Magic Hou‪r‬ Jordan Weitzman

It was a little strange getting together with Shala Miller in the same space we’d met in less than a year ago. It was Farah Al Qasimi’s opening at Helena Anrather’s gallery, and the room was packed. This time, we were in the same space, but it was filled with Shala’s things instead - stuff for her to work on and during residency she was doing at the gallery. The room had different workstations that were set up, which made sense to me given Shala’s practice. She is a multi-disciplinary artist working with photography, film and music, which she makes under the name Freddie June. As I’ve gotten more and more into her work, I’ve discovered that It’s the tapestry of it all that makes it so compelling and rich. Shala is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, studied at SAIC in Chicago and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris before pursuing her MFA at Bard. She currently lives and works in New York.
 
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Jordan Weitzman gets together with Anne Turyn to talk about Top Stories, the avant-garde periodical she published between 1978-1991.
 
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While preparing to interview Moyra Davey, I started to really try and figure out what it is that I love so much about her work.


Is it that she is able to deal with the most mundane, everyday subject matter in such a personal, unpretentious, electrifying, simple and complex way?


Is it her subject matter that’s so appealing? Artists that she’s interested in, diaries, ephemera, hang-ups, let downs, preocupations, inspirations, quotes, books? Is it that she speaks of those things in the first place?


Is it her form? The simple elegance of it which is a through line in all her work from the writing to the films to the mailers.


“I’m trying to write in the forms of the work I want to read” she writes in her title essay of her recent book Index Cards published by New Directions. That seems like such a simple and easy thing to do, but it’s really the most challenging place to get to.


Moyra was born in Toronto in 1958, grew up in Montreal and lives in New York now, where she’s been for some 30 years.


She is the recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and just last month, she opened a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
 
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I have an interesting relationship to Mike Marcelle’s work. On the one hand, I totally get it, but on the other, i so don’t relate to where it comes from. I get the seeing, I feel the strength of the pictures, but his reference points feel so different than mine in a way. Like, for example, the new Suspiria would probably NOT come up in every conversation of mine, and with him, welll….. 


Process though - that’s another story. Hearing Mike speak about his way of making pictures, often involving ideas as starting points for photos i totally get. In his case, he jots them down in a several year long email to himself that he replies to over and over. Those ideas, though, are just to get off the couch, to try something out, to roam around and find things. The photos that he makes are always completely different and unexpected. 


Mike grew up in New Jersey where he recently made photos of his family which ended up in his book Kokomo, published with Matte in 2018. In Gregory Crewdson’s essay in the book, he says that Marcelle's photographs employ various conventions of the beloved horror and B-movies of his youth - self-consciously low-end special effects and garish, technicolor lighting - the materials of the domestic and familial are reconfigured into an uncanny, alien world. 


We conducted this interview remotely, i in Montreal, and Mike at his home in upstate New York that he shares with his husband Danny.
 
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On an unusually mild winter evening this past February, I got together with Mary Manning at her apartment in NYC. She is the author of Blueprint and First Impressions of Greece, and has contributed to numerous publications, most recently, a wonderful image text exchange with the author Olivia Laing in the Spirituality issue of Aperture. In 2006, she started the blog Unchanging Window, which became an important creative outlet for her and a way of finding community. She has shown with Canada (gallery) in NYC, has shot for Ekhaus Latta, and recently contributed photos to the Dimes Cookbook.
 
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Just before the world went into Covid-19 lockdown, I got together with Drew Sawyer at his apartment in the Bedstuy. He’s the photo Curator at the Brooklyn Museum, and among the numerous exhibitions he’s worked on in his current and previous posts at MoMa and the Columbus Museum of Art, he recently gave the Russian Ghanian photographer Liz Johnson Artur her first solo museum exhibition, resurrected the color work of Gary Winogrand and put together an incredible survey of queer work in the past 50 years in Art After Stonewall. Drew earned his Ph.D in art history and archeology at Columbia University, where his dissertation was a critical re-examination of Walker Evans. 
 
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