Interview

Kathryn Spence has spent years compiling, sorting and transforming culture’s discards into sculptural objects that reveal a human determination on the topic of sufficiency. Fascinated with space, materiality, and objectness, she attends to materials conventionally wasted to produce installations and individual objects that act as a point of unhinging between the natural world and the controlled world.

The show being discussed s Kathryn Spence at P. Bibeau, September 9 – October 22, 2022.

Craig Drennen is a painter based in Atlanta and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.  His recent solo exhibitions include Merchant, Mistress, and T at Freight+Volume in New York City, Old Athenian & at Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN and First Acts at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, GA. He has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Triangle Arts Foundation, DNA Provincetown, and Skowhegan. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, and the New York Times. Drennen served as dean at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and manages THE END Project Space. Since 2008 he has organized his studio practice around Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.

Michael McClard arrived in New York in 1973 with a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he also won a Peabody Award in Sculpture. He soon made his mark on the art scene as a member of a highly original group of young artists who helped to revive an interest in painting and visual performance. He was a founding member of the noted artists’ support  group Colab and its first chairman.

Sidestepping the confines  of abstract conceptual art,  McClard’s work seethes with figurative content; yet it has nevertheless retained a conceptual element and mines a strong vein of humor. During the 70s he staged provocative  performances such as « Foes v. Foes » at the Kitchen and  surreal, carnivalesque installations at venues such as the Clocktower (« There’s Meat on these Bones ») ; PS 1, Institute for Art and Urban Resources,  De Appel, Amersterdam and N.A.M.E Gallery, Chicago. For these presentations, he constructed all sets and props and performed, often as sole actor. His one-act play, « Mumbo Jumbo, » was published in Avalanche 12, Winter 1975.

In October 1981, his first large-scale one-man show of paintings and frescoes took place at Mary Boone, occupying both galleries on either side of West Broadway. Drawing on sources from  mythology, history and  everyday life, he created a pantheon of imaginary characters, notable for their tactile raw energy, range of facial expressiveness and astute power of observation. Also featured were  inventive depictions of historical scenes,  acclaimed by critics such as Grace Glueck of the New York Times for their verve and by Hal Foster of Art in America for their metaphysical insights. Many of these works were acquired by New York and Los Angeles public and private collectors. During this period  McClard was also awarded two fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, in Visual Arts and Mixed Media.

In the 90s McClard took a temporary hiatus from painting to explore new media. He embraced the digital revolution and applied his draughtsmanship skills to the creation of original software with his brother Peter McClard through their dotcom enterprise, Hologramophone Research.  The computer installation «Characters» furthered his interest in human physiognomy by generating an unlimited sequence of drawings of faces and was exhibited in « A visage découvert, » Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Jouy-en Josas, France.

The book mentioned in the interview: Leavings: Memoir of a 1920s Hollywood Love Child.

Dianna Settles is a Vietnamese-American artist in Atlanta, Georgia who received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. Her current work explores moments of joyful stillness amidst the cascading series of crises called modern life, accomplished through her synthesis of traditional Vietnamese and classical European painting styles.