Bad at Sports

Here we are here we are finishing out our roundup with the end of our “spot check” in Calgary Alberta, Canada, and we close out with the Western Canadian performance art legend Rita McKeough.

Rita McKeough is an installation and performance artist whose practice is based in Calgary. Her work incorporates audio, electronics and mechanical performing objects. Since the late 70s, McKeough has been committed to creating thoughtful and fully immersive spaces that push and unbalance our underlying assumptions which we use to navigate our everyday lives. She uses interactive technologies to represent natural interdependencies and to create weave together her musical and artistic practices. McKeough work’ are formerly rooted in a long established feminist perspective, and she brings that lense to content that deals with the environmental impacts of land development and industrial extraction. Her’s is the voice of agency and articulates the forces of resistance mobilized by the natural world.

Thanks again to the Esker Foundation, all the friends we made in Calgary, and especially Naomi Potter!

https://www.ritamckeough.com/

https://eskerfoundation.com/

https://www.truck.ca/shop/rita-mckeough-works

The Badlands Art Department - Jason de Haan and Miruna Dragan

In this episode Duncan visited "Drumheller" in the "Badlands" of "Alberta." We learn a little about life, love, and the magic that can happen way outside the centers. CONTEMPORARY ART FOR ALL! And natural beauty and leisure for artists!

Jason de Haan is a multidisciplinary Canadian artist working in installation, sculpture, video, drawing, collage, photography, and bookworks. This includes the exploration of uncertain and unexpected spaces, temporal flux, natural phenomena and systems, transmissions, and open timelines, with a focus upon the points at which the invisible and residual reveal their contingencies.

Miruna Dragan is a post-conceptual artist whose work reflects themes of locality and dispersion through questions of imminence and transcendence. Operating within and between various modes of studio research including drawing, lens-based media, site-specific intervention and others, her work interprets surreal geographies through the reanimation of archetypes, myths and symbols.

https://www.jasondehaan.com

https://www.mirunadragan.com

Names Dropped:

Corbin Union collaborator: Warren McLachlan. - www.warrenmclachlan.net 

Artist from Queretaro: Raphael Rodriguez - www.raphealrodriguezart.com - @rafarodriguez_art

Artists in Residence at B.A.D.:

Los Angeles: Brody Albert - @brodyalbert   - www.brodyalbert.com

Alberta: Stacey Watson - @staywats - www.stacey-watson.com

Alberta: Megan Feniak - @fenny__.__  www.meganfeniak.com

Alberta: Lindsay Sutton - @henriettaquiltshop

Northern Alberta Artist: Peter von Tiesenhausen  - www.tiesenhausen.net

Book: Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani

@badlands.art.department

Image David Robbins, 2014, care of... Contemporary Art Library

This week we check in with two members of the MdW art fair and assembly brain trust, Nicholas Wylie and Brandon Alvendia and learn a little bit about drifts. This marks a true return to form as we tailgate an art fair and record while feeding hot dogs, Marz beer, and vegetarian chili to all those true lovers of art. Then we spend a few minutes chatting with the brilliant John Engelbercht and Kalmia Strong from Iowa City's Public Space One and try and get the lowdown on what is going on in Iowa, and figure out why the art world need to know about it.

http://www.publicspaceone.com/

https://www.mdwfair.com/

https://www.mdwfair.com/drifts

Teresa Tam’s practice utilizes spaces and experiences that are familiar and then alters them into something a bit foreign through re-interpretation and re-creation. She likes to conceive her projects as sketches: iterations of ideas and systems rendered but never reaching finality. Her work is also developed to include and emphasize visitor interactions as integral components. She focuses on themes that touch upon alienation within nebulous belonging, the position of an individual within a community, excessive labour, and an obsession with objects that contextualize relationships and realities of diaspora individuals. She specializes in digital platforms, functional installations, all things shaped in paper, and body-based exchanges and objects. She graduated from AUArts in 2014 and is the other half of Yolkless Press.

We talk alternative and artist economy, the traditions of preforming industry, the inscription of labor, and publish artist books. Duncan learns that Teresa’s studio is in the same building as his studio from 25 years ago. That makes him feel a touch old, also they have put a lot of work into the building.

https://eskerfoundation.com/exhibition/teresa-tam-seasons-end/

https://calgaryherald.com/uncategorized/qa-with-artist-teresa-tam

https://www.instagram.com/neondaandaan/

https://www.instagram.com/yolklesspress/?hl=en

https://www.stencil.wiki/atlas/yolkless-press

Today on Bad at Sportscenter: Devin Balara and Bobby Gonzales! Another little transportive interview from summer sessions at the Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, be ears now and listen in to what a porch-hang with two generous geniuses and (whatever we’d call a) Jesse. Enjoy a careening, ebullient conversation in never mids west. 

http://cargocollective.com/devinbalara

https://bobby-gonzales.com/

Tamara Lee-Anne Cardinal is a mixed-media artist, community activist, and perpetual learner. Born in Lloydminster, Saskatchewan, she has been a visitor to Otôskwanihk/Mohkinstsis (Calgary) for the past nine years. Cardinal traces her ancestral roots back to both Nêhiyaw and Deutsch decent. Graduating from AUArts in 2015, Cardinal has since been a recipient of the National BMO 1st Art! Competition Award as well as the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Young Artist Award in 2017. Cardinal has been an active member in the urban Indigenous community within Treaty 7 Territory, activating roles through Awo Taan Healing Lodge Society, Native Counselling Services of Alberta, the Midewiwin Teaching Lodge Society of Alberta, and currently through Miskanawah’s Diamond Willow Youth Lodge. Cardinal’s work continues to be a reflection of the teachings she receives along her journey; it is an invitation for others to become a part of the process, to partake in its making.

