Marietta Bernstorff is a cultural promoter, artist, and curator. She is the founder of Mujeres Artistas y el Maiz (MAMAZ), a women’s art co-op based in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Larassa Kabel
Pushing into the liminal spaces that make us most uncomfortable, Larassa Kabel regularly traverses the emotional and intellectual space between life and death, love and loss, and the powerful and the powerless. Through the drawing, painting, performance and sculpture of her solo practice and her collaborative work with photographer Ben Easter as The Belle Morte Collective, she confronts viewers with that which makes us most uncomfortable: all white Americans’ relationship to racism, the dynamic tension of power and desire between men and women, our view of ourselves as “outside of Nature”, and our desire to distance ourselves as much as possible from the knowledge of our mortality. The Any Minute Now series of life size colored pencil drawings of horses splayed and falling through blank white spaces are meditations on how to Be with death. Tightly cropped POV drawings of fellatio rehumanize the individual pornographic players who had been become flattened in their commodification. Lush photos of dead animals being tenderly embraced by Kabel illustrate the continued relationship between the living and the dead, acknowledges that death is the great equalizer, and reinforces our place in Nature.
Larassa Kabel was born in 1970 and received her BFA with honors in 1992 from Iowa State University with an emphasis in fibers. She currently lives in Des Moines, IA where she works as a full time artist and curator. She has received numerous grants and awards including an Iowa Arts Council Fellowship, and her work has been shown nationally and is in several corporate and private collections including the Des Moines Art Center, the White House and the World Food Prize.
Unfit
“Biology enables, Culture forbids.” -Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
We are intricate organisms both physiologically and emotionally. Our basic makeup does not always easily reflect the norms of what is considered acceptable in society. So often we hear of, or perhaps are, people who never seem to fit somehow. Individuals who stand on the outskirts of the inner sanctum of society. The reality is that every one of us feels this way in varying degrees. No one is a perfect fit, no such thing exists nor could it. We must always bear in mind that every part of our existence is subjective. How we perceive things depends entirely on our personal context, the context of the larger society in which we live, and all are subject to constant and unannounced change.
Vivek Narayanan is a poet. For the last six years he has been working on a project involving aspects of translation practice focused on the oldest Sanskrit epic poem. Narayanan calls the project a “writing through” of the work. Initially he thought this would be a quick project but it turned into a deep dive involving four volumes of work.
“What we think of translation today…is more of a lexical translation,” Narayanan says, as opposed to historic translations that were often reinventions of the stories being told. He says while translating there is a certain alchemy that needs to take place during the process to breathe life into the story in its new form. Translation, he says, is an embracing of many methods. “A soul fusion technology.”
Naranyanan is also a poet in his own right. Some of his poetry takes the form of prayers, bringing together traditional and modern elements in such a way as to infuse this ancient form with a very 21st century energy. Sometimes this takes the form of stringed together phrases capturing the frenetic vibe of the world in which we live.
The “creative reader” is a critical component of poetry, separate from the creative writer. That is, a reader who can expand their range of hearing in order to delve into the layers the poet intended. The concept of sound infuses one of his poems and speaks to this concept in that the reader must bring a certain set of sounds to each reading of a poem.
To listen to Narayanan read some of his poetry and to hear more about his process and ways of thinking about the relationship between poet and reader, listen to the complete interview.
Lauren Mele is an artist based in London. At the moment her work centers on what she calls “fictional memories,” that is things that resonate in her mind but that have not actually happened to her. From there she has taken a deeper dive and begun looking at the figures from these fictional memories, most often images of women. Memory itself is always intensely subjective, Mele says. Recall is influenced by many, many factors. Mele begins her work with a physical space grounded in reality. From memory she structures the space on the canvas before creating a figurative scene.
These works ideally would be exhibited together in conversation with each other when they are all complete. At the moment, Mele has a painting in the group show Vienna Calling this September in Vienna. The work depicts a few women by the water with beer, cigarettes, “gluttony,” the artist says. The reason she chose this work is that the venue is in the vacant space of a former indoor pool.
When the work is together, Mele says the overwhelming senses are of gluttony, flamboyance, femininity, confidence, and female strength. Mele intentionally exaggerates flaws in the figures she paints and speaks to attributes she would like to assimilate in her own day to day. The work reflects her anxious tension and energy and walks the line between self-reflection and the embracing of flaws through the lens of feminism today.
Mele feels strongly about the connection between the inner life of an artist and what they portray to the world. Art takes the very personal, very intimate and celebrates it no matter how intense or grotesque it may be.
To hear more about Lauren Mele’s work and her thoughts on art, listen to the complete interview.
A Few Words to Keep in your Pocket:
Above all, be you.
