INTERLOCUTOR Interviews – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Artist Heather Benjamin discusses the works in her first solo show at NYC's Olympia Gallery, NEW STRANGENESS BLOOM.

Benjamin’s paintings investigate the hyper-vulnerable experiences of existing in a female body. Building on her formal printmaking background and a prolific, two-decade-long zinemaking practice, her autodidactic paintings emerge as self-portraits.

Through a diaristic lens, Benjamin’s figures—part goddess, part flawed protagonist—manifest spiritual transformation. These figures navigate imagined desert landscapes, alive with unnameable flora shimmering under electric skies. Both literal and symbolic, these "strange blooms" embody perseverance and renewal amidst psychic and physical terrains that are barren, parched, and alien.

Benjamin’s approach to painting nods to Surrealist modes of narration and the idiosyncrasies of outsider art. Motifs such as impassioned couples floating in clouds or emerging from extraterrestrial blooms evoke dream states, memories, and internal monologues. Words scrawled across cowboy hats and bootstraps read like fleeting, nonlinear poems.

In New Strangeness Bloom, Benjamin explores sexuality, gender, trauma, and self-perception through intricate, labyrinthine mark-making, maximalist palettes, and a developed personal symbology. Broken mirrors, dead cockroaches, nail-polished claws, and butterflies blend with retro-futurist Americana, warping, refracting, and reimagining mythologies of femininity.

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JMikal Davis, aka Hellbent, is a muralist, painter, and street artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Davis began making street-based artwork in the late 1990s while still in art school at the University of Georgia.

Upon graduating and moving to Brooklyn in 2000, he took up the nom de plume Hellbent, experimenting with various media and becoming known for his hand-carved plaques that he pulled throughout New York City and eventually across the globe. 

Since 2011, the backgrounds that started on these plaques became the focal point of his work both on and off the street. The abstract configurations of multiple patterns layered on top of each other are derived from American quilt-making and folk art traditions, inspirations not typically associated within murals and street art. 

In his public work, he aims to include elements from different textiles associated with the citizens of the community and weave them together harmoniously.

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Lara Aburamadan is an independent visual artist, journalist, and co-founder of the Refugee Eye organization. Born in Gaza City, Palestine, she is now based in the United States. She holds a BA in the Faculty of Communication Sciences and Languages from Gaza University.

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Lara tends to embrace the human perspective through visual storytelling; her work explores the social and political narratives for refugees and marginalized communities. She captures documentary and artistic images of everyday life and excels at catching light and moments with intimacy and humanity.

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She has been photographing since 2010. Her photographs have been published in a variety of news organizations and online websites such as Time Magazine, VICE, San Fransisco Chronicle, WorldPressPhoto, NPR, Refinery29, The Progressive Magazine, Pacific Standers, Al-Jazeera, Syria Deeply, +972, and elsewhere. Time Magazine has chosen Lara among 34 women photojournalists around the world whose work you should follow. She's also a member of Women Photograph and Survival Media Agency.

In this interview, Lara discusses her upbringing in Gaza, her move to the US with the assistance of writer Dave Eggers, and her aims to portray images of Gaza that show the everyday life and culture of its people rather than the usual bleak and war-torn imagery that is often presented in the media.

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aja monet is a poet, lyricist, writer, and community organizer from Brooklyn, now based in Los Angeles. Her debut studio album, when the poems do what they do, was released in 2023 to acclaim, and it earned a GRAMMY® nomination for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album.

We published a version of this interview in the online edition of INTERLOCUTOR on February 1, 2024, and this episode is the full and unedited recording of the discussion between aja monet and our Contributing Editor, Logan Royce Beitmen.

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Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) is a multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. She is known for her unique, synthesia-esque, surrealist works that unite elements from mysticism, science, and her own lived experience as a neurodivergent individual. Her artwork is surreal, sensorial, and symbolic. It shifts in subject matter from stones to moths and machines, as VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures and recursive symbols like circles, holes, and spheres.

In this interview, VLM discusses her recent solo exhibition at Austin's Women & Their Work, Eye Moon Cocoon, which featured her ongoing examination of native Texas Luna moths and our multifaceted associations with the moon, along with her unique parallel career as a Graphic Facilitator.

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Tyler Nesler talks with leading AI researcher, author, and TED speaker Blaise Agüera y Arcas about his new book, Who Are We Now? - an exploration of how biology, ecology, sexuality, history, and culture have intertwined to create a dynamic “us” that can neither be called natural nor artificial.

Identity politics occupies the front line in today’s culture wars, pitting generations against each other, and progressive cities against the rural traditions of our past. Rich in data and detail, Who Are We Now? goes beyond today’s headlines to connect our current reality to a larger more-than-human story.

The book is available December 19 via Hat & Beard Press.

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French-American artist Miles Hyman has a solo show, Secret Lives, up at NYC's Philippe Labaune Gallery through December 23. Hyman's recent paintings lead us on a journey through his sources of inspiration. From his early childhood memories of the Ferris wheel in Bennington, Vermont, to his travels with his jazz musician father, to the bustling streets of New York, to the romantic embrace of Paris, where he has made his home for the past two decades, every stroke of his brush is a testament to that odyssey.

The culmination of his artistic pilgrimage leads him to Italy, a country to which he already shares a deep artistic connection. Here, he weaves the pages of the Louis Vuitton travel book, an ode to the eternal city of Rome. These works are studies of light, imaginative juxtapositions, and records of personal geography. Alongside his paintings, there will be a selection of original strips from his latest graphic novel adaptation, La vie secrète des écrivains, penned by French author Guillaume Musso.

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“Everyone is fascinated by crime,” says author/musician Harper Simon. “When you look at the history of song, romantic love songs may be the dominant mode of songwriting, but second would probably be songs involving crime—murder ballads, for one. Crime is a major theme in all songwriting.”

Simon offers a new and expansive contribution to this legacy with Meditations on Crime, an ambitious multi-media project that includes an album he produced of musical collaborations with a sweeping range of contributors (Julia Holter, Gang Gang Dance, King Khan, the Sun Ra Arkestra) and a book he edited featuring essays by such notables as Ben Okri, Miranda July, Hooman Majd, and Jerry Stahl, alongside artwork from giants like Cindy Sherman, Tracey Emin, Julian Schnabel, and Raymond Pettibon. 

In this interview, Simon talks with host Tyler Nesler in detail about the genesis of this project and its development over several years into its present multifaceted form.

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