The Carla Podcast

Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles
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The Carla Podcast is brought to you by Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (Carla), a quarterly print magazine and online journal dedicated to expanding critical dialogue in Los Angeles’s contemporary art community. We release a new podcast every month in addition to the essays, reviews, and interviews published in the magazine and online. The podcast includes conversations with artists, curators, and creatives that make that live and work in Los Angeles.

  1. Episode 29: Patrick Martinez

    11/16/2021

    Episode 29: Patrick Martinez

    L.A. based artist Patrick Martinez’s artistic practice takes many forms. An observer of the city, his work illustrates the ever-changing urban landscape and the beauty that can be found within the diverse and layered aesthetics of our streets. Martinez discusses his role as an observer, the importance of recovering and documenting erased histories, and how his art serves a social purpose, communicating the most pressing social issues of our time.  "It's also about observation too, right? And reacting to the changing landscape, the disappearing landscape or land, businesses, surfaces, colors, it’s all of that really. And trying to kind of merge those things together to create something that can speak to how fast everything is moving and just you know, how things are in transition and they aren’t cemented and they’re in this kind of mixture of things right now." –Patrick Martinez Host and Producer: Lindsay Preston Zappas Engineering: PJ Shahamat Production assistance: Alitzah Oros Theme music: Joel P West Episode Sponsor: Odd Ark LA

    1h 10m
  2. Episode 28: Maysha Mohamedi

    11/16/2021

    Episode 28: Maysha Mohamedi

    L.A. based artist Maysha Mohamedi’s abstract paintings are flurries of colors, lines, and shapes imbued with energy, sensation, and meaningful intention. She often paints with her hands and talks about both visible and invisible marks that go into the making of her work. She discusses her process, her use of language, the movements and gestures that define her work, and how the making of abstraction can be a privilege.  “It does feel like a privilege for a person of color to engage in creativity abstractly. It feels like a privilege to spend time thinking about our feelings and expressing them, and having emotions that are carried out in a visual way like that.” – Maysha Mohamedi Host and Producer: Lindsay Preston Zappas Engieneering: PJ Shahamat Production assistance: Alitzah Oros Theme music: Joel P West Sponsored by: Paradise Framing and Parrasch Heijnen Gallery

    57 min
  3. Episode 27: Naotaka Hiro

    09/15/2021

    Episode 27: Naotaka Hiro

    L.A. based artist Naotaka Hiro talks about the exploration of the “unknown body” in his multi-media practice. The Osaka-born artist, who works across painting, drawing, video, film, and sculpture, often puts constraints on his body as he works, embracing his own limitations and failures. In this episode Hiro gives listeners intimate insight to his nuanced process, and the private performance that goes into making his work. He also talks about how 2020’s pandemic and unrest directly impacted his recent exhibition, Armor. “I think that making failure is to show myself, like a raw myself.. Not pretending or dont try to be pretty like something extra. I always have the tendency to make it neat and nice, but having a failure kind of pulls me off from that.” –Naotaka Hiro Host and Producer: Lindsay Preston Zappas Production and engineering: PJ Shahamat Theme music: Joel P West

    54 min
  4. Episode 24: Amanda Ross-Ho and Erik Frydenborg

    04/09/2021

    Episode 24: Amanda Ross-Ho and Erik Frydenborg

    L.A. based artists Amanda Ross-Ho and Erik Frydenborg talk about shifting focus and priorities after a year of the pandemic. As teachers, the two discuss what it’s been like to work with students over the last year, and they also find common threads across their art practices: attention to detail, engaging with time and archival material, and inviting the viewer into an open-ended dialogue. “The craft element was not just about a well-made object, but a way to see other objects with precision and close attention to form. Like reading the contexts in which objects come into the world, and where they’ve been—I think of craft as being not just a tool, but a way to respect materiality. It’s a respectful ceremony for objecthood, so thereby it entends to other things in the world that you have not made… For us it’s also like a church of—it’s devotional. It’s totally ritual, devotional, it’s reverence, it’s a world view.” –Amanda Ross-Ho and Erik Frydenborg

