The Selection Committee Radio Show

Nate Heiges

5.0 (3)
VISUAL ARTS
UPDATED BIWEEKLY

Host Nate Heiges invites a visual artist or writer to make a mixtape/playlist and then we listen to the music together and have a conversation about sounds, art, language, and life. The Selection Committee Radio Show is a bi-weekly mixtape party broadcast live every other Tuesday from 4-6pm on Newtown Radio in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

APR 29

Rebecca Cleman: Wonder and Horror, April 21, 2026

This week we welcome the amazing Rebecca Cleman, a writer and the director of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) in New York City. Born in Flagstaff, Arizona the same year that VCRs came on the consumer market, Cleman has an abiding interest in the mythologies of the American West and the public use of video recording. Cleman discusses the legacy of EAI, a nonprofit founded in 1971 by the visionary gallerist Howard Wise to encourage the use of video technology by artists. We talk about the changing role of EAI in a world where video has become ubiquitous and how this historically important institution is navigating the continual evolution of technology, from video cassettes to streaming, from cable access TV to YouTube and beyond. Cleman’s audio selections range from Ennio Morricone and the Clash to George Carlin and Lily Tomlin. Comedy and the Spaghetti Western are perfect foils for her interest in artists who can take things apart and expose narratives and histories that are hidden, people like Jaime Davidovich, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Robert Buck, Cory Arcangel, and Nancy Holt. We also talk about “Yo! MTV Raps”, horror movies, Marshall McLuhan, and her childhood growing up in a very musical family in the desert wanting nothing more than to play ice hockey. A great show!

2 hr
MAR 17

Matlok Griffiths in conversation with B. Wurtz, March 10, 2026

For this episode of the Selection Committee Radio Show, former guest B. Wurtz joins me in conversation with Matlok Griffiths, an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Both artist-musicians, the two first became acquainted when Griffiths approached Wurtz to do a book project with his imprint Tutto. This began an ongoing conversation about art and music between the two that we get to join. Griffiths’ wonderful exhibition “And My Unnamed Corners” recently closed at Gordon Robichaux in New York City. The show featured a selection of modestly scaled paintings on sculptural canvases as well as a series of gouache paintings on crossword puzzles. We discuss the New York connection to this work—in 2016 Griffiths spent four months in the city doing a mentorship with painter Stanley Whitney. He began picking up free newspapers and using the crossword puzzles as a found grid to make gouache paintings. Through time and inspiration these crossword paintings found new form in the sculptural canvases. The conversation also touches on his ceramic practice which began when a neighbor gave his family a bag of clay during Melbourne’s intense Covid lockdown. Inspired by a figure his daughter made of a girl sitting bolt upright in bed, Griffiths created an entire body of work that is a meditation on that strange time. Throughout the program, Griffiths shares a semi-autobiographical set of songs including selections from his own band, Big Supermarket, formed with his wife Katrina and his friend Travis. This three-way conversation is a window into a practice that is remarkably open to opportunities, collaborations, and the unexpected. It was a pleasure to spend the afternoon with Griffiths and Wurtz!

1h 55m
MAR 3

Phyllis Baldino: Hit thegroundrunning, February 24, 2026

The great artist Phyllis Baldino graduated from the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford as a dedicated sculptor. But a few years later, a chance encounter with a generous subletter with a trunk full of video cameras changed the course of her life. She began making video pieces on her Sony Handycam in the early 90s in what would become the remarkable "Gray Area Series." Inspired by books about fuzzy logic, each video records a sequence of actions by Baldino on common household objects that are—sometimes aggressively—deconstructed and repurposed. In "Wine Rack/Not Wine Rack," for example, a wooden thrift store wine rack is sawed up to accommodate a 4L jug of blush wine. In "April 1994: The Gray Band," Baldino gathered together four musician friends, Dez Cadena, Lynn Johnston, Tom Watson, and Mike Watt, to reconstruct instruments that she disassembled and play a single song: Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive.” Baldino's musical selection for the show includes great songs from each of these artists as well as music that has influenced her work or been included in her work. Baldino's abiding interest in the intersection of science and the everyday has led to fascinating works about nanotechnology ("Nano-cadabra," 1998), quantum mechanics ("Baldino-Neutrino," 2003), and parallel universe theory ("19 Universes/my brother," 2004). She has been exploring issues of climate change in works like "u_n_d_e_r_w_a_t_e_r," 2019 and "Fake Nature Box," 2021. It was through research on the Little Ice Age (1300 - 1850) that Baldino arrived at the process that is powering her current body of work. Learning about horrific stories of women accused of witchcraft and weather magic instilled in her the desire to speak firsthand with witnesses to the events. So she turned to an experienced friend and a Ouija board to find out what really happened: "whether weather what" was the result. Continuing this process led to "Hit thegroundrunning," 2025, about immigrants to the US who came through Ellis Island in New York as children. What is it like communicating with the dead? Listen in to find out! We discuss all this work as well as some of the vicissitudes of making video art. It’s a fascinating conversation with a truly unique artist. Information about the work can be found on www.phyllisbaldino.com.

