Peachy Keen Vivian Liddell

Peachy Keen and guest co-host Stephanie Raines, artist advocate and arts administrator, visited Nashville-based artist Chalet Comellas-Baker in her artist-run exhibition space (Unrequited Leisure) just as all of us pandemic mole people were beginning to peep our little heads out of our burrows. Fittingly, after a year of not being with other humans, we talked about wildlife— particularly bird sounds as they relate to Comellas-Baker’s most recent artworks—and Nashville life among the honky-tonks (honky geese included!).

Chalet shared the process behind her collaborative work with Clint Sleeper that’s currently on view at MOCAN, gave us really cute mini-zine maps that guided us through her current projects, and dropped some insider knowledge on the nuts and bolts of showing and getting paid for video work without using NFTs.

Peachy Keen masked-up and joined artist Alice Stone-Collins in her home studio in Atlanta, GA, for our first (and so far, only) pandemic interview. She contemplates the lasting impact that her rural Madison County upbringing has had on her work, which utilizes a combination of painting and collage techniques to depict a slightly askew, surreal version of the everyday mundane.

We commiserate about pandemic life and motherhood as two working artist parents and get the low down on how the COVID-19 pandemic has and hasn’t affected the content of some of her most recent works. Stone-Collins explains how seemingly random or disjointed scenes such as carousel horses in a roundabout or a beach overrun with Amazon vans relate to her everyday experiences. She also talks about how My Little Pony “blank flanks” and “cutie marks” can sadly be seen as a metaphor for our society at large.

Peachy Keen met up with artist Jessica R. Smith at her home studio in Savannah, where she is a professor of fibers at the Savannah College of Art & Design. Smith is the is the co-author with Susan Falls of the recently released book Overshot: The Political Aesthetics of Woven Textiles from the Antebellum South and Beyond.

We talked about her childhood spent between Alaska and Pennsylvania, her family’s history in the Florida panhandle, and how a formative backpacking trip around the world with a friend led her to a deeper appreciation of the use of textiles to create narratives.

She explains how her artistic practice and research have evolved from an initial interest in painting and printmaking to a focus on performance and installations—starting with wallpaper and moving into fabrics. By playing as a designer and creating subtly subversive wallpapers that referenced historical designs (think 80s suburban angst meets Waverly prints) she became a designer—starting her own business and then licensing her designs to Studio Printworks.

We discuss how her 12-year-relationship with SCAD colleague and professor of anthropology Susan Falls has led to multiple collaborations, culminating in their current book project, Overshot. Smith gives us the lowdown on their research process as a team, and some of the surprising finds they made as they explored the history, presentation, context and materiality of woven “overshot” coverlets.

Peachy Keen met up with artist Sonya Yong James on the occasion of her massive installation “Phantom Threads” as part of the PROJECT exhibition curated by Scott Ingram at the Temporary Art Center in Atlanta. (Thanks to our podcasting friends from Brainfuzz Podcast for lending us the use of their swank dedicated podcasting room on site!)

We talked about our shared position as women/artists growing up in the 1970s/80s (shoulder pads did come up), her formative years in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and how she’s navigated labels as they pertain both to her art and her identity.

She explains how the Gwisin of Korean folklore are related to her PROJECT piece, her path to working with such diverse materials as bedsheets and horsehair after having been initially trained as a printmaker and gives us the lowdown on managing a thriving studio practice that involves everything from supervising assistants to fear-free scissor lift operation.

Peachy Keen met up with artist Colleen Merrill on day three of SECAC 2019 and got into the nitty gritty of the psychology behind her conference presentation titled Mirroring: Affirming the Self as Parent, Artist, and Academic—discussing both Rozsika Parker and Donald Winnicott’s theories. We note the lack of men at parenting-related SECAC sessions and the importance of having men in the room when discussing parenting and career roles.

But first, we talk about how she got sucked into the college town vortex of Lexington, Kentucky post grad school, seduced by its many charms—including the rich local craft community and cheap, easy access to an inspiring selection of found textiles. She paints a picture of how the local customs (like painted gourds for bird houses) have influenced her practice.

She describes how her time at Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn made her realize how immense and popular textiles have become in the contemporary art scene, and we debate the extent of fiber-based mediums’ integration into the sometimes off-putting world of fine art. We also discuss parenthood and its relationship to her practice as an artist and her career as an academic. As a professor at a community college, Merrill explains how her initial naivety of her school’s policies on student parents worked in her favor as she works to build a more inclusive and supportive learning environment for her students with young children.

Peachy Keen met up with artist Naomi Falk in a boardroom at the Chattanoogan Hotel during the recent SECAC conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee. After briefly discussing some of the points that Falk made in her conference session on limits in the studio art classroom, we continued to talk about some of the challenges and joys of pushing students in our own classrooms, the long slog to a permanent teaching position in the arts, working collaboratively, and her experiences at artist residencies throughout the US and abroad.

Originally from Michigan, Falk currently lives and works in South Carolina. We discussed how geography has affected her art practice—from a heightened awareness of climate change living in an area affected by hurricanes and frequent flooding, to her use of indigo, an important crop in the state during the eighteenth century.