The Artists Contemporary Podcast

The Artists Contemporary

The Artists Contemporary Podcast is the podcast that champions contemporary artists, curators and galleries. It is hosted by artist and curator Anna Woodward, listen each week to hear Anna speak to a different person about their experiences of the contemporary art world and what they are currently up to. Thank you so much for listening.

  1. 02/25/2022

    Shaqúelle Whyte

    Episode 47 of The Artists Contemporary Podcast is with @shaq.whyte Shaqúelle Whyte is a London based artist currently studying an undergraduate in Fine Art at The Slade, UCL. Whyte’s practice evolves around the narrative and life of a series of characters. He depicts them traveling through different scenes and experiences, from running free in fields in a dream like scape to referencing his Grandma’s bible study groups in the domestic. Whyte’s practice is also so much about the way he uses paint and colour to create depth. In the episode Whyte discuss the process of making moments in paintings, the shift in texture and brush stroke to make an impasto area of flesh or cloth. The energy in Whyte’s mark making comes through to allow the works to become other worldly and site between utopia and dystopia in the realm of his characters. Whyte talks about his experience of art school and the process of re learning how to painting and make work that he has gone through. He found going back into art history and really getting to understand how and why artist such as Bacon, Rothko and many many more made art. This allowed Whyte to find his own hand writing as he put it in his practice. Whyte is an artist who when out of the studio is always busy seeing contemporary art and a few of his favourite spots are @theforesproject @plop.residency and @theartistroomgallery and he has also exhibited with @delphiangallery and @danielraphael_gallery. Listen to the episode to learn more about @shaq.whyte practice and the world in which this characters exist in and to see his works in person visit the @sladeschool BA show in May!

    57 min
  2. 11/05/2021

    Luisa Me

    ‘Luisa Me have operated as an artistic duo since meeting at the Accademia di Belli Arti di Urbino in 2016, their pseudonymous title borrowed from an Italian colloquialism roughly translated to ‘him with me’. Their interdisciplinary practice engages with the artistic and cultural traditions of their Italian heritage, depicting distinctive Christ-like characters, employing altarpiece arrangements and recalling religious architecture through sculptural reliefs. Similarly, the beachfront existence of the artists’ native, coastal Pesaro aesthetically invades through sun-bleached, weathered textures, produced by a sustained addition and sanding back of paint (at points perforating the canvas), as well as ornamental marble dusted vase visage, their surface akin to seaside salt crystals. In The Crab Chair, Luisa Me introduce for the first time an extended narrative framework, with the artworks and accompanying short story not only inspired by Camusian concepts of absurdity and late-20th century Italian cinema’s fondness for a skyline punctuated by cranes and construction, but also their first-hand experience of maintaining a studio in South Bermondsey, a target in recent years for property developers speculatively seeking to preempt the area’s inevitable gentrification. Here, figures partake in cultish, tribal rituals within a paradisal, spa-like oasis inside the surrounding scaffolding and concrete cityscape, a marine mirage of high-heeled clawfoot bathtubs. This primitive, pious populace parade one another around, arms linked to form a four-handed seat (‘Pope chair’ in Pesaro parlance), as a tale of Kafkian metamorphosis unfolds across the three-floors of 9 French Place, resulting in therianthropic human-crab hybrids, hard-shelled, thick-skinned and ready to face the trials and tribulations of a city in constant construction. Luisa Me and Hector Campbell would like to thank Mauro Mattei for facilitating the exhibition. For press enquiries please contact campbellha96@gmail.com ‘ Hector Campbell

    44 min

About

The Artists Contemporary Podcast is the podcast that champions contemporary artists, curators and galleries. It is hosted by artist and curator Anna Woodward, listen each week to hear Anna speak to a different person about their experiences of the contemporary art world and what they are currently up to. Thank you so much for listening.