L.A. based artist Maysha Mohamedi’s abstract paintings are flurries of colors, lines, and shapes imbued with energy, sensation, and meaningful intention. She often paints with her hands and talks about both visible and invisible marks that go into the making of her work. She discusses her process, her use of language, the movements and gestures that define her work, and how the making of abstraction can be a privilege. 

“It does feel like a privilege for a person of color to engage in creativity abstractly. It feels like a privilege to spend time thinking about our feelings and expressing them, and having emotions that are carried out in a visual way like that.”
– Maysha Mohamedi

Host and Producer: Lindsay Preston Zappas
Engieneering: PJ Shahamat
Production assistance: Alitzah Oros
Theme music: Joel P West
Sponsored by: Paradise Framing and Parrasch Heijnen Gallery

L.A. based artist Patrick Martinez’s artistic practice takes many forms. An observer of the city, his work illustrates the ever-changing urban landscape and the beauty that can be found within the diverse and layered aesthetics of our streets. Martinez discusses his role as an observer, the importance of recovering and documenting erased histories, and how his art serves a social purpose, communicating the most pressing social issues of our time. 

Host and Producer: Lindsay Preston Zappas
Engineering: PJ Shahamat
Production assistance: Alitzah Oros
Theme music: Joel P West
Episode Sponsor: Odd Ark LA

L.A. based artist Naotaka Hiro talks about the exploration of the “unknown body” in his multi-media practice. The Osaka-born artist, who works across painting, drawing, video, film, and sculpture, often puts constraints on his body as he works, embracing his own limitations and failures. In this episode Hiro gives listeners intimate insight to his nuanced process, and the private performance that goes into making his work. He also talks about how 2020’s pandemic and unrest directly impacted his recent exhibition, Armor.

“I think that making failure is to show myself, like a raw myself.. Not pretending or dont try to be pretty like something extra. I always have the tendency to make it neat and nice, but having a failure kind of pulls me off from that.”
–Naotaka Hiro

Host and Producer: Lindsay Preston Zappas
Production and engineering: PJ Shahamat
Theme music: Joel P West

L.A. based artists Amanda Ross-Ho and Erik Frydenborg talk about shifting focus and priorities after a year of the pandemic. As teachers, the two discuss what it’s been like to work with students over the last year, and they also find common threads across their art practices: attention to detail, engaging with time and archival material, and inviting the viewer into an open-ended dialogue.

“The craft element was not just about a well-made object, but a way to see other objects with precision and close attention to form. Like reading the contexts in which objects come into the world, and where they’ve been—I think of craft as being not just a tool, but a way to respect materiality. It’s a respectful ceremony for objecthood, so thereby it entends to other things in the world that you have not made… For us it’s also like a church of—it’s devotional. It’s totally ritual, devotional, it’s reverence, it’s a world view.” –Amanda Ross-Ho and Erik Frydenborg

In this episode, host Lindsay Preston Zappas talks to L.A. based artist Simphiwe Ndzube. Ndzube talks about his childhood growing up in South Africa and how as an artist he uses his Magical Realist style to blend past experiences with fantasy. Ndzube talks about following his inner child as an intuitive guide to his art making which blends sculpture, painting, and assemblage. Ndzube discusses art-making as a tool for unpacking traumas, and how he uses his own practice to process past experiences. 

Simphiwe Ndzube  (b. 1990, Cape Town, South Africa) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Cape Town, South Africa. He received his BFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in 2015. Ndzube’s work is characterized by a fundamental interplay between objects, media and two-dimensional surfaces; stitching together a subjective account of the black experience in post-apartheid South Africa from a mythological perspective. Recent exhibitions include INXS: Major Never Before Seen Works by Simphiwe Ndzube, Moffat Takadiwa, and Zhou Yilun, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2020); Hollywood Babylon: A Re-Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Nicodim, Jeffrey Deitch, and AUTRE Magazine, Los Angeles, USA (2020); Where Water Comes Together With Other Water, The 15th Lyon Biennale, Lyon, France (2019); People, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, USA (2019); In the Order of Elephants After the Rain, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest, Romania (2019, solo); and New Acquisitions, The Rubell Museum, Miami, USA (2018). His work can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, France, and the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, among others.

Adapting performance work for Covid-19 safety — How performance operates without an audience present — How writing, sampling, and sound play in performance work — How the pandemic has shifted the way we we think about institutional support and artist communities

In this episode, I talk to three artists in The Hammer exhibition, Made in L.A. 2020: A Version, which is on view but still not open to the public due to Covid-19 restrictions. Harmony Holiday, Aria Dean, and Jaqueline Kiyomi Gork all had planned performance works for the biennial exhibition and had to shift their artworks to accommodate for Covid-safety. We discuss the process of adapting their initially envisioned work, how performance becomes altered without audience participation, and how other disciplines like writing, sculpture, and sound play out in each artist’s work. Together, the artists muse on issues that the pandemic has brought to light. How might alternative platforms privilege community and care for artists and performers?

Abstraction as Resistance — Reclaiming Identity Through Strategies of Refusal  — The Labor of Performance — Relating Audience and Performer — The Politics of Rest — Saying No

Nikita Gale is an L.A.-based multi-media artist working in sound, sculpture, and video. In 2018, Gale made a solo show about changing her name—a form of reclaiming her own identity away from a patriarchal lineage. This refusal in many ways sets the stage for Gale’s multi-disciplinary practice, as she explores what it means to insist on self-autonomy and abstraction as a method for refusal—a means of presenting her subject matter to the viewer on her own terms.

