INTERLOCUTOR Interviews

Experimental composer Daedelus & musicologist Brian Baumbusch discuss ASTERISM, an innovative interactive music project

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:09:17 GMT

Asterism is a collaborative project between skewed beatmaker Daedelus, experimental drummer/producer Dan Drohan, and technological boundary-pushing label Holography Records. In this interview, Daedelus and Holography Records founder Brian Baumbusch discuss how Asterism will allow listeners to customize compositions in unprecedented ways, transcending the usual composer/listener dichotomy.

Interlocutor Magazine presents Interlocutor Interviews, a podcast featuring in-depth conversations with creatives across art, music, activism, film, fashion, writing, and more. Follow us on Instagram and subscribe to our newsletter for updates on our latest features. Also, if you love what we're doing, please help support us with a donation.

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Artist Claudia Bitrán on her epic exhibition TITANIC, A DEEP EMOTION

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:38:58 GMT

For more than a decade, Claudia Bitrán has been remaking James Cameron's Titanic through an extensive collaborative process that spans film, painting, sculpture, drawing, animation, performance, and scenography. Using lo-fi materials, deliberately visible methods of production, DIY processes, and spontaneous casting, Bitrán meticulously reconstructs the original film scene-by-scene at an intimate scale. The project has involved more than 1,400 participants across the United States, Chile, and Mexico, who have contributed as actors, crew members, and collaborators, allowing the work to take shape and evolve through collective labor and improvisation.

TITANIC, A DEEP EMOTION is up through March 28 at Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York.

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Techno-pop shapeshifter SAM QUEALY chats about her new album JAWBREAKER

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 23:45:42 GMT

Sam Quealy is a fearless creative chameleon—singer, songwriter, dancer, rapper, and performance artist. Known for her unhinged tracks and magnetic, almost otherworldly aura, she leaves audiences unable to forget her. With the look of a pop star and the attitude of a rock star, she has exploded onto the scene with a deafening bang—and she’s only just getting started.

In this interview, Sam talks with Tyler Nesler about her influences, the unique ideas and choreography seen in three specific music videos of singles from her new album JAWBREAKER, and the Rocky Horror-inspired theatrics of her upcoming tours.

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Singer, songwriter, musician, & producer Sylvia Black on her new album SHADOWTIME

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:23:32 GMT

A Southern-born American nomad, Sylvia Black has called many places home – from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest. Now based in Los Angeles, she continues to evolve as a singer, songwriter, musician, and producer, crafting productions that bridge the cinematic and the intimate.

Black delivers music that resonates with fans of the darker side of indie music, from underground club scenes to headphone rituals late at night. In her new album Shadowtime, secrets are revealed in whispers and sighs, bodies writhe and swirl through the gloom, and Sylvia Black cements her bonafides for all to savor.

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Mieke Marple talks about her ongoing art project LIVE, LAUGH, LUBE

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 02:13:32 GMT

Live, Laugh, Lube is an ongoing art project by artist and former art dealer Mieke Marple, probing in the superficial depths of social media with fellow clowns, comedians, and fools.

A kind of "exquisite corpse” project in which comedians provide language that Mieke creates a painting with, then both create a video together for IG explaining the collaboration. Mieke then gifts the painting to the participant, who must recommend two other comedians as the next participants (one with more visibility and one with less), and the cycle repeats ad infinitum.

She’s so far worked with the likes of actress and comedian Melinda Hill, The Simpsons writers Dan Greaney and Broti Gupta, head writer and executive producer of The Office and King of the Hill, Brent Forrester, writer, actor, and comedian Obehi Janice, and others.

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Joseph Keckler on his new performance piece A GOOD NIGHT IN THE TRAUMA GARDEN

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 03:37:08 GMT

Joseph Keckler is a singer, writer, and multifaceted creator. Keckler has performed everywhere from dive bars and DIY venues to NPR Tiny Desk, Centre Pompidou, and Lincoln Center. His story and essay collection Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World was published by Turtle Point Press.

His new performance piece, A Good Night in the Trauma Garden, was commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Live Arts and co-commissioned by ArtYard and Coffey Street Studios. He will be performing the latest version of it on Saturday, November 22, at ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ. This piece weaves together original new songs with a vivid narrative portrait of a wild and unforgettable friend, meditating on what it means to be a classic.

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Musician, educator, activist, & organizer Amirtha Kidambi

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 02:31:48 GMT

Educator, activist, and organizer Amirtha Kidambi discusses her newly launched podcast, "Outernational,” her new album with her ensemble Elder Ones, New Monuments Live in Vilnius, out on November 14, and her upcoming performances with Elder Ones at the Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht on Friday, November 7. She also talks about her guest curation event at the festival on November 8, featuring performances by Dirar Kalash; Ghadr غدر (Jad Atoui, Sandy Chamoun, Anthony Sahyoun); One Leg One Eye (ft. Ian Lynch from Lankum); Saint Abdullah & Jason Nazary; Elder Ones; and various collaborative combinations of the above, plus an "Outernational" panel discussion moderated by Kidambi and improv performance with Saul Williams, Dirar Kalash, and Masello Motana

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A talk with olfactory artist Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 17:36:32 GMT

Logan Royce Beitmen interviews Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel, who works intersectionally with scent, performance, video, sound, and installation. His work is currently in the group show Winter Nights (Vetrnætr) at The Association of Visual Artists in Oslo, Norway, on display until November 2, 2025.

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Filmmaker Peter Pavlakis discusses his debut feature APOSTASY BLUES

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 01:55:05 GMT

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Peter Pavlakis discusses his debut feature, APOSTASY BLUES. The film focuses on two cult members who expect to be raptured at an appointed time. However, their leader appears to have raptured without them, taking their donation money with him, so the two members head out to look for him while they deal with their personal issues as they readapt to the secular world.

The film will be shown at the Soho International Film Festival in NYC on Friday, October 10, and the Buffalo International Film Festival on Sunday, October 12.

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Charlie Wells on his new book WHAT HAPPENED TO MILLENNIALS: In Defense of a Generation

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 19:39:09 GMT

Author and journalist Charlie Wells discusses his new book, What Happened to Millennials: In Defense of a Generation.

At the birth of America’s largest living generation, the outlook was strong: unparalleled economic growth, the emerging Internet, the rise of the cell phone, and a geopolitics that had allegedly reached “the end of history” all set expectations exceedingly high for a cohort entering adulthood at the dawn of the new millennium.

That adulthood—a work in progress for more than a quarter century—has been disrupted by war, recession, pandemic, and a sharp turn toward cultural and economic polarization. It has also been endlessly critiqued by others as immature, lazy, weak, incomplete, selfish, and supposedly riddled with failure.

Now, 25 years after the first millennials began turning 18, Bloomberg News reporter Charlie Wells comes to the generation’s defense with a cultural history of an adulthood disrupted. Drawing on hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with five millennials from across the country, he explores how the biggest events, ideas, and transformations of the century played out in private lives.

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Dan Alvarado talks PANDORA'S SWIPE - his solo show satirizing the dating app dystopia

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:20:56 GMT

Artist Dan Alvarado discusses his solo exhibition PANDORA'S SWIPE, a satirical take on the temptation, overstimulation, and hypersexualization of online dating apps. Opening on September 5 and running through September 22 at Bushwick, Brooklyn's Botanica Grove, Alvarado’s paintings, composed of digitally altered and collaged dating profiles, become a landscape of portraits across the ether.

Complimentary bright, colorful emojis accentuate the sexual stimulation and dopamine that dating profiles promote, and comment on how human society interacts and flirts with one another. To create a feeling of overstimulation, the profile images and emojis are screen-printed in vibrant colors before being hand-painted for their final touches, resulting in portraits with a more playful take on profiles users would see on dating apps.

Significant events in the first half of this decade, such as the COVID pandemic and the correlation of ramped-up usage of dating apps during this time, inspired Alvarado to explore creating works on this particular topic. With dating app companies like Hinge, Tinder, and even Facebook promoting the idea that you can find love, many individuals are persuaded to take the leap and rely on these digital platforms to find their partners or significant others.

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Robin Givhan discusses her new book Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 02:48:57 GMT

Pulitzer Prize–winning culture critic Robin Givhan discusses her new book about fashion icon Virgil Abloh. She profiles Abloh’s legendary work and impact, revealing how the son of Ghanaian immigrants was able to infiltrate all aspects of our culture and inspire millions. Not only a remarkable biography of his singular creative force, the book is a powerful meditation on fashion and race, taste and exclusivity, genius and luxury.

With access to Abloh’s family, friends, collaborators, and contemporaries, and featuring a cast of fascinating characters ranging from groundbreaking Black designers like Ozwald Boateng, to Abloh’s mercurial but critical employer and mentor Kanye West, Givhan tells a captivating, great American story of how a young man’s rise amid this cultural moment would upend a century’s worth of ideas about luxury and taste.

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Bob Holmes talks ACROSS THE HORIZON

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 01:42:01 GMT

Musician Bob Holmes of the New York-based trio Suss talks about his unique and ambitious Across the Horizon music series. Bob and Northern Spy Records invited eight innovators from the wide landscape of instrumental music to curate the first volume of Across the Horizon, which was released at regular intervals over the past year, culminating in a double vinyl, which is out now and available to Bandcamp subscribers of the series.

Curators and participants in the project include Mark Nelson (Pan American), Luke Schneider, Dave Harrington, Marisa Anderson, Stelth Ulvang, Walt McClements, David Moore, William Tyler, Chelsea Bridge, Melissa Guion (MJ Guider), Julianna Barwick, and many more.

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Estefania Vélez Rodriguez

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 20:16:37 GMT

Estefanía Vélez Rodríguez (b. 1985, Mayagüez, PR) is a Puerto Rican artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. As a dual-tongued individual, she utilizes the symbolic language of painting as a bridge between many cultures and spaces. Her paintings formally address questions between abstraction, non-representation, simplification, symbol, and painting as a language with ambiguous structural limitations. Her landscapes meander and distort physical spaces like mazes meant to be misleading.

Utilizing chemical reactions within a painting, Estefanía experiments with raw pigments, spray materials, oil mediums, and acrylic polymers. Her painting language ruptures visual spaces, opening the viewer's receptivity to fleeting spaces, times, and emotional presence.

In this interview, she talks in-depth about the seven paintings she has on display as part of the group show Past Tense/Future Perfect at NYC's Marc Straus Gallery, which will be up through August 8.

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Amanda Ekery on her new album Árabe, an exploration of Syrian and Mexican shared history and culture

Wed, 14 May 2025 01:07:09 GMT

Vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Amanda Ekery collaborates with everyone, literally. Historians, artists, engineers, bakers, you name it. Amanda works with all to create projects that invite others to explore and share their stories. She weaves her experience in improvisatory creative music, research, and jazz into her compositions, workshops, and performances.

Her new album, Árabe, is about Syrian and Mexican shared history and culture, and covers everything from food, gambling, and evil eyes, to immigration law, biracial identity, and the fraught relationship between immigrant entrepreneurship and workers’ rights. The vinyl release also includes an art book which contains essays for each track, and restored family and historical photos.

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Vincent John & Max Perla of Eraserhood Sound discuss scoring for CARL THE COLLECTOR

Thu, 01 May 2025 23:57:03 GMT

Friends since childhood, Eraserhood Sound partners, Vincent John and Max Perla’s unique songcrafting process includes sourcing and learning to play vintage instruments, and using reel-to-reel equipment to create the exact sound they are after. EHS also features an in-house boutique record label that specializes in vinyl releases. Operating out of the studio built for Questlove, EHS is uniquely positioned to carry on Philadelphia’s rich musical legacy.

Their latest television project is PBS KIDS’ groundbreaking Carl the Collector, the network’s first animated series spotlighting central characters on the autism spectrum. The team’s handcrafted music for each episode gives the show a sophisticated, stand out sound that has not been seen in children’s entertainment since Peanuts. The score features Eraserhood Sounds’ trademark Synth & Soul palette, a distinctive blend of vintage analog recording stylings of 60s soul and traditional 70s funk, with 80s based synthesizers and drum machines.

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Priya Vulchi discusses her new book GOOD FRIENDS: Bonds That Change Us and the World

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 02:05:44 GMT

In Good Friends: Bonds That Change Us and the World, author Priya Vulchi explores friendships across history, continents, and cultures to show how friendship can open up new levels of community. Through her inspiring prose, Vulchi reveals that friendship, in the right hands, is a brilliant act of resistance.

Studies show that loneliness is as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. We are not taught how to be good friends to one another. We cancel plans, lose touch, blame technology, and neglect our non-romantic loved ones. In Good Friends, author Priya Vulchi explores friendships across history, continents, and identities to show how friendship can open up new levels of joy and community in your life. What is the meaning of friendship, these miraculous bonds with once-strangers? How do you begin friendships? End them? Keep them vibrant? For answers, Vulchi weaves through Western classical thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and uncovers the private moments between good friends like James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Yuri Kochiyama, Toni Morrison, and June Jordan. Friendship, she shows, has ripple effects beyond just any two friends; it awakens solidarity and changes in the world.

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Artist Heather Benjamin discusses her new painting series NEW STRANGENESS BLOOM

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 01:53:53 GMT

Artist Heather Benjamin discusses the works in her first solo show at NYC's Olympia Gallery, NEW STRANGENESS BLOOM.

Benjamin’s paintings investigate the hyper-vulnerable experiences of existing in a female body. Building on her formal printmaking background and a prolific, two-decade-long zinemaking practice, her autodidactic paintings emerge as self-portraits.

Through a diaristic lens, Benjamin’s figures—part goddess, part flawed protagonist—manifest spiritual transformation. These figures navigate imagined desert landscapes, alive with unnameable flora shimmering under electric skies. Both literal and symbolic, these "strange blooms" embody perseverance and renewal amidst psychic and physical terrains that are barren, parched, and alien.

Benjamin’s approach to painting nods to Surrealist modes of narration and the idiosyncrasies of outsider art. Motifs such as impassioned couples floating in clouds or emerging from extraterrestrial blooms evoke dream states, memories, and internal monologues. Words scrawled across cowboy hats and bootstraps read like fleeting, nonlinear poems.

In New Strangeness Bloom, Benjamin explores sexuality, gender, trauma, and self-perception through intricate, labyrinthine mark-making, maximalist palettes, and a developed personal symbology. Broken mirrors, dead cockroaches, nail-polished claws, and butterflies blend with retro-futurist Americana, warping, refracting, and reimagining mythologies of femininity.

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JMikal Davis aka Hellbent discusses his unique approach to creating art in public spaces

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 02:30:31 GMT

JMikal Davis, aka Hellbent, is a muralist, painter, and street artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Davis began making street-based artwork in the late 1990s while still in art school at the University of Georgia.

Upon graduating and moving to Brooklyn in 2000, he took up the nom de plume Hellbent, experimenting with various media and becoming known for his hand-carved plaques that he pulled throughout New York City and eventually across the globe.

Since 2011, the backgrounds that started on these plaques became the focal point of his work both on and off the street. The abstract configurations of multiple patterns layered on top of each other are derived from American quilt-making and folk art traditions, inspirations not typically associated within murals and street art.

In his public work, he aims to include elements from different textiles associated with the citizens of the community and weave them together harmoniously.

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Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle of CANADA Gallery

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 00:02:48 GMT

A candid and expansive talk between INTERLOCUTOR Contributing Editor Logan Royce Beitmen and Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, the Managing Partner of CANADA Gallery. She plays a key role in shaping the gallery’s program and strategic direction. She recently returned to CANADA after serving as Senior Director and Global Head of Online at Pace Gallery, where she expanded the gallery’s artist roster by bringing on renowned painter Kylie Manning in Spring 2022 and spearheaded its digital evolution by establishing and activating a robust online sales strategy.

Boyle’s curatorial practice is driven by a commitment to equity and intergenerational dialogue, as seen in her debut exhibition at Pace, Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious of Body Work, which brought together 17 artists from the gallery’s program alongside figures from her wider network. She continues championing new perspectives in contemporary art through exhibitions such as Beyond the Frame: Abstraction Reconstructed and Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude. Through her work, Boyle remains dedicated to expanding the reach of contemporary art, engaging collectors, and fostering dynamic connections between artists and institutions.

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An exploration of mourning and loss: Asa Horvitz & Carmen Quill discuss their new album GHOST

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 23:45:01 GMT

Musicians Asa Horvitz and Carmen Quill discuss GHOST, a multi-format piece of art that began its life as a touring multidisciplinary performance and later took form as a website with video and music components commissioned by Het HEM (NL) before finally taking form as an album with additional contributions from Ariadne Randall, Bryan West, and Wayne Horvitz. The lyrics for the work were generated by a custom Natural Language Processing AI system (designed by Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant and Alejandro Calcaño). Part experimental opera, part neo-Medieval reverie, and part avant-pop song cycle, it is now presented as a streamlined album of standout recordings made throughout the project’s long genesis.

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Game Transfer Phenomena & The Tetris Effect: A Conversation With the Executor of the Estate of Joshua Caleb Weibley & Composer Jordan Dykstra

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 01:39:15 GMT

A conversation with the executor of the estate of Joshua Caleb Weibley and composer Jordan Dykstra about their installation Projection 010: Game Transfer Phenomena, now up at NYC's Chart Gallery through February 15, which consists of 7 crates made to hold objects derived from Tetris’s 7 Tetromino shapes. The installation, curated by Alex Feim, takes its name from repetitive gameplay’s influence on spatial reasoning and the visual/auditory hallucinations it induces. These perceptual occurrences were first observed following the wider release of Tetris during the late 1980s and are also called “The Tetris Effect.”

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Talia Lavin discusses her new book WILD FAITH: HOW THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT IS TAKING OVER AMERICA

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 04:50:50 GMT

INTERLOCUTOR Magazine Contributing Editor Logan Royce Beitmen interviews author and journalist Talia Lavin about her new book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America. Lavin is also the author of the critically acclaimed book Culture Warlords, in which she invented online personas that allowed her to meet and expose fascist white supremacists who gather in chatrooms and websites; the book also traces the historical roots of these contemporary phenomena. In Wild Faith, she investigates the rise of the Christian Right over the last half-century and lays out the grim vision evangelicals are attempting to enforce in the United States.

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Alex E. Chávez discusses his new album SONOROUS PRESENT

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 04:10:00 GMT

A Cultural Anthropologist trained in Linguistic Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, and Folklore, Alex E. Chávez is the author of the book Sounds of Crossing: (Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño).

Chávez's debut album, Sonorous Present, an immersive poetic and musical passage, extends sonic meditations on loss, migration, and mourning across America’s borderlands. What began as an improvised performance in 2019—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s book Sounds of Crossing—has been reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores.

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SACRED MONSTER ~ Chloë Cassens discusses JEAN COCTEAU

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 20:17:13 GMT

Chloë Cassens is the representative of the Severin Wunderman Collection, the largest in the world of works by iconoclastic French artist Jean Cocteau. It makes up the entirety of the contents of the Musée Jean Cocteau-collection Severin Wunderman in Menton, France.

She is a longtime scholar of Cocteau with a unique perspective, as she is Wunderman’s granddaughter. Her past research has centered around Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles and its echoes in the later life and work of Yves Saint Laurent, as well as Cocteau’s Opium: Journal d’une désintoxication and how it illuminates the role that drug addiction and sobriety plays in the lives of creatives. In this extensive interview with Logan Royce Beitmen, Cassens discusses Cocteau’s massive cultural influence and her efforts to increase awareness about his life and legacy.

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Author Julia Hannafin

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:44:51 GMT

Julia Hannafin is a writer and artist from a two-mom family in Berkeley, California. Their first novel, Cascade, was published with Great Place Books in April 2024, an independent press founded by Alex Higley, Emily Adrian, and Monika Woods.

Cascade is a propulsive novel set on the Farallons—a rugged set of islands off the coast of San Francisco—about addiction, sex, gender, loss, and whether any of us can escape our biological inheritance. After her mother’s overdose, Lydia goes to work for her ex-boyfriend’s father, tagging and monitoring great white sharks. As rare and unforeseen interactions between species threaten her team’s research, so does Lydia’s growing infatuation with her boss.

In this interview, Interlocutor Fiction Contributing Editor Nirica Srinivasan talks with Hannafin in detail about Cascade and its development.

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Gabriel Birnbaum

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 03:53:09 GMT

Brooklyn-based musician Gabriel Birnbaum talks about his new record, Patron Saint of Tireless Losers, along with his developing professional focus on therapy and mental health for musicians, and why adequate mental health care for artists can be difficult to obtain and is often overlooked as a serious issue.

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Lara Aburamadan's intimate and artistic portrayals of everyday Gazan life

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 01:16:49 GMT

Lara Aburamadan is an independent visual artist, journalist, and co-founder of the Refugee Eye organization. Born in Gaza City, Palestine, she is now based in the United States. She holds a BA in the Faculty of Communication Sciences and Languages from Gaza University.

Lara tends to embrace the human perspective through visual storytelling; her work explores the social and political narratives for refugees and marginalized communities. She captures documentary and artistic images of everyday life and excels at catching light and moments with intimacy and humanity.

She has been photographing since 2010. Her photographs have been published in a variety of news organizations and online websites such as Time Magazine, VICE, San Fransisco Chronicle, WorldPressPhoto, NPR, Refinery29, The Progressive Magazine, Pacific Standers, Al-Jazeera, Syria Deeply, +972, and elsewhere. Time Magazine has chosen Lara among 34 women photojournalists around the world whose work you should follow. She's also a member of Women Photograph and Survival Media Agency.

In this interview, Lara discusses her upbringing in Gaza, her move to the US with the assistance of writer Dave Eggers, and her aims to portray images of Gaza that show the everyday life and culture of its people rather than the usual bleak and war-torn imagery that is often presented in the media.

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Lande Yoosuf

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:37:25 GMT

Lande Yoosuf is a writer, director, and producer with over 12 years of production development and casting experience, and has worked with several networks, including MTV, NBC, WEtv, truTV, Bravo, and others. Her short film, Privilege Unhinged, screened at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, Big Apple Film Festival, and the DC Black Film Festival, aired on Shorts TV, and is currently streaming on Chicago’s VonTV (Available on Amazon Fire TV, Roku, TV, Apple TV). Yoosuf’s second film, Second Generation Wedding screened at the Bronze Lens Film Festival, and inspired a prequel novel, “Ko-Foe.” She has an affinity for telling stories that explore media influence, sociology, gender/race relations, pop culture, and self-image themes and is currently developing a mixed slate of feature films, documentaries, and television pilots through her production company, One Scribe Media.

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Why aja monet's poems do what they do

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 01:30:21 GMT

aja monet is a poet, lyricist, writer, and community organizer from Brooklyn, now based in Los Angeles. Her debut studio album, when the poems do what they do, was released in 2023 to acclaim, and it earned a GRAMMY® nomination for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album.

We published a version of this interview in the online edition of INTERLOCUTOR on February 1, 2024, and this episode is the full and unedited recording of the discussion between aja monet and our Contributing Editor, Logan Royce Beitmen.

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The Metaphysical Dreamworlds of VLM

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 02:40:15 GMT

Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) is a multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. She is known for her unique, synthesia-esque, surrealist works that unite elements from mysticism, science, and her own lived experience as a neurodivergent individual. Her artwork is surreal, sensorial, and symbolic. It shifts in subject matter from stones to moths and machines, as VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures and recursive symbols like circles, holes, and spheres.

In this interview, VLM discusses her recent solo exhibition at Austin's Women & Their Work, Eye Moon Cocoon, which featured her ongoing examination of native Texas Luna moths and our multifaceted associations with the moon, along with her unique parallel career as a Graphic Facilitator.

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Blaise Agüera y Arcas

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 03:00:11 GMT

Tyler Nesler talks with leading AI researcher, author, and TED speaker Blaise Agüera y Arcas about his new book, Who Are We Now? - an exploration of how biology, ecology, sexuality, history, and culture have intertwined to create a dynamic “us” that can neither be called natural nor artificial.

Identity politics occupies the front line in today’s culture wars, pitting generations against each other, and progressive cities against the rural traditions of our past. Rich in data and detail, Who Are We Now? goes beyond today’s headlines to connect our current reality to a larger more-than-human story.

The book is available December 19 via Hat & Beard Press.

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Miles Hyman

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 01:22:23 GMT

French-American artist Miles Hyman has a solo show, Secret Lives, up at NYC's Philippe Labaune Gallery through December 23. Hyman's recent paintings lead us on a journey through his sources of inspiration. From his early childhood memories of the Ferris wheel in Bennington, Vermont, to his travels with his jazz musician father, to the bustling streets of New York, to the romantic embrace of Paris, where he has made his home for the past two decades, every stroke of his brush is a testament to that odyssey.

The culmination of his artistic pilgrimage leads him to Italy, a country to which he already shares a deep artistic connection. Here, he weaves the pages of the Louis Vuitton travel book, an ode to the eternal city of Rome. These works are studies of light, imaginative juxtapositions, and records of personal geography. Alongside his paintings, there will be a selection of original strips from his latest graphic novel adaptation, La vie secrète des écrivains, penned by French author Guillaume Musso.

