Podcasts about high desert test sites

Did you know you can explore your own creative processes as pathways to healing and self-discovery? Creative practices can be powerful tools for processing trauma, moving through somatic programming, and fostering resilience. Today, I'm excited to have Jai Knight, who offers a unique perspective on the healing power of art and embodiment practices. In this podcast episode, Jai takes us through: - Their journey as an artist and their discovery of ancestral artistic connections - The role of art in processing trauma and personal transformation - The transition from recreating trauma through art to healing and presence - The practice of ritual tattooing and its healing potential - Somatic awareness in artistic practices and daily life - The importance of grounding and embodiment in creative and spiritual work - The integration of Hanna Somatics in Jai's tattoo practice and personal life And so much more! Jai knight is an interdisciplinary artist and ritual hand poke tattooist. Their work integrates metaphor and symbol as a tool for communicating deep messages that expand beyond the verbal, the subjective, and into the collective narrative. The work they create is an intimate processing with an individual or group, slowing down time into the kairos. Through Jai's own investigation of slowing down through intensive wilderness emersion, 9-year meditation practice, lifelong art practice, crafting their own artistic material including paper, paint, ink, and fibers, and training as a regenerative land and social systems designer, emotional cpr practitioner, and somatic movement junkie informs the work and experiences they share with the world. Their work has always dealt with transforming trauma into creative action. Their most recent project as channel, creator, illustrator, and author of House Oracle Project weaves together intimate and shared experiences of processing how to be at home in a changing world. This resulted in hundreds of collaborative meaning-making sessions, transformative paper-making workshops, a collaborative publishing project, and more. Their projects have recently been supported by Arcosanti foundation, CA Artsconnection, and the public arts advisory council of 29palms. Jai's work was also invited into several residencies including High Desert Test Sites, Lookout Arts Quarry and Ute mountain studios. Jai currently resides in Joshua Tree, CA where they regularly offer ritualistic tattoos and live simply comnected with land. Connect with Aimee Takaya on: Instagram: @aimeetakaya Facebook: Aimee Takaya And watch the podcast on Youtube @aimeetakaya To learn to release your muscle tension and pain to experience greater success and vitality, go to www.youcanfreeyoursoma.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/aimee322/support

In this episode, we've invited Elena Yu to share her experience with Kenneth Tam's The Founding of the World, which she experienced in summer 2023 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Elena is an interdisciplinary artist and community organizer from Los Angeles, where she received her BA in Art from UCLA. She moved to the Morongo Basin in 2016, where she founded two artist-run alternative art spaces, The Firehouse and Sun Spot. She also worked as Assistant Director of Programming for High Desert Test Sites and as Program Director for Arts Connection, the Arts Council of San Bernardino County. She recently relocated to Charlottesville, VA where she is an Incubator Artist at McGuffey Art Center. Elena co-curated our exhibition ‘Emergence,' featuring the Mojave Artists of Color Collective, with support from the California Arts Council. On view at Compound YV from September 9 through November 5, 2023, It was the first-ever public exhibition of works by MACC artists as a collective, aiming both to stabilize and uplift the group.

The Kinsey African American Art & History Collection is back in LA. “What we do is about illuminating a fuller scope of Blackness and humanity at large,” says the chief curator. LA artist Phung Huynh honors the kids of Cambodian American immigrants and refugees in her new exhibit, “Donut (W)hole.” High Desert Test Sites' 2022 biennial is titled “The Searchers.” It features nine artists at various locations in the Mojave Desert. 

Hillary and Tina interview artist, writer, and podcaster, Maya Gurantz. Maya Gurantz is an artist and writer whose work interrogates social imaginaries of American culture, and how constructions of gender, race, class, and progress operate in our shared myths, public rituals, and private desires. Maya's videos, performances, installations, and social practice projects have been shown and commissioned by (solo): Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Grand Central Art Center, Catharine Clark Gallery, Greenleaf Gallery, Pieter PASD; (group) the Museum of Contemporary Art Utah, Angels Gate Cultural Center, the Oakland Museum of California, Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, Navel LA, Art Center College of Design, The Goat Farm Atlanta, The Great Wall of Oakland, High Desert Test Sites, Autonomie Gallery, and Movement Research at Judson Church, among others. She is the recipient of the inaugural Pieter Performance Grant for Dancemakers and an Artist Residency at the McColl Center For Art + Innovation. Maya is a regular contributor to The LA Review of Books (where her essay, Kompromat, was the most-read article of 2019), and has written for This American Life, The Frame at KPCC, The Awl, Notes on Looking, Avidly, Acid-Free, Baumtest Quarterly, RECAPS Magazine, and an anthology, CRuDE, published by the École Nationale Supérieure d'Art, Bourges. She co-translated Be My Knife and Someone to Run With by Israeli novelist David Grossman. In 2018 she received a grant from the UC Humanities Research Institute for “Out of the Archive,” an ongoing project making archives more widely accessible to citizen-researchers. She co-hosts the culture and politics podcast, The Sauce. For show notes and links to our sources, please click here (https://themuckpodcast.fireside.fm/articles/lmep33notes). Special Guest: Maya Gurantz.

