Dinner Rush. As a narrator, he is a two time winner of the Audio Publisher Association's Best Male Narrator Award, and a two time winner of Society of Voice Arts awards. In 2021 he co-created the Audible Original "The Angel of Rome," with Jess Walter, named one of Audible "Best of 2021."

Ben Coonley is an artist working with video, computers, 3D, and cats. His work has exhibited in “3D: Double Vision” at LACMA in Los Angeles; “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; “Flat is Beautiful: The Strange Case of Pixelvision,” at Lincoln Center, New York; “Continuing Education for Dead Adults,” New Museum, New York; “3D in the 21st Century,” Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Brooklyn, NY;  and “Greater New York: Cinema,” MoMA PS1, Queens, NY, among others. Coonley’s works have also been screened widely including at Performa, Anthology Film Archives, the Moscow Biennale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Rotterdam, The Netherlands. His works are in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others, and have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Artsy, Frieze, Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, among others. Ben Coonley studied Art Semiotics as an undergraduate at Brown University, and received

Robert Zandvliet is one of the foremost Dutch painters working today, whose work has been on the cusp of abstraction and representation since the early 1990’s. He examines the tension between self-reflective artistic practice and painting bound to a representational function. His pictures arise out of a movement between opposites, a symbiotic relationship between deliberate composition and chance occurrence, abstraction and figuration, part and whole, space and surface, and in which these elements are fused into polyphonic structures that re-envision the history of painting through his own lens. Oftentimes using landscape as a conceptual frame of reference, recognizable representations of a landscape become replaced by a gestural play of lines, colors, and surfaces that shift and merge foreground and background, reorienting the viewer’s perception of depth and surface. Robert Zandvliet (b. Terband, Netherlands, 1970) lives and works in Haarlem, Netherlands. He received an MFA from De Ateliers, Amsterdam, Net

Sarah Slappey (b. 1984, Columbia, South Carolina) is a painter based in Brooklyn, NY. Slappey received her MFA from Hunter College in 2016. She has had solo exhibitions at Maria Bernheim Gallery (Zurich, Switzerland) and Sargent’s Daughters (New York, NY). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Schlossmuseum (Linz, Austria); Carl Kostyal Gallery (London, UK); Deanna Evans Projects (New York, NY); König Galerie (Berlin, Germany); White Cube (Paris, France); The Pit (Los Angeles, CA); and Andrew Edlin Gallery (New York, NY). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO) Geneva, Switzerland; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC. Slappey’s work has been reviewed by Artforum, The New Yorker, The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Artsy, ArtSpace, Vogue Italia, and Flash Art, among others. She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters.  Sarah Slappey, Blue Gingham, 2

Antoine Catala is French. He has lived in the US for the past 17 years. He has exhibited at the Whitney Museum, New York, New Museum, New York, Sculpture Center, New York, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria, MACLyon, Lyon, Fridericianum, Kassel, MoMA PS 1, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, among other institutions and galleries. He was part of the Venice Biennale in 2019. He is represented by 47 Canal, NYC and Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich. "I am interested in the banal, everyday use of communication tools. I look at platforms and devices, and scrutinize how they are used to communicate, or miscommunicate. So at the center of all I do, there is language. New platforms of communication (such as smart phones, texting, net 2.0) allow language to evolve in radical new ways (images as words, short form messages, audio messages, etc). Language is by essence playful, and this playfulness flourishes in any form. More and more language develops a symbio

Examining the complexities of contemporary Indigenous identity, culture, and representation, Nicholas Galanin works from his experience as a Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist. Embedding incisive observation and reflection into his oftentimes provocative work, he aims to redress the widespread misappropriation of Indigenous visual culture, the impact of colonialism, as well as collective amnesia. Galanin reclaims narrative and creative agency, while demonstrating contemporary Indigenous art as a continually evolving practice. As he describes: “My process of creation is a constant pursuit of freedom and vision for the present and future. I use my work to explore adaptation, resilience, survival, dream, memory, cultural resurgence, and connection and disconnection to the land.” Galanin unites both traditional and contemporary practices, creating a synthesis of elements in order to navigate “the politics of cultural representation.” Speaking through multiple visual, sonic, and tactile languages, his concepts determine

Chris Regner is an artist born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He works serially, using autobiography as a jumping-off point for satire, humiliation, and explorations of the grotesque. His work tackles a variety of topics, including religious and cultish indoctrination, the effect of technology on societal discourse, how to navigate adulthood as a male with no strong role models, and stereotypical notions of masculinity that find their way into every subject he explores. Using his personal experiences as a foundation, his paintings have questioned archetypes found within these themes, all the while challenging his own values and beliefs. He positions himself as an anti-proselytizer, complicating the easy answer and presenting morally questionable individuals with the intent of causing contradictory interpretations by the viewer. Navigating this discomfort is vital when searching for a greater truth. Chris is a recent graduate of RISD’s MFA Painting program. He is represented by Kravets Wehby Gallery. He h

Rainer Gross in his studio - photo by David Benthal Rainer Gross was born in Cologne, Germany in 1951. In 1973 he left Cologne to come to New York City, where he continued his art career at a time when many proclaimed the “end of painting.” Gross’ reaction to this proclamation was to draw on his connection to the painterly heritage of traditional European Art and its usage of iconography, and to establish a vocabulary capable of taking these historical traditions into the present. The dense and weathered surfaces of his paintings, realized through layers of pressed pigments, do just this. He has exhibited his works in numerous solo exhibitions nationally and internationally at venues such as the Ludwig Museum (Koblenz, Germany), Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (Lausanne, Switzerland), Krannert Art museum (Champaign, Illinois) and many others. Gross’ paintings are in numerous public collections, including the AT&T Corporate Art Collection, the Cohen Family Collection, the UBS Union B­­ank of Switzerland,  Hir

Courtesy Studio David Claerbout This interview discusses the work of Claerbout in the context of an exhibition at Sean Kelly gallery in New York City.. Throughout his career, the Belgian artist David Claerbout has investigated the conceptual impact of the passage of time through his use of video and digital photography. As scholar David Green has explained, “Claerbout’s work subtly proposes a relationship of similitude between film and the objective world that lies outside and beyond the narrative space of cinema. In doing so he poses a set of questions about how we experience film and about the nature of the medium itself.” Specifically, Claerbout manipulates both moving and still imagery to suggest an otherworldly level of existence, something that might refer to a specific place or event, but the timeline of which is not clear, oscillating between both past and present. The element of sound is critical in many of the works, often used as either a narrative device or a “guide” for the viewer to navigate

Scott Lyall Scott Lyall (b. 1964, Toronto) lives and works in Toronto and New York. Scott Lyall combines drawing, painting, sculpture, and found objects into what he describes as a ‘scenography without actors,’ or ‘plastic supports for an almost clientless sense of design.’ His production revolves around issues related to sculptural display, the relationships between graphic processes, and the design legacies of conceptualism. While Lyall’s earlier work involved installations created from construction and everyday materials such as particleboard, styrofoam, and other ephemeral fragments, his recent practice is predominantly comprised of graphic assemblages and printouts produced without direct mediation of an image. Referencing Bruno Latour, the artist describes his Nudes and EVEs series as “design all the way down,” a statement that resonates with Mark Rothko’s use of pigmented gessoes to achieve what he called “color all the way down.” Originating from the basic and most abstract unit of the digital real

Miami-based collage artist, Jon Davis, presents his most recent body of work as an homage to the city he calls home. Throughout “Brokedown Palace” images capturing ‘moments’ of Miami are fractured, stratified, and presented through a renewed understanding of not only the space they represent, but as they currently exist within each seamless rendering. After undergoing a year-long distillation period, this most recent body of work can be expressed as the culmination of Davis’s practice over the past 30 years. In previous iterations of his work, Davis has used found photographs to curate narratives that express the nuanced, often untranslatable, realities that exist within the human experience. In this tangential vein of new work, “Brokedown Palace” brings this concept closer to come featuring photographs taken by the artist throughout the tropical metropolis, placed in conversation with imagery pertinent to the larger story of Art History, and translated through Davis’s conceptually based process. Davis’s wo