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Hallie Packard

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 00:53:12 GMT

Hallie Packard's works depict a place nostalgic and foreign—comfortable and untouchable at once. A place through which the presence of humanity echoes, but from a source that has long since expired. Human-made relics interact with the natural world, confirming the question of previous human existence and conforming to—even mutating to become one with—the wildly organic environment surrounding them. As reminders of the wonder that abounds and the respect it deserves, her works are dedicated to rediscovering and cultivating the magic of this world.

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Harper Simon's MEDITATIONS ON CRIME

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 23:12:10 GMT

“Everyone is fascinated by crime,” says author/musician Harper Simon. “When you look at the history of song, romantic love songs may be the dominant mode of songwriting, but second would probably be songs involving crime—murder ballads, for one. Crime is a major theme in all songwriting.”

Simon offers a new and expansive contribution to this legacy with Meditations on Crime, an ambitious multi-media project that includes an album he produced of musical collaborations with a sweeping range of contributors (Julia Holter, Gang Gang Dance, King Khan, the Sun Ra Arkestra) and a book he edited featuring essays by such notables as Ben Okri, Miranda July, Hooman Majd, and Jerry Stahl, alongside artwork from giants like Cindy Sherman, Tracey Emin, Julian Schnabel, and Raymond Pettibon.

In this interview, Simon talks with host Tyler Nesler in detail about the genesis of this project and its development over several years into its present multifaceted form.

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Anthony Wilson explores new sonic territories with COLLODION

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:38:11 GMT

Born in Los Angeles in 1968, guitarist and composer Anthony Wilson is known for a body of work that moves fluidly across genres. The son of legendary jazz trumpeter and bandleader Gerald Wilson, his musical lineage has deeply influenced his creative trajectory, compositional choices, instrumental groupings, and the wide-ranging twelve-album discography that blooms out of them.

In this interview, Anthony discusses his newly released album Collodion, which he recorded with producer and engineer Pete Min for Los Angeles’s innovative Colorfield Records.

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Pete Min of Colorfield Records

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 23:55:00 GMT

Pete Min co-runs the innovative Los Angeles label Colorfield Records. At Colorfield, artists are encouraged to compose in the studio and often play instruments they’re unused to. There’s as much emphasis on sound as there is on composition and musicianship, and “chaos and chance are a big part of the process.”

In this interview, Pete delves into what he calls his "sherpa" approach to guiding musicians out of their comfort zones and allowing them to express themselves in new and exciting ways. He talks about his background in music production and the freeform pandemic jam sessions with friends that led to the creation of his organic and playful approach to recording Colorfield albums at his studio, Lucy's Meat Market.

Colorfield has already gained a solid reputation for releasing albums rich with expressive experimentation from artists such as Benny Bock, Anna Butterss, OHMA, with a forthcoming album Collodion by the accomplished jazz guitarist Anthony Wilson.

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Martine Johanna

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 00:33:14 GMT

Martine Johanna is a Dutch-born female artist who has been actively exhibiting her work since 2007, starting from little daily drawings to Amsterdam street art with a small band of brothers. Within two years, she developed into a full-blown painter, saying farewell to her job in design and going back to her artistic roots while part-time residing as a freelance lecturer at the HVA.

Johanna has exhibited internationally, including exhibitions at commercial galleries in Amsterdam, San Francisco, New York, Aalborg, Los Angeles, and San Diego. She has participated in exhibitions at cultural institutions, including the Mesa Arts Museum in Arizona and Collectie de Groen in Arnhem.

In this interview, Johanna discusses her overall thematic approaches and the works displayed in her third solo show for New York’s Massey Klein Gallery, How to Eliminate Stress and Anxiety Through Good Housekeeping. Read our May 2023 Interlocutor Magazine interview and our 2020 interview, both conducted by contributor Isabel Hou.

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Sayazake

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 20:19:53 GMT

Sayazake is a visual artist who operates in the realm of Photography, Illustration, and Painting. His work speaks to a conversation of adventure, spirituality, anime, and eccentricity.

In this interview, Sayazake talks about his expressive origins in performance and theater and what attracted him to pursue visual art in his early twenties, plus his thoughts on artistic influences, the commercial art world, his unique approaches to portraiture in both illustration and photography, and much more.

Sayazake will release his latest body of work, Erasure, available exclusively on his website starting July 5, 2023, about which he writes, "This body of work focuses on topics of spirituality and facing your shadow. Working with the shadow aspects of yourself and integrating them to find deeper strength. This idea came to me while I was pretty sad about how a situation turned out after taking a pretty big risk. Grateful for the experience as it helped me become wiser and also draw some pretty great things." He will also have work up in the group show Free Your Mind, opening July 8 at JCAL in Jamaica, Queens.

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KIDLEW - Part II

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:17:43 GMT

KIDLEW is an NYC-based color-blind Chorean (half-Chinese/half-Korean) artist. Born in Queens, NY, and raised on Strong Island, he started doodling the cartoon characters he saw daily on TV as a kid and soon discovered graffiti art on 1970s NYC subway trips with his grandmother. Big into skateboarding and metal music as teen, he segued into the music scene in the 90s and then studied toy design before returning to graffiti art as a part of the EX VANDALS crew. Now he may be best known for his character Lumpy Bumpkin, who has made appearances all around NYC and the world.

