Explore every episode of the podcast Art Personals

In this episode, we’ve invited Elena Yu to share her experience with Kenneth Tam’s The Founding of the World, which she experienced in summer 2023 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Elena is an interdisciplinary artist and community organizer from Los Angeles, where she received her BA in Art from UCLA. She moved to the Morongo Basin in 2016, where she founded two artist-run alternative art spaces, The Firehouse and Sun Spot. She also worked as Assistant Director of Programming for High Desert Test Sites and as Program Director for Arts Connection, the Arts Council of San Bernardino County. She recently relocated to Charlottesville, VA where she is an Incubator Artist at McGuffey Art Center. Elena co-curated our exhibition ‘Emergence,’ featuring the Mojave Artists of Color Collective, with support from the California Arts Council. On view at Compound YV from September 9 through November 5, 2023, It was the first-ever public exhibition of works by MACC artists as a collective, aiming both to stabilize and uplift the group.

Allegra Pacheco is a Costa Rican multidisciplinary artist best known for her 2021 documentary film about white-collar workers in Japan, Salaryman, which won Best Documentary and Best Composer (James Iha) at the Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival the same year. A Renaissance woman who works across cultures and media to tell stories through film, immersive installations, sculptures, paintings, and more, she is equally at home in her art studio in Escazu, Costa Rica — where she is currently preparing work for Compound YV's Spring 2023 show, Imaginary Landscapes (title and concept courtesy of Allegra).

The work she describes in this episode is:

Tadao Ando (Japanese, 1941-) and James Turrell (American, 1943-)

The Art House Project: Minamidera

1998-1999

Naoshima

Eric Nash is a California artist working in oil and charcoal. His subject matter focuses on icons and scenes inspired by Los Angeles and the California desert. His highly realistic images are pared down to their idealized essence often conveying a film still or a memory. He works in series, some of which go back decades.

Eric is a lifelong artist who began with community sponsored art classes at age 5. He went on to receive a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a talented student tuition waiver. He is represented by art galleries in Los Angeles and Palm Springs where he has had numerous solo shows over the years. His work is in collections internationally including  well-known Hollywood names, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and corporations such as Delta Airlines.

He has been the subject of numerous media articles and his work has been collected or featured at The Hilbert Museum of California Art, Tucson Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Riverside Art Museum and Palm Springs Art Museum. He currently lives and works in the high desert town of Yucca Valley, CA near Joshua Tree National Park.

The painting he describes is:

Jean Michel Basquiat (American, 1960–1988)
Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump
1982
Oil on canvas
96” x 164”
Art Institute of Chicago
Gift of Ken Griffin

Matt Wessen (born in Los Angeles in 1982) is a photographer, filmmaker, and art director currently based in Ojai, California. In his current Compound YV exhibition, Rise/Set, Wessen captures the moods and movements of two occurrences we all have the opportunity to witness every day: the sunrise and the sunset. Typically thought of as either impossible to capture in a way that’s true to the experience — or else clichéd and sentimental — Wessen instead uses abstraction to organize this daily ritual into a show that is colorful, bold and graphic, more akin to a PANTONE color book than nature photography. Matt and C.YV Program Director, Caroline Partamian, chatted via Zoom as Caroline spent time in the gallery with Matt’s work.

Luis Cobelo (b. 1970, Venezuela) holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Zulia in Venezuela. He was raised between Venezuela and Spain, where he became a photographer. Beginning in 1993, he participated in numerous international photography festivals and solo exhibitions. Working independently across borders since 2001, Luis has developed documentary projects in the Americas, Asia and Europe, and has been published in magazines and newspapers worldwide. He is based in San Francisco, California.

The photographs he describes are from the series, Christ in New York (1984), by Duane Michals (American, 1932).

Gelatin Silver Print
each sheet: 8”x 0”; each image: 5” x 7”

Akari Uragami lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Using soft sculpture, she expresses the universality of humans as organisms, depicting their internal and external phenomena. Akari graduated from Musashino Art University as a textile major and ESMOD fashion school in 2012. Her work has been exhibited in Korea, London, and California.

The work she describes in this episode is by cobird:

「3 minute experience」
Cyanotype on paper & Lightjet print on photo paper
745mm x 490mm
2018

She also mentions a collaboration with Ninja Tune, accessible here:

Cobird Ninja Tune Tee x Sasquatchfabrix tees

• https://ninjatune.net/release/ninja-tune-x-sasquatchfabrix/ninjabushi-t-shirt-white 
• https://ninjatune.net/release/ninja-tune-x-sasquatchfabrix/ninjabushi-t-shirt-black

photo: Masayuki Saito

Alisha Sofia (b. 1987) attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, completing her degree at Art Center College of Design in 2009. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

The painting she describes in this episode is:

• Hagop Hagopian (b. Alexandria, Egypt, 1923-2013, Yerevan, Armenia)
  A Woman with a Mirror
  1969

Nick Nazmi (b. Chicago, 1991) creates an array of paintings and drawings in which apparitions, lost souls, and characters in a book are stuck in their nostalgia for a time and place that is no longer accessible. His work is influenced heavily by Persian folklore and the poetry of his father and grandfather from Iran. Nazmi lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The paintings he describes in this episode are:

• Grant Wood (American, 1891–1942)
  Death on Ridge Road
  1935
  Oil on masonite
  32 ⅛” × 39 1/16” × 1 5/16”
  Williams College Museum of Art
  Gift of Cole Porter
  
• Stone City, Iowa
  oil on wood panel
  30¼ x 40”
  Joslyn Art Museum
  Gift of the Art Institute of Omaha, 1930.35; Art © Estate of Grant Wood/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY