Bad at Sports

This week Maryam Taghavi casts a spell over Brian and Duncan. Will they recover? We don't know. What we know is this... Taghavi plays and pulls codes at the edge of beauty and language. What about languages beyond languages? In her work she uses and recreates a language of the occult practices derived from Islamic mysticism. Her sigils promise to evoke real and active metaphysical powers. These forms become channels, lovely and beyond form itself – concept to volition, presence to absence. The works are a wish invoked. The conversation a wish fulfilled. Will Brian and Duncan ever be the same?

https://www.maryamtaghavi.com/

https://artadia.org/

The Bad at Sports crew is joined by Azadeh Gholizadeh. Her works explore the body, landscape, and the fragmentation of memory. Her works use weaving and needle work to generate and worry her images and objects. The works call to mind a powerful connection to place and dismantle that connection through a glitchy digital memory and build towards a reassembled experience. Azadeh Gholizadeh is a Chicago-based artist and educator, and a 2022 Artadia awardee.

https://www.azadehgholizadeh.com/

https://artadia.org/

Splitting her time between Spain and Chicago, Selva Aparicio is a research based interdisciplinary artist, whose work includes sculpture, installation and performance. On today’s episode of Bad at Sports Center, Jesse and Ryan speak with Selva following the announcement of her 2022 Artadia Award. We discuss the origins of her medical research, the ethical means by which she sources her materials, and the context of community and place in her practice. 

https://www.selvaaparicio.com/

https://artadia.org/awards/

Everything Must Go, so let’s. Jeffrey Michael Austin — interdisciplinary artist and musician — joins Ryan Peter Miller and Jesse Something Malmed to talk about their reflective new exhibition at the Chicago Art Department. Hope in the dark, illusion, allusion, elusiveness, late capitalism, climate crisis, the collective, the needing-tending, the tenderness of a phrase like *help wanted* and enduring questions of scale and capacity guide our winding conversation. What else?

https://www.jeffreymichaelaustin.com/

https://chicagoartdepartment.org/

Bad at Sports welcomes Ashanté Kindle and  Josie Love Roebuck from LatchKey Gallery and their exhibition "CROWN" at Expo Chicago 2022.

Working from a place of healing, "CROWN"  explores and rejoices in the legacy of Black hair. The exhibition, named after the CROWN Act - a law that prohibits race-based hair discrimination which is the denial of employment and educational opportunities because of hair texture or protective hairstyles including braids, locs, twists or bantu knots - luxuriates in the scope, range, beauty, and legacy that is black hair.

https://www.latchkey-gallery.com/

https://www.latchkey-gallery.com/woks-by-ashant-kindle

https://www.latchkey-gallery.com/artist-josie-love-roebuck

https://www.gioswaby.com/

https://www.claireoliver.com/artists/giovanna-swaby/

This week on Bad at Sports, Kera MacKenzie and Andrew Mausert-Mooney, the filmmakers behind Make A Distinction, join Jesse and the Block Museum’s Curator of Media Arts, Mike Metzger. Make A Distinction is an innovative, hybrid non-fiction feature that blends together strains of essayistic, observational and agitprop filmmaking into a blistering montage. Political in a capital P way, it’s urgent for most everyone, especially those of us in the so-called Chicago universe. 

It's the first week in April and that means its time for EXPO Chicago. Brian chats with the fair's director Tony Karman about returning from the pandemic after two and a half years and how best to get into the art amid all the hubbub.

This week Bad at Sports Center checks in with Chicago photo super hero Jessica Labatte and a coterie of Northern Illinois University students (Alex Dulski, Edwin Perez-Hernandez, and Emma Vitallo) as they work towards the construction of the world's largest paper snowflake.

Names Dropped:

Barbara Kasten

Ross Sawyers

Jessica Stockholder

Dan Peterman

Gaylen Gerber

Iowa

Guiness Book of World Records

Western Exhibitions

https://www.mickey.online/

https://www.mickey.online/landscape-with-a-man-killed-by-a-snake

https://melcookart.com/home.html

https://www.instagram.com/wizard_neal/

This week Brian and Ryan Roundtable with Asha Iman Veal,  Tulika Ladsariya, and Mike Nourse of the Center program at Hyde Park Art Center. Antics ensue in discussions of life as a mid-career artists in Chicago and the exhibition Dream. 

On this week’s Bad at SportsCenter we chatter about with Lan Tuazon. A Chicago-based sculptor, Tuazon discusses the culmination of her 10 year trilogy, Shift in the Order of Things, recently concluding at the Hyde Park Art Center. From Michael Reynolds' Earthship to Alfred Heineken's brick bottles, we unpeel a metaphorical onion to reveal the genius at the center of this epic series of "documentation sculpture". Also, Jesse dubs the nickname "Chi Chi" for this human settlement we call Chicago. Call in and  let us know your thoughts.

This week’s Bad at SportsCenter guest is Chicago expat Aaron Delehanty, a painter/sculptor and “dioramacist” based in Rochester, NY. Taking from his experience at Chicago’s Field Museum and the Rochester Museum & Science Center, Delehanty’s Loud Cow Studio fabricates dioramas, replicas, models and murals. In addition to his most recent drawings and sculptures, we discuss the narrative of the natural world, name dropping Freidrich Heinrich Alexander Von Humboldt and Carl Akeley, and discuss some of Delehanty’s upcoming projects with Maria’s Packaged Goods and the state of Vermont.