Talk Art – Details, episodes & analysis

Talk Art Live! We meet artist Studio Lenca (Jose Campos) within his recent solo exhibition 'Leave to Remain' at Carl Freedman Gallery in Margate.

‘Leave to Remain’ is the official term used by the UK Home Office, meaning someone who is allowed to stay in the UK with restrictions and without permanent legal status. According to the latest data from the UNHCR, 70.8 million people around the world have been forced from their own homes. Among them are 25.9 million refugees, over half aged under 18. In this latest body of work, Studio Lenca continues to explore his own displaced experience whilst questioning universal themes of belonging, home and lost histories.

Growing up as an illegal immigrant, Studio Lenca travelled illegally overland to the USA, growing up ‘without papers’ in San Francisco. As a young adult the artist moved to the UK, settling in Margate where he is now based. In his ‘Los Historiantes’ paintings Studio Lenca continues to play with the frames of history and identity. This new series depicts the folkloric dancers that theatrically re-enact stories of colonisation and the subjugation of indigenous peoples. The work playfully references a combination of biographical anecdotes, personal reflections and national iconography.

Alongside his characteristically vivid paintings, Studio Lenca will collaborate with KRAN (Kent Refugee Action Network), turning Carl Freedman Gallery into a working studio. Young refugees and asylum seekers will work with Studio Lenca to build large sculptural works based on the volcanoes of El Salvador. These works will explore the ‘borderless’ process of making and reference the artists own problematic encounters with a colonised education system.

Leave to Remain, offers a critical window within the gallery and a space for discussion. The show asks us to address Margate as a border town and who is allowed to leave and to remain.

Studio Lenca (b.1986 La Paz, El Salvador) is based at TKE Studios, Margate, UK. 

Studio Lenca is the working name of artist Jose Campos – ‘Studio’ referring to a space for experimentation and making; ‘Lenca’ referring to the Mesoamerican indigenous people of southwestern Honduras and eastern El Salvador.

He works with performance, video, painting and sculpture. He received an MA from Goldsmiths University of London and his work is included in the permanent collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Parrish Art Museum in New York.

Follow @StudioLenca

Visit: https://carlfreedman.com/exhibitions/2024/studio-lenca/

Special thanks to @CarlFreedmanGallery (where Talk Art's Robert Diament is Partner).

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We meet Precious Okoyomon – poet, artist, and chef – stages sculptural topographies composed of living, growing, decaying, and dying materials, including rock, water, wildflowers, snails, and vines. For Okoyomon, nature is inseparable from the historical marks of colonisation and enslavement. In their work, plants like kudzu – a vine native to Asia that was first introduced by the US government to farms in Mississippi in 1876 as a means to fortify erosion of local soil, which had been degraded by the over-cultivation of cotton, and then turned to be uncontrollably invasive – become metaphors for the entanglement of slavery, racialisation, and diaspora with nature, nonetheless holding the capacity for change and revitalisation.

Through their work, Okoyomon explores the intricate interplay between nature, chaos, and regeneration. Raised in the expanses of Ohio’s Midwest, Okoyomon’s formative years were steeped in the natural world. ‘My first love is very much the Earth, the soil,’ they say in this new episode of ‘Meet the artists.’ The sentiment informs their multifaceted practice, encompassing installations, poetry, and culinary arts. Characterized by what they describe as an ‘organic flow,’ in their work each medium seamlessly intersects with the others to create ‘the endless poem.’

Their invasive garden installations frequently feature kudzu, a vine introduced to the American South post-slavery, which Okoyomon employs as a potent metaphor for colonization. The kudzu’s unrestrained growth overtakes a space, embodying themes of chaos and natural reclamation. ‘What dies, dies. What grows is sprung up inside of that. And the beauty of everything is that it regenerates,’ they explain, underscoring the cyclical nature of their practice.

Precious Okoyomon’s work can be seen at Fondation Beyeler’s ‘Summer Show’, May 19 – August 11, 2024. They have also co-conceptualized the show. Their work is also on view as part of the Nigerian Pavilion at the 60th Biennale di Venezia 2024.