Photo Courtesy Perrotin and the artist. Gabriel de la Mora, born in 1968 in Mexico City where he currently lives and works, is best known for constructing visual works from found, discarded, and obsolete objects. In an obsessive process of collecting and fragmenting materials - eggshells, shoe soles, speaker screens, feathers - the Mexican artist creates seemingly minimal and often monochrome-looking surfaces that belie great technical complexity, conceptual rigor, and embedded information. De la Mora has exhibited at the Drawing Center, New York, and the Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico. His work is part of collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Colección Jumex, Mexico City; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Pérez Art Museum Miami. Gabriel de la Mora 720 I - M.D, 2021 Mosaico de alas de mariposa Morpho didius sobre cartulina de museo / Morpho didius butterfly wings mosaic on museum cardboard. Frame

Luisa Rabbia (b. 1970, Turin, Italy) blends the distinctions made between the human and the natural, expressing solidarity with the cosmos through the organic, bodily landscapes of her expansive paintings. The scale of Rabbia's paintings suits the themes she explores, oftentimes depicting overlapping abstracted figures joining and breaking apart, seemingly overcoming their physicality. She alludes to interconnected natural processes forming a thread between microcosms and macrocosms and interweaving them in a nebulous primordial state. Continually in flux and transforming, her forms created in expressive hues also evoke spiritual transitions. Upon closer viewing and bringing this substantial work to a more intimate level, her physical and intuitive process becomes visible with its rhythmically scraped paint, the stratification of pencil marks, and imprints of fingertips. Rabbia alludes to the minute traces that each person leaves over the course of a lifetime, yet simultaneously asserts an expansive and inter

The Currency Project is a conceptual art piece that explores value creation and value transfer. Created and implemented by Abdul Mazid and Julian Lombardi in March 2020, The Currency Project seeks to use social engagement as a platform to explore contemporary theories surrounding currency, value and markets. By using tradeable sports cards as the basis for the project, Mazid and Lombardi are able to engage an economy and marketplace that already exists while exploring spaces surrounding art and the creative process. The social practice element of the piece elicits engagement from the public through multiple platforms, social media, and through transactions. Ultimately, the project seeks to understand concepts surrounding currency as a form of transactional storage of value.

Elaine A. King was born in Oak, Park, Illinois and grew up in the Chicago area.  She was a Professor, at Carnegie Mellon University teaching the History of Art/Theory/Museum Studies.  King received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1986 from the School of Speech (Theory and Culture) and History of Art. Dr. King holds a joint Masters Degree in Art History and Public Policy, from Northern Illinois University and her B.A. was awarded from Northern Illinois University in Art History and American History [Pre-Law]. In 2002 she received a Certificate of Fine Arts and Decorative Arts Appraisal New York University.  In May 2011 she was invited to become a member of the National Press Club in Washington, DC. She is a freelance critic who frequently writes for Sculpture, ARTES, Grapheion and the Washington Post. Dr. King served as the Executive Director and Curator of the Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery [1985-1991, and was the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Contemporary Arts Center i

Donald Sultan (b. 1951 Asheville, NC) is an artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement. Sultan has challenged the boundaries between painting and sculpture throughout his career. Using industrial materials such as roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum and enamel, Sultan layers, gouges, sands and constructs his paintings—sumptuous, richly textured compositions often made of the same materials as the rooms in which they are displayed. Intrigued by contrasts, he explores dichotomies of beauty and roughness, nature and artificiality, and realism and abstraction. Weighty and structured, Sultan’s works are simultaneously abstract and representational: his imagery is immediately recognizable— flowers, daily objects, idle factories—but ultimately reduced to simple geometric and organic shapes. As Sultan says, “I try to pare down the images to their essence, and capture the fleeting aspect of reality by pitting the gesture against the geometric—the gesture being the fluidity of the h

Terry Haggerty was born in London, England and studied at the Cheltenham School of Art, Gloucestershire. His work has been exhibited widely in galleries and museums around the world, including solo presentations at the Norton Museum of Art, West palm Beach, FL; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. He is the recipient of several awards including the FOR-SITE Foundation Award (2009), John Anson Kittredge Award (2003), and the NatWest Art Prize (1999). Commissions include wall drawings for AT&T Stadium in Dallas, Munich Re in London, and private collections around the world. Terry Haggerty Two Minds, 2009 Acrylic on wall The Art Collection Cowboys Stadium, Arlington, TX Photo: Richie Humphreys/Dallas Cowboys © Terry Haggery, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Terry Haggerty Step by step, 2016 Acrylic on wood panel 72 x 58.625 inches (183 x 149 cm) © Terry Haggery, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.