Blind Contour

A conversation between Blake Gopnik and Monica Majoli about Andy Warhol Lifetimes. Recorded from a live talk February 19, 2022

Gabrielle Rucker joins us as she discusses the AAM's recent Midsummer Blowout celebration, poetry, Sparkle Nation, asemic writing, and more. Read some of Gabrielle's selections in our Sparkle Nation Reading Room, on view now with activities, books, and zines continuing through October 17.

In this episode of “Blind Contour,” AAM Assistant Curator Simone Krug talks to LA-based artist Kelly Akashi about her history as an artist and her upcoming Crown Commons sculptural commission “Cultivator.” Learn about the artist, exhibition, and more by visiting aspenartmuseum.org.

This episode of “Blind Contour” features recent AAM guest educator, Stacey Shelnut-Hendrick, and a brief conversation with our Learning Director, Rachel Ropeik! Listen to them talk about the practice of object-based learning, the role of museums in education, how museums interact within the community, and more! Also, be on the lookout for bonus content featuring an audio object-based learning section inside Oscar Murillo’s exhibition “Social Altitude”—coming soon!

In this episode of Blind Contour, we sit down with exhibiting artist Seth Price and discuss his use of white noise in his current exhibition No Technique, as well as some past stories of sound working in a Tower Records. Since the early 2000s, artist Seth Price has produced a diverse body of work that interrogates contemporary visual culture. Employing both traditional art media and materials often used in industrial production, Price explores the nature of authorship, identity, and our shifting relationship to images in an increasingly digital and globalized world. Learn more about the exhibition at https://www.aspenartmuseum.org/exhibitions/197-seth-price-no-technique

This week on Blind Contour we’re sitting down with Christina Quarles, our final interview from ArtCrush 2019¬. In this audio profile we check in on the artist and discuss her current practice, composition choices, and goals within her abstract, figurative paintings. Legibility teeters on the edge of lack and excess; when we lack information about a thing, it is vague. However, as information accumulates, the risk for contradiction increases and legibility tips into ambiguity. As a queer, cis woman born to a black father and a white mother, Christina Quarles engages with the world from a position that is multiply situated. Her work is informed by her daily experience with ambiguity and seeks to dismantle assumptions of our fixed subjectivity through images that challenge the viewer to contend with the disorganized body in a state of excess. Christina Quarles (b. 1985 Chicago, USA) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2016 and holds a BA from Hampshire College. Quarles was a 2016 participant at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2019 Pérez Art Museum Miami Prize, and in 2017 she received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. She will have a solo show at the Hepworth Wakefield Museum in October 2019. Recent exhibitions include: But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same, Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2019); Always Brightest Before Tha Dusk, Pilar Corrias, London (2018); Christina Quarles / MATRIX 271, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley (2018); Made in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Trigger: Gender as a Tool and as a Weapon, New Museum, New York (2017-18); It’s Gunna Be All Right, Cause Baby, There Ain’t Nuthin’ Left, Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles (2017); No burden as heavy, David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2017); Fictions, The Studio Museum, New York (2017); and Reconstitution, LAXART, Los Angeles (2017); among others.

This Weeks Blind Contour comes from painter Nir Hod at ArtCrush 2019. Hear him speak about the importance of beauty, and his approach to painting his monumental, reflective canvases. About the artist: Nir Hod’s paintings and sculptures address the paradox of beauty and horror, repulsion and attraction, and the declining state of American culture in late capitalism. Working in techniques handed down hundreds of years from Old Masters, the beauty of these oil paints belie other more sinister and disturbing truths. It took Hod two years to develop a process of control versus random, chance reactions between chrome, solvents, and various industrial tools used to remove top layers of chrome to ultimately reveal the colorful Pollock-like action paintings shown above. Hod’s “performative” approach to painting produced highly reflective surfaces, drawing the viewer in and allowing the viewer to see their reflection as if looking into a large mirror. A commentary on today’s highly self-absorbed “selfie” culture, the paintings are also a reference to Oscar Wilde’s cautionary tale, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde’s infamous hedonist character was inspiration for Hod’s exploration of creating highly reflective surfaces where the viewer can become a part of the composition. The sensuality, debauchery, and pursuit of beauty found in this nineteenth century novel are all themes that Nir Hod has explored in his work over the years. Nir Hod was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1970 and currently lives and works in New York.

During ArtCrush 2019, we sat down with some of the attending artists for a new audio series called Blind Contour to discuss their current practices and happenings. This episode features artist and sculptor Soo Sunny Park speaking about the process of making her expansive wire, glass, metal, and light installations. Soo Sunny Park's work challenges the boundaries between sculpture, installation, and drawing. Individual pieces are hybrids, which fall in-between, rather than within, any of these categories. Sculptures are drawings, drawings are sculptures, and installations are sculptures and drawings at once. she labels the totality of her work as sculpture to provide an overarching framework within the critical discourse of studio art, to identify work that Vladimir Tatlin called the “real object in real space.” Park use art to explore the spaces between the categories that structure our existence.

Marc Dennis is an American artist known for his hyperrealistic paintings that celebrate the subversive potential of beauty and explore the charged subjects of identity, pleasure, and power. His works have been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions in New York, London, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Boston, Houston, and Seattle, and included in numerous private and public collections, including those of JP Morgan Chase; The Neuberger Berman Collection, New York; The Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; The Springfield Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, among others. https://marcdennis.com/ During ArtCrush 2019, we sat down with some of the attending artists for a new audio series called Blind Contour to discuss their current practices and happenings. This episode features painter Marc Dennis talking about the darkness in his paintings and his love of painting commissions, one of which was featured in the ArtCrush 2019 Live Auction. Music: Podington Bear via the Free Music Archive https://www.podingtonbear.com/