Interviews are available on iTunes as podcasts, and for Android please click here. All weekly essay pieces in a shareable format are here. The full archive of interviews here.
Books to Read
What are you reading? Add your titles to our reading list here. Vivek Narayanan has been listening to composer Julius Eastman of late. He believes that listening with close attention feels like reading. Lauren Mele is one of several artists we have recently spoken to reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. A title to investigate for sure.
Opportunities
Manifest Gallery in Ohio offers an international call for artists to submit their Plein Air paintings with a twist. While traditional paintings created in the outdoors are invited, Manifest also wishes to explore what non-traditional meanings of Plein Air might be. Manifest asks what the process of Plein Air does for art itself. For more complete details and to submit your own work, visit the website. Deadline for submissions is August 31.
Deadlines
Weekly Edited Grant and Residency Deadlines – review the list here.
Sponsor: Whitney Museum of American Art – David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night. Jul 13–Sep 30, 2018. Beginning in the late 1970s, David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) created a body of work that spanned photography, painting, music, film, sculpture, writing, and activism.
It’s the End of the Line
As summer begins to wane, it is time to look toward the opportunities that linger near the end of this muggy season. There are many brass rings for you to reach for as August transitions to September before the leaves fall and the world goes dormant for a time. Summer can be a tricky time in any line of work, many people are away for periods of time vacationing and in general life slows to a crawl. But in the art world, things are churning all the time and this is no time to sit back and relax. Rather it is a time to jump on opportunities and make sure you are squared for the coming months. Read on for a few deadlines at the end of August
Manifest Gallery in Ohio offers an international call for artists to submit their Plein Air paintings with a twist. While traditional paintings created in the outdoors are invited, Manifest also wishes to explore what non-traditional meanings of Plein Air might be. Manifest asks what the process of Plein Air does for art itself. For more complete details and to submit your own work, visit the website. Deadline for submissions is August 31.
Aesthetica Magazine invites emerging and established artists from around the world to enter their art prize, a celebration of art. There are two prizes available, the Main Art Prize and the Emerging Art Prize. Multiple categories are eligible for submission including photographic and digital art, 3D design, sculpture, painting, drawing, mixed media & video, installation, and performance. For further details and to enter for the art prize, visit the website. Deadline for submissions is August 31.
Main Street Arts Gallery in Clifton Springs, New York is currently accepting applications for their artist residency. All resident artists have access to large studio space plus opportunities to exhibit and teach workshops. Residency includes many amenities. There is a small fee to reside at this artist community. For further details, to see videos of artists currently in residence, and to apply, visit the Main Street Arts website. Deadline for application is August 31.
We know the importance of opportunity here at Praxis Center. That is why we are committed to bringing you the latest deadlines on a weekly basis. We recognize that as a career artist it is in your best interest, in fact a matter of sheer survival that you be constantly applying to the next grant, exhibition, residency, award, et cetera. There is no rest in this game but there are ample rewards. Whether or not your applications are a success you will learn something every time. Join Praxis for just $40/month and gain access to a supportive community of peers and colleagues, as well as expert teachers and find the next opportunity that is right for you.
Photo credit: Manifest Gallery
Vivek Narayanan
Vivek Narayanan was born in India in to Tamil-speaking parents and grew up in Zambia. He did undergraduate and graduate study in cultural anthropology and creative writing at Stanford and Boston Universities respectively, taught at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and currently lives between India and the United States. Narayanan’s books of poetry include Universal Beach (Mumbai: Harbour Line, 2006; re-issued, in a new US edition by ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni in 2011) and Life and Times of Mr S (HarperCollins, 2012).
A full-length collection of his poems in Swedish translation was published in 2015 by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16) as part of work for his ongoing current project, an experimental “writing through” of the Sanskrit of Valmiki’s Ramayana.
Narayanan is also the Co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based international literary journal, forum and publisher founded in 2007. Through ongoing formats like Text As Material, he has tried to reinvent the design of the creative writing workshop, imagining it beyond conventional pedagogy as a more open-ended, inter-media mode of collective and compositional art practice; and he has extensively explored conceptual approaches to the performance of poetry—such as in its potential intersections with technology, physical space, movement, site-specific projects and audience interaction—partly through a series of works in collaboration with the filmmaker Priya Sen, the musician and composer Maarten Visser, the sound artist Sophea Lerner, the dancer and choreographer Padmini Chettur, the conceptual artist Laura Napier and others. In the mid-2000s, Narayanan was part of Sarai-CSDS, a seminal New Delhi-based organization that brought together visual artists, social scientists, writers, public intellectuals and others to reflect inventively on new and old media forms and the contemporary global city.