1h 55m
FEB 3

Alexander Dumbadze: All Day Night Sky, January 27, 2026

I first met the charming art historian Alexander Dumbadze when he was my TA in a Richard Schiff class at the University of Texas at Austin. In the years since, Dumbadze has produced a focused body of work, including his two books “Bas Jan Ader: Death Is Elsewhere” and the just-published “Jack Goldstein: All Day Night Sky.” Combining biography, traditional art history, and theory, these books are eminently readable portraits of two remarkable people. Both artists died prematurely—Ader was lost at sea during a transatlantic solo voyage at 33 and Goldstein by his own hand at 57— and both are big, mythic figures in the art world. What happens when the idea of the artist dominates the work that they make, when the myth precedes them and hovers around their art? Both artists were searching for a fundamental truth—Ader by making art that was unmediated and could communicate without representational systems and Goldstein through deep exploration of the possibilities of the representational image. Dumbadze walks us through Jack Goldstein’s life and times, from his early student days at Chouinard and Cal Arts, to his social circles and his time in New York City, and ultimately to the end of his life in California. We discuss Goldstein’s major bodies of work and his tendentious relationship to artistic mediums. Most of all we talk about Goldstein’s efforts to make an ideal image, something pure that is also a fundamental experience: an unsustainable moment of intensity. Dumbadze considers the books on Ader and Goldstein to be part of a trilogy of works, and he is currently working on the third and final book in the series: a novel set in the 1970s about a conceptual artist who only makes works in his head. I am very much looking forward to seeing how this book will continue the questions, problems, and possibilities that Dumbadze is dealing with in art history!

1h 58m
JAN 20

Sam Anderson: Healing Music, January 13, 2026

Artist Sam Anderson returns with a new selection of music that continues our journey into the world of synthesizers that started with her first appearance in 2021. Anderson breaks down every track, giving us an in-depth history of the instruments, contexts, and the artists who made them. She focuses especially on legendary pioneers of synth/electronic music like Suzanne Ciani, Shiho Yabuki, and Raymond Scott. Anderson’s most recent project started when she discovered a draft of a one-act play written in the 1970s by her mother, the late actress Conchata Ferrell. Using notes and journals that she inherited as well as other resources from the time, Anderson finished the play, "The Wolf Is an Endangered Species". It's about five women in a theater company working to put on a play. Themes of relationships, competition, and the difficulties for women of working in a male-dominated field are still very relevant today. In December, she produced, directed, and starred in a production of the show at 15 Orient gallery in New York City, and in the spring she plans to produce it in Los Angeles. We discuss Anderson’s mysterious and evocative sculptural work, including her pieces "E Number 1-11" and "TV" from her 2017 show “The Park” at Sculpture Center in New York City. "TV" comprised a weathervane positioned outside the museum that determined the soundtrack for the gallery below; one of eight pieces composed by Anderson and her partner would play depending on which way the wind blew. It is emblematic of Anderson's concerns with space, sound, story, and fate. In this music-forward episode, we talk about the psychoactive properties of sound and how it can be used for better or for worse. In Anderson’s playlist, it is used for good!