We first talked with KIDLEW back in March 2023, but even 80 minutes wasn't enough to cover the scope of his shenanigans - listen here for a further dive into his early years as a creative troublemaker, learn more info about his time in the music biz, the specifics of how he got back into street and graffiti art in the 2010s, how his signature character Lumpy Bumpkin developed along with his stable of other characters + MUCH more...

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Jeffrey Everett

Thu, 08 Jun 2023 01:33:04 GMT

Jeffrey Everett is a successful designer, illustrator, and author working outside of Washington, DC. Jeffrey has had the pleasure of designing and illustrating for a wide variety of entertainment, corporate, and non-profit clients. Jeffrey has created designs for such bands as Jason Mraz, Social Distortion, Foo Fighters, The Decemberists, Flight of the Conchords, Gaslight Anthem, Lou Reed, The Bouncing Souls, and A Day to Remember. He has created work for companies such as RedBull, Simon and Schuster, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washingtonian, Variety, Universal Records, LiveNation, Dreamworks, and more.

Jeffrey's Kickstarter-funded book Let It Bleed celebrates 20 years of concert posters and will be released soon.

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Philippe Labaune's Narrative Journeys

Tue, 16 May 2023 23:54:53 GMT

Founded in 2020, Philippe Labaune Gallery focuses on graphic design by featuring high-level artists whose common point is to explore new territories and to decompartmentalize the borders separating various modes of expression: illustration, painting, comic strips and animation.

In this interview, Philippe talks in-depth about his lifelong passion for narrative art and how he came to start his gallery after a long career in the finance industry, in addition to the different ways that comic art has been perceived in Europe compared to the United States, and why those perceptions are now changing.

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Adele Bertei

Tue, 09 May 2023 00:21:55 GMT

The creator of the band the Bloods—the first out, queer, all-women-rock band—Adele Bertei has made a career as a singer, songwriter, writer, and director. Her resume, which spans decades and disciplines, is a who's who of the ’80s underground—performing and recording for artists such as Culture Club, Whitney Houston, Sandra Bernhard, and Matthew Sweet, to name a few.

But her formative years bore little resemblance to her celebrity-studded adult life. In Twist: An American Girl, Bertei recounts her troubled childhood in 1960s and 1970s Cleveland, telling the story through the eyes of “Maddie Twist,” a stand in for Bertei herself. As she says about her alter-ego in the author’s note, “I needed protection while taking the journey back through the war zones of my youth.”

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Scott Listfield

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 01:39:28 GMT

Known for his paintings featuring a solitary astronaut wandering through scenes filled with pop culture iconography, Scott Listfield creates works which invite viewers to perceive the contemporary world from a slightly askew and alienated perspective. He currently has a solo show, AM Gold, at NYC's Harman Projects, up through April 29.

Listfield calls AM Gold, "a show about music and time travel. I was inspired by the kind of physical artifacts we mostly don't have, don't need, or don't care about anymore: Album covers, CDs, posters, cassette tapes, stereo equipment (with actual knobs), band flyers, zines, photos cut and pasted from magazines, mix tapes shared amongst friends, passed down from cooler older siblings, or made to impress crushes." The show is also accompanied by several Spotify playlists with music from the 70s through the 2000s.

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The transcendental aesthetics of Zhivago Duncan

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 23:46:31 GMT

Zhivago Duncan was born to a Syrian mother and a Danish father in Terre Haute, Indiana. His fluidity across materials and cultural signifiers reflects the relentlessness of an investigative mind. With freewheeling creativity spurred by his curiosity, Duncan’s lifelong impulse towards painting demonstrates his desire to contemplate, negotiate and comprehend the “big picture”: the origins of sentient life and the universality of consciousness.

In this interview, Zhivago deeply explores his process, motivations, and ambitious themes. He also discusses the series of works and the unique nature of the gallery layout of his current exhibition Mapping Out Unification at Colector in Monterrey, Mexico - on view until April 21, 2023.

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Vonn Cummings Sumner Samples & Remixes Krazy Kat

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 23:42:35 GMT

An interview with artist Vonn Cummings Sumner about his visual takes on the iconic cartoon character Krazy Kat, from George Herriman's wildly weird and wonderful newspaper comic strip that ran from 1913 to 1944 and influenced countless artists working in many styles. Sumner currently has a solo show called Second Nature at Washington DC's Morton Fine Art, which is his second show at the gallery featuring Krazy Kat works.

The gallery writes, "Sumner returns to the wandering, curious avatar with Second Nature, escorting the titular figure through newly verdant, water-pooled landscapes, open spaces and art historical-coded landscapes, longing for escape and a reconnection with nature. Genderless and endlessly depicted, Krazy Kat stands in for 'everyman,' but rarely has their roaming path seemed to follow a strange inner voice that might be its own, but also Sumner’s—raising the question 'who’s following who?' as both go about a grand tour of references, past and present.

Second Nature will be on display through April 8, 2023.

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KIDLEW

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:49:51 GMT

In this wide-ranging interview, KIDLEW gets into his roots skating and tagging as a suburban teen, his ups and downs as a musician in the 90s, his return to graffiti art in the 2000s, his involvement with the legendary Queens mural space 5Pointz, how Lumpy Bumpkin originated, and much more.