Our conversation takes place in the wake of the revelations about the abuse suffered by indigenous humans at the hands of religiously motivated colonialists in Canadian communities schools and we discuss how art can be a site of healing and how we must all be attentive and responsible for that healing.

http://tamaraleeannecardinal.com/

The Earth is changing. Quickly. Should we be afraid? Or can we embrace the changes and challenges and boldly look ahead? Can we build a new, better life on this planet? Ryan and Brian sit down with curator Nick Butcher and artists Allen Moore and Kat Jarvinen of The New Earth to find out.

https://publicworksgallery.com/blogs/exhibitions/the-new-earth
https://publicworksgallery.com/
https://katjarvinen.com/
https://chicagoartistscoalition.org/artists/allen-moore
https://www.sonnenzimmer.com/

Artists duo Sans façon (Charles Blanc and Tristan Surtees) began working together in 2001 in Glasgow, Scotland. Their diverse practice responds to the relationship between people and place. Collaborating with architects, composers, geographers, or perfumers, they work internationally on projects ranging from ephemeral performances, temporary installations in public space, large scale permanent artworks, to developing and implementing city wide strategies. Their approach renews awareness and tempts interaction, inviting one to look and think differently about our relationship to our surroundings and one another.

In this conversation we trace the core of Sans façon’s work and use their almost decade long residency with the City of Calgary to open up the dimensions of what is truly a unique and singularly impactful practice.

www.sansfacon.org

asmaa al-issa (b. Baghdad, Iraq) immigrated to Mohkínstsis/Calgary, Alberta, Canada with her family in 2001. Her interdisciplinary practice engages her lived experiences with the land, materials, and people around her. She is continually building knowledge of recipes, traditions, philosophies, theories, and histories of the Middle East while developing her practice as an artist and educator. asmaa holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from the University of Calgary (2013) and a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies from Simon Fraser University (2017).

Our wide ranging conversation seeks the roots of her practice and voice, post-colonialist futures, the nature of interdisciplinarity, and what we think when we speak of home.

Today, your Bad at Sportscenterers take refuge in Diane Christiansen's room at the Chicago Cultural Center's exhibition An Instrument in the Shape of a Woman. Her enrapturing paintings and animations play tricks in the cosmic sands as we feel and laugh our way through the existential biggies, buoyed by bodies, icons and acorns. Curator Annie Morse helps lead our sense of the exhibition and takes us through the long, pandemic-wrought fraughtness that permeates the space. Part one of a three part series!

Nura Ali’s wide-ranging practise investigates the linguistic scaffolding upholding the assumptions we bring to the act of reading and writing. We speak about her most recent exhibition, blackness, whole-ness, the power of language, and the power of cultural unions.

Nura Ali is a visual artist, writer and curator, living and working in Calgary, Alberta. She received a BFA in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, a BA in English Literature, Art History and Italian from the University of Leicester and a BA in History from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her work has been shown nationally and received numerous awards and grants; most recently from the Calgary Arts Development,  the Rozsa Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. She is a founding members of the Vancouver Artists Labour Union; a unionised workers cooperative whose mission it is to transform labour practises in the arts sector and create fair, equitable and sustainable working conditions for artists and cultural workers.

https://www.instagram.com/nuranura1986/

http://www.stride.ab.ca/

Today on Bad at Sportscenter: Kelly Lloyd! Yes, that one. Kelly and Jesse sit down in the cupola at the Ox-Bow School of Art — mere hectometers from where they met almost a decade ago — to talk about practice (and practice talking), about the naming of the thing, about art education and parties. Kelly’s practice spans genre and form and most actively in this moment revolves around her research and its public instantiation, the (excellent) podcast This Thing We Call Art, for which she interviews artists about their livelihoods and labor. You can probably find it wherever you found this (including on WLPN). 

http://www.k-lloyd.com

https://www.thisthingwecallart.com/

(photo credit: Cat Garcia)

Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett

Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett explore the interspace between seemingly polarized entities: light + dark, nature + culture, DIY + institutional, individual + collective. Based in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, the duo centres their practice in relational space, conceptualizing installations and interventions primarily for the public realm. Their projects beckon viewers with novel materials and participatory contexts, inviting strangers to share in collaborative viewership. Beautiful, subversive, playful, and radically inclusive, their works transform the everyday through a critical shift in perspective.

We talk through hibernation, place as space, the magic of light, a physical glitch art (the show image is an image of the work "Carbon Copy", 2022)and the magic that could be in post-social practice "New Genra Public Art." Oh, and Duncan tries to defend the Stampede.

https://incandescentcloud.com/

This is part of a series of conversations curated by Naomi Potter and the Esker Foundation in service of evolving a portrait of the future of Calgary’s contemporary art world.

It is an idea about investigating places though conversations with artists. As though, through a series of conversations with sensitive and emblematic makers we could come to a greater understanding of a context, not just artistic practices.

In this episode Duncan reaches out to Naomi Potter and the Esker Foundation to curate a series of conversations, in the hopes of evolving a portrait of the future of Calgary’s contemporary art world.

It is an idea about investigating places though conversations with artists. As though, through a series of conversations with sensitive and emblematic makers we could come to a greater understanding of a context, not just artistic practices.

It is kind of an experiment.

The Esker Foundation is Calgary’s and one of Canada’s premier contemporary art venues, and an incredibly unique Canadian investigation into alternative arts funding and philanthropic artistic support thanks to arts patron, Jim Hill. We did a show about it. 

Here is a link...

https://badatsports.com/2019/episode-695-naomi-potter-and-the-esker-foundation/

This week Nick Cave chats with Brian and Ryan about his career-spanning survey exhibition Forothermore at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Cave shares his process conceiving of his dazzling soundsuits and sculptures, as well as how to find exuberance in resistance and activism within a work of art.