Follow @DevilInTraining

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For his first exhibition in London in over 20 years, New York-based artist Jack Pierson presents a new series of works at Lisson Gallery that explores love, kinship, celebration, poetry, youth, and identity. Pierson diverted from the path of documentary photographers that he studied with in Boston, and was instead drawn to punk-influenced performativity, embracing non-linear, spontaneous compilations that prioritise the expression of individual freedoms over existing narratives. He has since, through a multi-disciplinary practice, challenged conventional hierarchies by commingling mediums equally. Featuring his signature word sculptures, photographs, YELLOW ARRAY, MALE ARRAY, FEMALE ARRAY, DRAWING ARRAY (all 2024), and a series of folded photographic works, a journey through the exhibition invites viewers into a world where narratives, intimate and autobiographical, interact with those distinctly universal and inclusive. 

A yellow hue echoes throughout the exhibition – a shift from Pierson’s typical blue, pink and grayscale themes – the centrepiece of this being YELLOW ARRAY (2024). A coalescence of archival pigment prints, C-type prints, cylindrical magnets, folded pigment prints, found posters, galvanized metal, paper, spray and watercolour paint, these large-scale compositions, spanning ten by fifteen-foot panels, intricately incorporate magazine pages, photographs, drawings, vintage poster and other ephemera, both personal and unfamiliar. Pierson's meticulous process of addition and rearrangement of diverse components – either produced by Pierson himself or discovered during his travels – mirrors that of a collector; each material is afforded a prominent presence within the whole. 

Pierson is acclaimed for his evocative word-sculptures and installations created by re-appropriating commercial signage and large-scale vintage lettering. The first word sculpture in the exhibition is titled PETER BLAKE (2024), named after the leading English visual artist who, having created the design for multiple iconic musical records including The Beatles' 1967 album ‘Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and the 2012 Brit Award statuette, became a key figure in the pop art movement. Pierson’s sculpture embodies the connection between the two artists – one which began in the 1960s when the young artist first encountered the work of Peter Blake distributed in the media. Years later, the artists would meet, with Blake inviting Pierson to visit his studio – an encounter that left a lasting impression on both. Blake himself was inspired to create a series of word sculptures bearing Pierson’s name: Appropriating Jack Pierson, Copying Jack Pierson and Borrowing from Jack Pierson (all 2002).

While Pierson has been profoundly inspired by the work of Peter Blake – his own sculptural homage suggesting echoes of the playful and colourful arrangements of Blake’s work – this is the first time he has reciprocated this creative exchange by producing a word piece that directly references this history. Peter Blake also carries the legacy of the transformative period of cultural exchange between the UK and US in the 1960s, intertwining personal history with wider cultural influences. The exchange between Pierson and Blake serves as a testament to the power of artistic inspiration and collaboration, transcending time and distance to create connections within the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary art. 

Follow @JackPierson9 and @Lisson_Gallery

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New Talk Art! We meet Jammie Holmes from his studio in Dallas, Texas. Holmes is a self-taught painter from Thibodaux, Louisiana, whose work tells the story of contemporary life for many black families in the Deep South. Through portraiture and tableaux, Holmes depicts stories of the celebrations and struggles of everyday life, with particular attention paid to a profound sense of place. Growing up 20 minutes from the Mississippi River, Holmes was surrounded by the social and economic consequences of America’s dark past, situated within a deep pocket of the Sun Belt, where reminders of slavery exist alongside labor union conflicts that have fluctuated in intensity since the Thibodaux Massacre of 1887. His work is a counterpoint to the romantic mythology of Louisiana as a hub of charming hospitality, an idea that has perpetuated in order to hide the deep scars of poverty and racism that have structured life in the state for centuries.

Despite the circumstances of its setting, Holmes’ work is characterized by the moments he captures where family, ritual, and tradition are celebrated. His presentation of simple moments of togetherness and joy within the black population that nurtures the culture of Louisiana has made him an advocate for this community. Holmes’ paintings fall somewhere between realistic depiction and raw abstraction, incorporating text, symbols, and objects rendered in an uncut style that mirrors a short transition from memory to canvas. He often references photographs from home, but also draws heavily on his own recollection of moments and scenes and works quickly to translate his emotions to paint.

Follow @JHolmes214 and visit https://www.jammieholmes.com/

Learn more at Marianne Boesky Gallery: https://marianneboeskygallery.com/artists/440-jammie-holmes/biography/

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We meet leading artist Peter Halley from his studio in NYC!