This episode is all about plants, and the art practices that help us to connect with them. Millennials are obsessed with house plants, driven in large part by an interest in self-care and wellness. Plants are good for our mental health, and thanks to social media, they’ve become increasingly desirable for their aesthetic. However, what we tend to forget is that making us feel better, and livening up our urban dwellings is the least they do for us. Plants provide the core basis for life on Earth. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to breathe, and we’d have nothing to eat. Despite how essential they are to our survival, we take them for granted. In this episode, we explore how turning plants into art, can help us to develop a deeper understanding and empathy toward them. Bio: Alice Yuan Zhang is a mixed reality artist, designer, and program organizer. Her work bridges the sacredness of natural environments with the speculative power of human-made ones, inviting exploration into interspecies empathy, generative networks, and the illusion of agency. She is the co-organizer of virtual care lab, a current resident artist at CultureHub, and an involved member of NAVEL. Alice studied at the University of California, Berkeley. Alexander Kaye is an artist born near Detroit Michigan and currently residing in Los Angeles California. His practice began in writing and producing music and has since expanded into sound and visual art. He creates experimental music with modular synthesis, field recordings, audio manipulation, chance/aleatoric techniques, and traditional instrumentation. Often finding creative guidance through random operations, he embraces unknown variables as part of the process that influences all of his work. Adrienne Adar is a sound artist and photographer based in Los Angeles. She creates interactive work, often incorporating living plants and technology in site-specific installations. Adar animates plants with sound, seeking to activate unexpected connections to the natural environment. Adar received her MFA from NYU/International Center of Photography and studied at the Slade School of Art, London. Her work has been shown in Los Angeles, New York, Wyoming, London, and Seoul, Korea, as well as Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin, China. She is a participating organizer of High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, CA and a member of the Southern California Succulent Society. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/sound-science-dr-yewande/support

First trained as a painter, artist Mary Addison Hackett also practices in photography, video and other time-based projects.   Mary Addison first experience with desert was on family vacation – three of them – from her hometown of Nashville to the Grand Canyon, Tucson, Mexico and other natural desert wonders along the way.  Even then, Mary Addison had a camera and to document her trips.   Though impressed with the natural and cultural aspects of these desert trips, Mary Addison doesn’t recall having any aspirations of moving to the desert.   Mary Addison’s next desert encounter came in the late 90’s while working for a post-production house out of Chicago. A project with a director in Santa Monica, brought Mary Addison west and during some downtime, she decided to make a trip to Joshua Tree and admits the place made no particular impression on her at that time. Later, after getting married in Palm Springs, and having by this time moved to Los Angeles, she remembers weekend getaways at the 29 Palms Inn and other camping trips where she used the coin operated showers at Coyote Corner.   Mary Addison made the move to Joshua Tree after five years back in Nashville caring for her aging mother, then sorting through three generations of belongings and selling her childhood home. The political climate had changed and, feeling uncomfortable in Nashville, coming back west, near her artistic Los Angeles, peer group felt like the right thing to do.   Researching and communicating with a realtor via the web, Mary Addison found a home and made the move.   Here in the desert for about two weeks, a friend from Atlanta texted, suggesting she immediately –that very moment – drive to an event at the Joshua Tree dry lake bed for what turned out to be a High Desert Test Sites event. Mary Addison also attended an Artist Tea at Joshua Tree National Park (which she now directs) and the opening of the Joshua Treenial – a trifecta of events at which Mary Addison began to establish roots in the artistic community.     Mary Addison believes the desert has elevated her consciousness around being a more responsible human, doing her best to reduce her footprint by taking her trash to the dump, rather than opting for trash pick up and chopping her own wood, used to heat her home.   Not sure if the desert is her last stop, Mary Addison says she wanted a rural living experience and right now, the desert is affording her that opportunity.   Mary Addison has exhibited domestically and internationally, is a film editor, arts educator and freelance arts writer.   Check out Mary Addison on social:   www.maryaddisonhackett.com Instagram: @maryaddisonhackett @painting_is_a_verb

Annelies Kuiper is of Dutch descent, born in Kenya, Africa eight years before Kenya received it's independence from Britain.  With no rights to Kenyan citizenship, it was difficult to find work so Annelies made the difficult decision to leave and has only been back to Kenya twice since 1974.   Annelise found work with a large hotel chain, which took her to Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Johannesburg,  eventually landing in 'romantic' Palm Springs where she lived for 11 years, playing golf and enjoying the resort hotel amenities.  After ending a second relationship, Annelies wanted to 'fall off the earth' and a friend recommended she move to the hi-desert.   In this episode, Annelies tells me how she found her place in north Joshua Tree: Copper Mountain Mesa. Heartbroken and disillusioned, it was a place where she could scream as loud as she wanted and no one would call the police. A place where she could once again find and be her authentic self.   On the mesa, Annelies had the sudden urge to write and in six months time wrote two books. 'Kenya Cowgirl!' and 'Stay Well Kenya Cowgirl', the first a fictionalized version of her formative years in Africa.   Six years ago, Annelies decided to return to school - starting at Copper Mountain College in Joshua Tree and transferring to UC San Diego, from where she recently graduated with a degree in Communications and Media Studies.   Annelies has partnered with artist Andrea Zittel and High Desert Test Sites to publish a book of short stories that will be arriving in Spring 2019.   In the meantime, you can keep up with Annelies and the goings on in her 'little community' of Copper Mountain Mesa through her weekly column in the Hi-Desert Star 'Weekender', available for free on Saturdays.      Links for Annelies: https://www.amazon.com/Kenya-Cowgirl/dp/0963039709 Annelies on Facebook   Annelies on Instagram  

Vanesa Zendejas has been making art for as long as she can remember - even tagging along with her dad to the art classes he was taking in Chicago, where Vanesa was born and raised. In this episode, she describes her process for creating her abstract works. The majority of Vanessa's work has been in paint, but with the addition of a kiln to the art compound at A-Z West, where she is the Administrative Director, she finds herself experimenting with clay, reaching back in her memory to apply knowledge she gained from Bard College where she earned her MFA in sculpture. Prior to attending Bard, Vanesa was learning from a group of artists know as the 'Hairy Who' or the Chicago Imagists at School of the Art Institute in Chicago.  A favorite place to visit in the area is Desert Christ Park - Vanessa really likes their hair.   Vanesa started coming to the desert for work four years ago, keeping home and her own studio space in LA, making the weekly trek out to Joshua Tree, staying on site three days, back to LA for four, but eventually, decided to keep her studio in LA and make home here in the desert. These days, the trips to LA are less frequent, about twice a month, and the soon-to-be completed addition of her own art studio here in the desert will give her more time for her own art work.   We talk about the different ways of the desert: the difference in diversity, the difference in how 'trash' is managed, High Desert Test Sites and those black humps dotting the landscape on the south side of Highway 62, traveling toward 29Palms and how you can go visit them. Or visit another favorite of Vanesa's:  Desert Christ Park in Yucca Valley ~ Vanesa really likes the sculptures hair.   Recently married, Vanesa and her husband reside in 29 Palms and expect the desert will be more of a respite between visits to her native Chicago, and Neil's roots in Montreal.     https://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/304815-vanessa-zendejas?tab=PROFILE

Aurora Tang from High Desert Test Sites, discusses the history of the organization and the recent receipt of non-profit status after a decade of programming.

This week: San Francisco checks in with a discussion with Aaron GM and Ginger Wolfe-Suarez In this episode Art Practical contributors Zachary Royer Scholz, Elyse Mallouk, and Patricia Maloney speak with artists Aaron GM  and Ginger Wolfe-Suarez. This was one of several conversations held over the weekend of the fair as part of “In and Out of Context: Artists Define the Space between San Francisco and Los Angeles,” a program that invited artists to consider the two cities as a continuously evolving constellation of dialogues, shared interests, and overlapping approaches. An abridged transcript of the conversation can be read on Art Practical. Aaron GM lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied at both San Francisco Art Institute and UCLA. Recently he exhibited a solo presentation at the NADA Art fair in Miami Beach (2010). Other Recent solo exhibitions include capezio (2010) at ltd los angeles, Timeshares (2009) at Parker Jones Gallery in Los Angeles, and sales calls(2008) at Blanket Gallery in Vancouver. Aaron has shown in group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Ginger Wolfe-Suarez is an emerging conceptual artist, writer, and theorist. Her work often takes the form of large-scale sculpture, exploring the psychology of built space. Both an exploration into the experiential phenomena of body-object relationships, and a questioning of the material nature of sculpture interweave concepts of memory and process. Wolfe-Suarez teaches studio critique and art theory, and is currently Visiting Faculty in the graduate program at San Francisco Art Institute. Her writings on art criticism have been published internationally, and her artwork has been recently exhibited at Silverman Gallery, ltd Los Angeles, KUNSTRAUM AM SCHAUPLATZ in Vienna, Artist Curated Projects in Los Angeles, Mills Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and High Desert Test Sites, among others. She studied at Goldsmiths College in London and later received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. Wolfe-Suarez lives and works in Richmond, CA, where she raises her three-year-old son.