    1h 7m
  5. Episode 22: Simphiwe Ndzube

    02/05/2021

    Episode 22: Simphiwe Ndzube

    In this episode, host Lindsay Preston Zappas talks to L.A. based artist Simphiwe Ndzube. Ndzube talks about his childhood growing up in South Africa and how as an artist he uses his Magical Realist style to blend past experiences with fantasy. Ndzube talks about following his inner child as an intuitive guide to his art making which blends sculpture, painting, and assemblage. Ndzube discusses art-making as a tool for unpacking traumas, and how he uses his own practice to process past experiences.  “The work is so much based on the openness. I do not judge my work. I bring to it what comes naturally, and I allow it as the finish goes to be whatever it’s going to be. And I think what ends up happening is there is something that comes naturally without dictating and controlling it and wanting to say a specific thing or be a specific thing.” –Simphiwe Ndzube Simphiwe Ndzube  (b. 1990, Cape Town, South Africa) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Cape Town, South Africa. He received his BFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in 2015. Ndzube’s work is characterized by a fundamental interplay between objects, media and two-dimensional surfaces; stitching together a subjective account of the black experience in post-apartheid South Africa from a mythological perspective. Recent exhibitions include INXS: Major Never Before Seen Works by Simphiwe Ndzube, Moffat Takadiwa, and Zhou Yilun, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2020); Hollywood Babylon: A Re-Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Nicodim, Jeffrey Deitch, and AUTRE Magazine, Los Angeles, USA (2020); Where Water Comes Together With Other Water, The 15th Lyon Biennale, Lyon, France (2019); People, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, USA (2019); In the Order of Elephants After the Rain, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest, Romania (2019, solo); and New Acquisitions, The Rubell Museum, Miami, USA (2018). His work can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, France, and the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, among others.

    1h 9m
  6. Episode 21: Aria Dean, Harmony Holiday, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork

    12/11/2020

    Episode 21: Aria Dean, Harmony Holiday, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork

    Adapting performance work for Covid-19 safety — How performance operates without an audience present — How writing, sampling, and sound play in performance work — How the pandemic has shifted the way we we think about institutional support and artist communities In this episode, I talk to three artists in The Hammer exhibition, Made in L.A. 2020: A Version, which is on view but still not open to the public due to Covid-19 restrictions. Harmony Holiday, Aria Dean, and Jaqueline Kiyomi Gork all had planned performance works for the biennial exhibition and had to shift their artworks to accommodate for Covid-safety. We discuss the process of adapting their initially envisioned work, how performance becomes altered without audience participation, and how other disciplines like writing, sculpture, and sound play out in each artist’s work. Together, the artists muse on issues that the pandemic has brought to light. How might alternative platforms privilege community and care for artists and performers?

    1h 9m
  7. Episode 19: Nikita Gale

    10/09/2020

    Episode 19: Nikita Gale

    Abstraction as Resistance — Reclaiming Identity Through Strategies of Refusal  — The Labor of Performance — Relating Audience and Performer — The Politics of Rest — Saying No Nikita Gale is an L.A.-based multi-media artist working in sound, sculpture, and video. In 2018, Gale made a solo show about changing her name—a form of reclaiming her own identity away from a patriarchal lineage. This refusal in many ways sets the stage for Gale’s multi-disciplinary practice, as she explores what it means to insist on self-autonomy and abstraction as a method for refusal—a means of presenting her subject matter to the viewer on her own terms. In our hour-long conversation Gale and Zappas talk about how ideas of chosen identity, abstraction, refusal and rest can act as powerful mechanisms in artwork, as well as in protest and dissent. In 2018, Gale made a solo show about changing her name—a form of reclaiming of her own identity away from a patriarchal lineage. This refusal in many ways sets the stage for Gale’s multi-disciplinary practice, as she explores what it means to insist on self-autonomy and abstraction—a means of presenting her subject matter to the viewer on her own terms. We talk through the relationships between audience and performer, and how those play out in recent works by Gale: “Audiencing” and “Private Dancer.”

    54 min
  8. Episode 18: Sarah Williams

    09/03/2020

    Episode 18: Sarah Williams

    Learning within Institutions — Building Spaces for Community — Redefining Centers, Structures, and Bureaucracies — Connectivity within Digital Adaptations — Radical Everyday Practice — Living, Breathing Values Sarah Williams is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Women’s Center for Creative Work (WCCW). In this episode, Zappas & Williams discuss the seeds in Williams’ trajectory that grew into WCCW, a space that nourishes and adapts to the needs of its creative feminist communities. As they speak on a range of topics, from day-to-day practices to the larger workings of power and resistance, Zappas and Williams muse on what it means for an organization to be attentive, nimble, and ultimately radical within artistic and social ecosystems. How can strategies of collectivity and horizontality be implemented to create a more liberatory and inclusive pathway forward? Even before the pandemic began in March, WCCW was in a transition — having outgrown its space, they were considering moving to a larger building. The pandemic halted those plans, and also provided a slew of other puzzles to work through. Zappas and Williams discuss how space-making can happen in the digital sphere, and how the digital offers the potential for new connections. The Carla podcast is produced by Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles and Lindsay Preston Zappas with production assistance on this episode by CJ Salapare and engineering by PJ Shahamat. Our theme music is by Joel P West. Thank you to our episode sponsors: The Equality Mural Project and The Hammer Museum.

    59 min
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4.9
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About

The Carla Podcast is brought to you by Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (Carla), a quarterly print magazine and online journal dedicated to expanding critical dialogue in Los Angeles’s contemporary art community. We release a new podcast every month in addition to the essays, reviews, and interviews published in the magazine and online. The podcast includes conversations with artists, curators, and creatives that make that live and work in Los Angeles.

Information

  • Creator
    Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2021
  • Episodes
    25
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2024 The Carla Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Carla Podcast