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Peter Halley’s paintings and extensive writings about the ever-growing digitisation of cultural, artistic, and social life established him as a leading figure of the Neo-Conceptualist movement in New York City. In his paintings and writings, Halley described the increasingly isolated built environment through his uniquely invented language of ​‘cells’, ​‘prisons’ and ​‘conduits’. These central motifs were a means of thinking through the French Post-Structuralist ideas of Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard – among others – in relation to digital technology and capitalism. The gridded forms of Halley’s paintings reference not only the societal structures of the urban grid and the expansion of its underlying network of information technologies, but also the legacies of minimalist painting with which Halley grew up. It was during this period of the 1980s, while re-evaluating some of the inherited traditions of modernism, that Halley began to use synthetic colours and materials such as Day-Glo paint and Roll-a-Tex, which continue to characterise his work to this day. Alongside his teaching, painting and writing, in 1996, Halley founded index magazine, which was a further locus of his contribution to critical discourse around contemporary culture.

Halley’s exhibition at Modern Art comprises a group of new shaped-canvas paintings that Halley has been evolving over the past several years. Building on his well-developed language of cells, prisons and conduits, these new shaped-canvas paintings further elaborate a relationship between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space in relation to the built environment. While remaining faithful to his painterly vocabulary and chosen materials: acrylic, Roll-a-Tex, and fluorescent Roll-a-Tex on canvas, Halley’s new works mark a departure from his paintings from the 1980s which assumed rectangular forms. The shapes of Halley’s new canvas surfaces are defined through the painted geometric compositions, associative of another dimension – perhaps an architectural plan, or a circuitry board – while the works continue to inhabit a point of contradiction between pure, rationalist geometry and playful, irreverent colour and texture. 

Peter Halley was born in 1953 in New York City, where he continues to live and work. He received his ba from Yale University in 1975 and his mfa from the University of New Orleans in 1978, remaining in New Orleans until 1980.

Follow @PeterHalleyStudio on Instagram and https://www.peterhalley.com/

View his works at his gallery Stuart Shave/Modern Art: https://modernart.net/artists/peter-halley

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We meet emerging artist Nash Glynn, from her studio in New York's Seaport! Nash Glynn (b.1992) is a transdisciplinary American artist currently working in NYC. Working across painting, photography, and video, Glynn is best known for her groundbreaking nude self-portraits of her experience and life as a transgender woman, an underrepresented figure in the Western art canon until recently. Glynn was born and raised in Miami, Florida and learned to paint while working at her father's set design shop. Speaking about their work, the artist says, ‘I use paint as I use my body, and as such the possibilities for spontaneity of form and change become inexhaustible. By crafting affective figures I seek to create empathy. The work serves as an affirmation, a reminder that representation has no outside, meaning we choose the reference, add and remove as we please, manipulate each stroke with unique gesture and tone. A process of painting, also known as self-determination.’

Nash Glynn (b.1992) received her BFA in 2014 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and in 2017 her MFA from Columbia University. She has had solo shows at Participant Inc. in 2019, OCD Chinatown in 2020, and an upcoming exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles in Fall 2021. Her work has been in publications such as Artforum, Candy Transversal Magazine, and New American Paintings. Glynn was the recipient of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship in 2017.

"Interiors, with its plural title, belies the singularity of Glynn’s point of view. Lately, she sticks to painting what she sees from the swivel stool she’s positioned between window and easel, things like: apples in a bowl, closed door, knife. Herself in a mirror, or her mind’s eye. Mostly windows. Yet this self-imposed agreement comes with a proviso to also see with her eyes closed, so as to produce landscapes that look mental. Glynn’s intuitive aversion to the rules of the physical world finds its clearest expression in her palette, which has the firmness of a signature. Alice Neel’s cobalt, Paul Gauguin’s vermillion, Lucian Freud’s mauve are all her colours now. Mixing: as little as possible. Earth tones: no. When she concedes the need for green in a landscape, the shade she uses is not actually grass but jade, à la Ferdinand Hodler; the resulting swath of field looks undulant and cold enough to pass for ocean. Then of course there is white. Rauschenberg’s white, or Ryman’s. The white of a well-rested eye, of the sand under the sun, of nothing said. Glynn has, over the past several years, developed a style of both still life and portraiture in which objects and/or subjects are exquisitely rendered and then set out on a ground that is white except for traces of shadow, so that the knife or flower or girl appears surfaced from memory." Excerpt from Catalogue Essay by Sarah Nicole Prickett from show Interiors.