2h 2m
12/23/2025

Pam Lins: Laterness, December 16, 2025

The wonderful Pam Lins joins us to share some favorite studio songs and talk about “Laterness,” her two-person show with Roger White at Uffner and Liu gallery in New York City through January 10, 2026. The title of the exhibition came from a conversation the artists had in the wake of Donald Trump’s second presidential victory: is it too late for action? How can one make work that is both an inflection and reflection of the political moment? What does it mean to be a maker situated in history? The exhibition features collage works by White and sculptural floor works by Lins comprising quasi-modernist forms made from USPS flat-rate shipping boxes and ceramic birds inspired by John James Audubon’s (imaginary) “Mystery Birds.” A collaborative project by Lins and White inspired by Lins’ research into visionary architect and artist Frederick Kiesler forms the second part of the show. We dive deep into the role that investigations into history and archives play in her work, particularly the idea that bringing concepts and forms from the past into the present can illuminate the political and aesthetic economies of both times. Looking at past exhibitions and bodies of work as well as past lives—a jeweler!—Lins charts her idiosyncratic relationship to craft, form, subject matter, and the complicated histories of sculpture and painting. With characteristic midwestern humility and wit, Lins talks about other collaborations, cultivating mushrooms, the vagaries of scale, the Vkhutemas school in 1920s Moscow, and whether or not sculpture is based on lying. Truly an enjoyable conversation with a singular artist!

2h 1m
12/09/2025

Meredith James: The Exit, December 2, 2025

The charming artist Meredith James joins the Selection Committee Radio Show to discuss her current show “The Exit” at Marinaro Gallery in New York through December 13, 2025. In 2019, James became intrigued by a building near her home in TriBeCa. After some finagling she managed to get inside and take some pictures of an abandoned office space—designed for efficiency with low cubicles and drop ceilings—which eventually led to the work in “The Exit.” Depicted in each of the four photographs in the exhibition is a mirror, and reflected in each of the mirrors is another mirror. James then translated the resulting mesh of nested spaces into four exquisitely produced dioramas which represent the reflected images in a fractured, uncanny three dimensions. Each one is a kind of ontological puzzle box, with the viewer trying to piece together the logic of the space and missing, like a vampire, her own reflection. James’ focus on the relationship between image, space, and experience is evident in her earlier work as well. Day Shift, 2009, features a security guard who watches a closed-circuit monitor of what looks like the same office she is sitting in. She leaves the office and walks through whatever space the work is shown in (James reshoots this part of the video every time the work is shown in a new place) and goes out to her truck—where she climbs through the back window into a miniaturized version of the office space. The video is then displayed on the closed-circuit monitor in the miniaturized office space installed in the gallery, retranslating the logic of cinema and dreams back into the real world. Her work often incorporates these kinds of practical effects as well as optical illusions that push questions of scale and perspective, and she insistently uses only analog effects. We discuss many more of James’ pieces, including her large-scale public sculptures, and what it means for people to interact with her work, particularly people outside the art world. James is a sculptor at heart, and we talk about her belief from childhood that objects can carry with them not only the history of their use and the lives they have touched, but also past time itself. In that sense her work doesn’t just create visual and conceptual loops, but time loops as well. Inspired by sources as varied as Maya Deren, Chantal Ackerman, walks around the city, and the cartoon Adventure Time, James’ work always contains a sincere meditation on the time and space of living. Along with a playlist of very personal songs, Meredith brings an illuminating conversation about her kaleidoscopic point of view.

1h 55m
11/25/2025

Eileen Quinlan: Everything She Wants, November 18, 2025

Appropriately enough for her gritty, challenging, yet lyrical work, the great photographer Eileen Quinlan joins me with a playlist about heartbreak. In this wide-ranging conversation, Quinlan discusses the arc of her career, from her breakout body of work in grad school to her most recent experiments. Consistent throughout her explorations in photography is a focus on process, mortality, and the haptic. Quinlan goes into the long-established relationship between photography and mortality and how moments of flux and change are central to her project. For her, this focus on transformation includes both the subject(s) of the photographs as well as the photographic medium itself. Working in a “wrong and slightly backwards way,” Quinlan has always used experimentation as a key modality in her process; her failures become a kind of language, the focus of the work, the evidence of her struggle or hand. We discuss how she came to work in this way—her background in advertising and commercial photography and her early fascination with spirit photography—and how the process has informed her development as an artist. With a great sense of humor Eileen Quinlan tackles big questions of photography and life—listen in!

2h 3m

5

out of 5

3 Ratings

Host Nate Heiges invites a visual artist or writer to make a mixtape/playlist and then we listen to the music together and have a conversation about sounds, art, language, and life. The Selection Committee Radio Show is a bi-weekly mixtape party broadcast live every other Tuesday from 4-6pm on Newtown Radio in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Creator

Nate Heiges
Years Active

2021 - 2026
Episodes

77
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© Nate Heiges
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