In our hour-long conversation Gale and Zappas talk about how ideas of chosen identity, abstraction, refusal and rest can act as powerful mechanisms in artwork, as well as in protest and dissent. In 2018, Gale made a solo show about changing her name—a form of reclaiming of her own identity away from a patriarchal lineage. This refusal in many ways sets the stage for Gale’s multi-disciplinary practice, as she explores what it means to insist on self-autonomy and abstraction—a means of presenting her subject matter to the viewer on her own terms. We talk through the relationships between audience and performer, and how those play out in recent works by Gale: “Audiencing” and “Private Dancer.”

Learning within Institutions — Building Spaces for Community — Redefining Centers, Structures, and Bureaucracies — Connectivity within Digital Adaptations — Radical Everyday Practice — Living, Breathing Values

Sarah Williams is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Women’s Center for Creative Work (WCCW). In this episode, Zappas & Williams discuss the seeds in Williams’ trajectory that grew into WCCW, a space that nourishes and adapts to the needs of its creative feminist communities. As they speak on a range of topics, from day-to-day practices to the larger workings of power and resistance, Zappas and Williams muse on what it means for an organization to be attentive, nimble, and ultimately radical within artistic and social ecosystems. How can strategies of collectivity and horizontality be implemented to create a more liberatory and inclusive pathway forward?

Even before the pandemic began in March, WCCW was in a transition — having outgrown its space, they were considering moving to a larger building. The pandemic halted those plans, and also provided a slew of other puzzles to work through. Zappas and Williams discuss how space-making can happen in the digital sphere, and how the digital offers the potential for new connections.

The Carla podcast is produced by Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles and Lindsay Preston Zappas with production assistance on this episode by CJ Salapare and engineering by PJ Shahamat. Our theme music is by Joel P West. Thank you to our episode sponsors: The Equality Mural Project and The Hammer Museum.

Remembering John Baldessari: artist, friend, teacher, and mentor — Leslie Jones, Meg Cranston, Fay Ray, Amanda McGough, and Norm Laich reflect on the life and legacy of the celebrated Los Angeles artist 

This special episode of the Carla podcast is dedicated to remembering John Baldessari, who passed away on January 2nd at the age of 88, leaving behind a massive void in the L.A. art community and beyond.

You’ll hear from five people who knew John—former assistants, students, friends, and colleagues—as they reflect on not only his artistic contributions, but his impact as a dedicated teacher, friend, and mentor.

Thanks to LACMA, you’ll also hear from Baldessari himself via an interview taped during his 2010 retrospective, Pure Beauty.

John Baldessari lived a life that was indivisible from his practice as an artist and exhibited great care for his community of students and peers. He conducted his practice with generosity, humor, and deep curiosity that will be long remembered by those who had the pleasure to work with and know him, as well as by the countless who have been impacted by the work of the celebrated artist.

The Carla podcast is produced by Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles and Lindsay Preston Zappas, edited by Jenna Kagel, and engineered by PJ Shahamat. Our theme music is by Joel P West. Other music in this episode included tracks by Ibeke Shakedown, Lobo Loco, Ari Di Niro, Scott Holmes, and Joel P West. Thank you to LACMA, Amanda McGough, Meg Cranston, Leslie Jones, Norm Laich, and Fay Ray.

Growing up in L.A. — Rock Photography and Photographing Michael Jackson — Feeling Split Between Commercial Work and Art — The Colonized Mind — Finding Balance Between Mind and Body — Make Rules Break Rules

Todd Gray joins Lindsay for an hour-long conversation surrounding his work and the influences that life experiences have had on his approach to thinking and making. Gray’s meticulous photographs are framed and then stacked on top of each other, so certain areas are strategically concealed. Some of his works contain images of Michael Jackson among his other subjects of European gardens and scenes shot in Africa. As a teen, Gray started taking photos at rock concerts, and for a stint became a successful music photographer, working with The Rolling Stones, and doing album art for Jackson Five, Gladys Knight, and Stevie Wonder. He later became Michael Jackson’s personal photographer and amassed a huge archive of images. Alongside all this, Gray received his MFA from CalArts in 1989 where he studied under photographer Allan Sekula and focused primarily on ideas of mental colonialism. These ideas first started around his well-known subject, Michael Jackson, until Gray realized that his own mind had been colonized by his western upbringing and education. Todd and I talk about the split between a western logical thinking, and a more African bodily and intuitive way of thinking—and how much of his practice is an effort to reconcile the two.

Gray’s exhibition, Euclidean Gris Gris, is on view at Pomona College Museum of Art through May 17, 2019.

How identity has shaped Pittman’s work—Being a Painter in the Pictures Generation—Working Politically While Not Being Defined as a “Political Artist”—Thoughts on the Younger Generation of Artists—On Boredom—Leaving Work Open for the Viewer

This episode, host Lindsay Preston Zappas is joined by painter Lari Pittman that was recorded just days before Pittman’s retrospective opened at the Hammer Museum in LA. They discuss personal experiences that have deeply influenced his work, and talk about what it was like to delve into painting and decoration in the ’70s—a time when painting was, as Pittman says, “dilapidated.” Pittman now teaches painting at UCLA, and in this conversation, he talks about the impact that working with younger artists has had on him. He also delves into his early experiences growing up in Colombia, the impact that his identity has had on his work, and the way in which his work has found a dialogue with a new generation of contemporary painters.