Follow Nash on Instagram: @NashGlynn

Visit Nash's official website: http://www.nashglynn.com/

View images at Vielmetter, LA: https://vielmetter.com/exhibitions/nash-glynn and @Vielmetter

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We meet artist Kyle Coniglio to discuss his paintings which have been described as 'fictional tellings based on authentic experiences'.

Naturally, this leads viewers to search for clues in his paintings to understand Coniglio as an artist, as a painter. A good starting point, as his recent solo exhibition title suggests is Last Summer. The title talks about the particular kind of warming nostalgia from memories of the past, and also Coniglio’s time spent on Fire Island.

Fire Island which is parallel to the south shore of Long Island, New York, has long been a haven to LQBTQ+ visitors and residents alike. The island, a utopian-like place that is bountiful with queerdom, offers social freedoms that are less experienced in the outside heteronormative world. The island provides a space to build a society around another set of values. There is the sexual context which is well documented, but Coniglio also places importance on friendship, and how it brings people together. Because of this queer framework in which interactions are less bounded by traditional notions – connections to each other are more fluid. In turn, feelings of the fevered nature come to the forefront such as rejection, insecurity, isolation and shame. It is within the context of expanded communal interactions that these challenging notions can be candidly embraced.

Orange, reds, blues, soft tans and even black –each portrait in the exhibition have different colours that are tied to a distinctive narrative. All the paintings together function to create a cast of characters and lexicon of emotional experiences. Characters wear briefs that are comfortably sculpted to their bodies, cut off shorts that are tailored around the waist to reveal lean legs, shirts that have been tied above the navel, or an epic combination: tote/beach/paint-brush bag that brings together queer, summer and artist modes of dress.

Kyle Coniglio has his MFA in painting from Yale University and a BFA from Montclair State University. He has been a fellow of the Queer Art Mentorship program in New York and an affiliated fellow at the American Academy in Rome. His work has been included in shows in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin. Conilgio had a solo exhibition with Taymour Grahne Projects, London, May 2022. Coniglio lives and works in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Follow @KyleFyles on Instagram and visit Kyle's official website at: https://kyleconiglio.com/

You can view images of Kyle's solo show at Taymour Grahne at this link: https://taymourgrahne.com/exhibitions/kyle-coniglio-last-summer

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Season 15 continues!!! We meet our dear friend Katy Hessel!!!! Art historian, podcaster, author and presenter. She is best known for creating and curating The Great Women Artists; under this label, she runs an Instagram account and a successful podcast named by British Vogue as one of the top podcasts of 2021. 

In 2020, Katy wrote and presented a documentary on Artemisia Gentileschi for BBC Four’s Inside Museum series, followed by a documentary on Monet in for BBC Four’s Art on the BBC entitled The French Revolutionary and an appearance on BBC Two’s Inside Culture with Mary Beard. Beyond the BBC, Katy has presented films for the likes of Dior, the Tate, the Barbican, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the National Portrait Gallery.

She has engaged in keynote speeches and panel events at the Oxford Union, Intelligence Squared, and the National Gallery, and has curated exhibitions at Victoria Miro, Timothy Taylor, and the Tate Modern. In 2021, Katy was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Arts and Culture. 

In 2022, Katy published her debut book, The Story of Art Without Men, to much fanfare and critical acclaim, hitting the Sunday Times’ bestseller list in its first week of publication. How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway? Discover the glittering Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century USA and the artist who really invented the Readymade. Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of post-War artists in Latin America and the women artists defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned, and your eyes opened to many art forms often overlooked or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan this is the history of art as it's never been told before.

​

Follow @Katy.Hessell on Instagram.

Thanks for listening!!!

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Talk Art is back for Season 15!!!! This special Talk Art live episode with DJ Fat Tony is brought to you in partnership with L’OR coffee for the Secret Podcast Experience.

We met artist Fat Tony live from Spring Studios London in front of a live audience for an incredible thought provoking chat about his life experiences, inspirations and interesting people he has met along the way.

Follow @DJ_FatTony_ on Instagram and his official website: www.djfattony.co.uk Thanks for listening!!! We are so excited to share this new season with you. Keeping you company through the Winter!!!

