Interview
Philip Matthews
Philip Matthews is a poet from eastern North Carolina. He is the author of Witch, forthcoming from Alice James Books in April 2020, and Wig Heavier than A Boot, a collaboration with photographer David Johnson, forthcoming from Kris Graves Projects in October 2019. Anchored by site-specific meditation and performance, his practice investigates spiritual, queer power, ecological shift, and questions of home. Philip is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Peaked Hill Trust, Hemera Foundation, and Wormfarm Institute.
He has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and the Kansas City Art Institute, and from 2013-16, he organized public programs at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, emphasizing artist-driven thinking, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and community-directed action. He holds an MFA Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and BA English from Tulane University.
Ariana Vaeth
Ariana Vaeth is a Baltimore raised artist focused on contemporary realism through the self-portrait. Graduate of the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, she fulfilled an exchange program at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Following undergrad, Vaeth completed a studio based Artist in Residence program at her alma mater. She has shown locally at the Portrait Society Gallery, Charles Allis Museum, as well as in Chicago at Woman Made Gallery and the Museum of Science and Industry for ‘Black Creativity.’ Vaeth is a 2017 Mary L Nohl Fellow in the Emerging Artist category, leading to her first museum represented solo exhibition, “Close Contact,” at Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art. Last autumn, Vaeth was selected as an inaugural cohort recipient of Fellowship.art, a visual arts grant modeled on Gener8tor’s nationally recognized entrepreneurial program. Her work will appear in the Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art opening October 18th.
The book mentioned in the interview was Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel.
Kadar Brock
Kadar Brock has lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY since graduating from The Cooper Union in 2002. In 2005 he began exhibiting bright, gestural abstractions, with solo exhibitions at BUIA Gallery, NY (2006, 2008) and Angell Gallery, Toronto (2007), which were written about in The New York Times, ArtForum, and The Village Voice. By 2009 though, he lost faith in that approach to painting and began questioning the assumptions about authorship and gesture that undergird it.
To step away from and challenge his previous paintings, Brock began creating works via systems of role playing and ritual. He first exhibited this new vein of work with Thierry Goldberg in New York in late 2010. He’s since had solo exhibitions with The Hole, NY (2013), Vigo Gallery, London (2012, 2015, 2016), Almine Rech, Brussels (2015), and Patron Gallery, Chicago (2017), as well a group exhibitions at Praz Delavallade, Paris (2016), Sperone Westwater, NY (2015), and The Flag Foundation, NY (2015), all containing these works that dig at his earlier mode of painting.
Brock’s current body of work began nine years ago as a way to criticize his learned relationship to painting, and its roots in Romanticist myths about the artist, gesture, and progression. Now his work also scrutinizes representations of the future from his youth, which include tropes of heroism and masculinity, stories of post-nuclear dystopias, and the failed promises of New Age spirituality. He translates a love and hate of these formative concepts into a physical ritual. A canvas is painted on, dried, un-stretched, scraped with a razor blade, primed over, sanded, re-stretched, and painted on again. He repeats these processes until the layers of paintings stop functioning as pictures and congeal into a historical object, a meditative relic that contains and obfuscates a lexicon of images.
Markel Uriu
Markel Uriu is an interdisciplinary artist based in Seattle, WA. Her work explores impermanence, maintenance, and the unseen. Drawing from her Japanese and Irish-American heritage, she is particularly interested in liminal spaces, and explores these concepts through, research, ephemeral botanical narratives, installations, and two-dimensional work. Her subjects of time, cycles, and cultural interchange have culminated in a fascination with invasive species. Her current work explores the nature of invasive species, their environmental impacts, and their links to humanity, colonialism, and globalization.
Markel received her BA from Whitman College in 2011. She is the recipient of various awards and residencies, most recently the 2018 Amazon Artist in Residence, and the 2016-2017 Artbridge Fellow at Pratt Fine Arts Center. She is a member of the Lion’s Main Art Collective for Queer and Trans Artists, Seattle and SOIL Gallery, Seattle, and has shown throughout the United States.