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Ai Yo! A Chat With Artist Jenny Wu

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:15:47 GMT

Jenny Wu is an artist and educator. Wu’s work acknowledges the sensational and perceptual properties of materiality and then transforms the materials from their original forms and purpose to present them within new contexts. Her solo show at Morton Fine Art, Ai Yo!, is up through March 8, 2023. Long interested in tactility, in-betweenness, embodiedness, and construction (Wu has a background in architectural studies), the exhibition questions our basic assumptions about what paintings and sculptures can be.

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Tuning Into Uhl's Channels

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 00:46:24 GMT

Shapeshifting through time, space, and spirit, Uhl’s debut EP Channels is a genre-bending and vocally explorative collection of songs threaded together not as much by their similarities as by their nuanced differences.

Showcasing her operatic background through a pop lens, Uhl makes dynamic music that is as informed by Mozart and Puccini as it is by art pop divas Kate Bush and Annie Lennox. The results are enigmatic, dramatic, and transportive and will certainly appeal to fans of contemporaries like Weyes Blood, Perfume Genius, and Cate Le Bon.

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Joseph Keckler's Underworld Voyages

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 23:53:58 GMT

Joseph Keckler is a singular artist, a performer and creator known for his expressive and powerful voice, sharp prose and stirring songs, and absurdist, bizarrely heroic operatic monologues, which "dance between comedy, commentary, and communion."

Hailed by the New York Times as “major vocal talent…a singer whose range shatters the conventional boundaries…with a trickster’s dark humor,” his original performances have been presented by Lincoln Center, Cenre Pompidou, NPR Tiny Desk and many others. His first collection of writing, Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2018.

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Siobhan McBride's Quiet Tensions

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 01:03:01 GMT

The works of Siobhan McBride are imbued with a sense of quiet mystery, often with slightly skewed perspectives and containing objects imprinted with unseen energies or tensions. In this interview, she discusses the inspirations and methods behind her beguiling creations.

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Nick Bautista's Mantras and Methods

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 21:37:44 GMT

Artist Nick Bautista writes, "I have often been reluctant to talk about my work. I have even been hesitant showing or exhibiting it - I suppose that can be problematic for a painter. The images I choose to paint, rather the ideas of the images, I treat very personally, almost protectively. I see them as fragments of private journal entries. After all, they address my personal situations and struggles, or whatever I might be experiencing in my life."

Despite his reluctance to talk about his work, Nick sat down with INTERLOCUTOR Magazine founder Tyler Nesler for a wide-ranging discussion about his projects and creative drives, the personal struggles and deep self-reflections which have inspired his creations, along with recountings of his harrowing experiences with ultra running, which have included being stalked by a pack of coyotes through the mountains while pushing his body and mind to dangerous extremes.

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Steven Montgomery's Aesthetics of Damage

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 00:28:13 GMT

Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Steven Montgomery describes himself as having, “...an affinity for the aesthetics of damage, destruction or any evidence of the passage of time.” His earthenware creations pay homage to the once-thriving industrial capital, its degradation, and subsequent resurgence. Incorporating elements that honor the regality of Detroit’s auto industry and its machinery and recognize its more recent issues with the safety of its water supply, Montgomery creates vessels that look more like futuristic Bronze Age sculptures than pottery.

In this episode, we catch up with Steven and dig deeper into his work with a focus on his series TOXIC CON, which viscerally comments on the health of the world’s water supply via the Flint Water Crisis. This conversation further expands on his INTERLOCUTOR Magazine interview from May 2021.

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Ryan Sarah Murphy, Cardboard Whisperer

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 02:15:37 GMT

Ryan Sarah Murphy's reclaimed cardboard relief sculptures, powered by the visceral impact of color combinations, act as visual meditations on geographical location, placemaking, architecture, and spatial awareness. Her videos, generated through multiple digital interventions on random images and movements, are enigmatic, animated paintings that look like pixels, binary code, or even deconstructed maps, a visual reference to her fixed cardboard works. Her drawings, which begin as tracings of stills from her videos, complete the multi-dimensional deconstruction of her creative cycle.

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Eszter Balint Only Sort of Hates Memory

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:13:59 GMT

Songwriter/violinist/actress Eszter Balint’s stage production of I Hate Memory, originally set to premiere in 2020 but postponed due to the pandemic, finally premiered this past summer with two performances at Joe's Pub in NYC, and now she is set to release an album of songs from the show (available November 18 via Red Herring Records). Written by Eszter and based on an original concept by her and Tony Award-winner Stew, I Hate Memory is an “anti-musical” “co-starring the Streets of New York and the Late 20th Century featuring Family, Film, Fame, Immigration, Joy, Theater, Shame, Dance Floors, Open Doors, Papaya Ice Cream, and the Shah of Iran’s Wife.”

In this interview, Eszter goes into detail about the genesis of the show, why she cringes at the word "memoir" and the concept of nostalgia, but also why she still wanted to find a way to honestly tell her unique story of growing up in a Hungarian experimental theatre family in the gritty milieu of the late 70s/early 80s NYC downtown art and music worlds, the highly talented production cast, and more...

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