We would love to hear your feedback: https://survey.euro.confirmit.com/wix/2/p703696360272.aspx?l=9&src=1&HQLType=6&foreignID=%5BID%5D

Starting his career 3 decades ago at an age too young to mention, Fat Tony has had his say in paving the way for the UK’s current music scene. Early on he won residencies for Trade at Turnmills, Egg and Limelight while also making his mark in New York holding a weekly show at The Palladium for Steve Rubell during the height of Paradise Garage. He has also graced the main floor of Privilege Ibiza, Space, Amnesia and DC10. A regular at Ministry of Sound and Glitterbox, Tony has already in this short season of 2021 played Defected Festival in Croatia, One Out & Wilderness Festival and countless other venues with The Warehouse Project and so much more around the corner. As official DJ to the icons like Elton John, Kate Moss and Donatella Versace, he is also one of the fashion scene’s go to performers.

As one of club culture's most notorious - and best loved - figures, Tony is a complete force of nature. In his recent book I Don't Take Requests, he tells the most extraordinary stories of depravity and hedonism, of week-long benders and extreme self-destruction - and of recovery, redemption, friendship and the joy of a good tune.

'Anyone can get a party started, but no one keeps it going like Fat Tony, the energy never dips and

what a life he's lived.. He's a tosser but we still love him.' ELTON JOHN & DAVID FURNISH

DJ Fat Tony has been described as 'the closest thing that club culture has to a national treasure' and the 'unlikely cult hero of quarantine'. Few people have crammed so many lives into one: when your first line of cocaine is aged 16 with Freddie Mercury, where do you go from there? I Don't Take Requests is Fat Tony's breathtakingly candid and outrageous memoir of a life of extremes. From his childhood on an estate in Battersea where he honed his petty criminality, was abused by an older man and made friends with Boy George, to his teenage years spent parading the Kings Road in his latest (stolen) clobber, working as a receptionist for a prostitute, hanging out with Leigh Bowery and Sue Tilley and creating his drag persona, to his life as DJ to the stars and his spiral into serious drug addiction. Now, he is 16 years sober and, alongside working to help others overcome addiction, DJing for everyone from Elton John to Louis Vuitton - and running one of lockdown's most popular Instagram accounts with its wickedly funny memes.

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It's the Season 14 finale! We meet Skinder Hundal MBE who is the British Council's Director of Arts!!!! We discuss his extraordinary career in Visual Arts including recently working with Sonya Boyce, for the 2022 British Pavilion, who won the Golden Lion prize for her exhibition 'Feeling Her Way', which runs until 27th November.

Before joining British Council, Hundal was CEO/Director of New Art Exchange, a contemporary arts space in Nottingham where he worked for 12 years to create connections between the UK and overseas through arts and cultural projects. Working across art forms, his international experience includes projects for La Biennale di Venezia, TED Global, Google Cultural Institute and for the UK’s official arts programme for the First World War Centenary, 14-18 Now.

Major projects under his tenure at New Art Exchange includes Here, There & Everywhere, an ambitious international programme of artistic development, cultural exchange and artist residencies between the UK and Africa, South Asia, South Korea, Middle East, North America and Europe.

Skinder Hundal is Executive Producer and co-Artistic Director of the UK’s original South Asian outdoor festival, Nottingham Arts Mela, and a Board member at Artist News (a-n) and Tom Dale Dance Company. In 2019, he was awarded an MBE for his contribution to visual arts.

As Director of Arts, British Council, Hundal oversees multiple art forms, including: Architecture, Design and Fashion; Film; Literature; Music; Theatre and Dance; and Visual Arts. The British Council’s major arts activity includes cultural programmes for annual bilateral seasons such as UK/Italy 2020 and UK/Australia 2021-22; the British Pavilion exhibitions at La Biennale Arte and La Biennale Architettura, Venice; and the Market Focus Cultural Programme at the London Book Fair.

"Connecting, engaging and sharing knowledge through arts and culture is now more important than ever. I believe artists and cultural professionals help challenge, provoke and make sense of the world, so I’m looking to connect the unique and diverse UK’s arts scene with many brilliant artists and organisations around the world in my role at British Council.' Skinder Hundal MBE

Follow @SkinderHundal and @BritishArts on Instagram, or @SkinsBC on Twitter. Learn more: https://www.britishcouncil.org/arts and explore the British Council Visual Arts Collection here: http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/collection

Thanks for listening to Season 14!! We will be back next week with a whole new series 15!!! Plus we will be announcing some very exciting news next week. WATCH THIS SPACE!!! Enjoying the podcast? Follow us and say hello via our Instagram: @TalkArt

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