chatted about / archive / a hard baby cleans / a passenger / blown cover / christ and spiderman / democracy now / fall / fixation object / fruit / hagia sophia / laptop masturbation / lurker / pietà / six-headed entangled figure / sleep noises / triple vision / untitled (shirt)

Dunt & Toby Wu

Brett Swenson and Kirsten Ihns introduce their single-channel video series, Dunt (2019-ongoing). Toby Wu prefaces/waxes lyrical about surface tension in Dunt. We watch The Giant Bowl (2021) in full, then excerpts of Sleep Noises (2020). Everyone talks about how they feel. Kirsten reads her 2021 poem, hi hi hi hi, Brett shares sculptures in progress; they talk about world building together.

Sophia Anthony & Claire Rich

Focusing on the notion of multiple or simultaneous practices (different modes of painting, photography, and drawing) within an overarching, singular practice à la Marlene Dumas or Gerhard Richter, Claire Rich and Sophia Anthony discusses how Anthony’s work highlights the often complicated relationship between images and paintings. The talk also looks to Anthony’s influences and inspirations across time and space, from the historic baroque to the contemporary current, and how they develop in her work.

Qiuchen Wu & Kirsten Ihn

How are belief and its counterpart, doubt (not disbelief), produced? How does this question play out regarding sensation, knowledge, authority and relationality? And what is the expression (which involves art) of this knitting of concepts? Kirsten Ihns and Qiuchen Wu screen and discuss selections from Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s film Moses and Aaron (1975), together with Qiuchen’s video works The Star of Redemption (2020) and fruit (2021) as a way of thinking about these questions together.

Wilson Yerxa, Ambrin Ling & Xuanlin Ye

Religious and consumer symbolism, shifting points of view, including the point of view of humor, the materiality of recycled clothes, and the perpetual reconstitution of painted form and subject matter in the artist’s oeuvre— these are but some of the points of discussion in Ambrin Ling (MAPH) and Xuanlin Ye’s (MAPH) talk with Wilson Yerxa (MFA) about Yerxa’s practice. Treating the studio as a lab of experimentation, Yerxa, Ye, and Ling reflect on how Yerxa's works on paper draw on his theatre, poetry, and video experiences and incorporate new approaches to first person perspective. In doing so, his works revel in theconfusion between the subjects and objects of paintings. This inversion of roles continues as Yerxa in turn discusses Ling and Ye’s studio practices.’

Caleb Clemente, Jacob Pet, Jingchen Jiang & Sarah Hobin

Jacob Pet (MFA) Caleb Clemente (MFA), Jingchen Jiang (MAPH), and Sarah Hobin (MAPH) consider how objects are imbued with meaning. Through histories and through the process of their making, art objects can leverage narrative to amplify significance. Sometimes, however, meaning can emerge from elements of the object that are hidden from the viewer. How is meaning experienced by the audience? And what, after all, is the artist’s intent? In light of these questions, we also look to the art practices of Pet and Clemente to consider transcendence—as theme, as process, and as effect—and the meaning within objects that artists explore in their practices.

Cameron Mankin & Robyn Tisman

Cameron Mankin and Robyn Tisman explore the roles imagery, design, and textual materiality play in formation of both identity and art object itself. We discuss the use of found objects, surveillance footage and screens, and notions of inherent vice in the construction and dematerialization of new realities.

Iona Liu, Thomas Lin & Yiran Chi

Iona Liu (MFA), ​​Thomas Lin (MPP), and Yiran Chi (MAPH) consider how the politics of reproduction intersect with mass media, folk religion, mythology and scientific discourse. Iona, Thomas and Yiran reflect on how Iona’s multimedia installations and recent paintings illustrate her ever-expanding fascination with the historical, cultural, ideological and technological conjunctures of reproductive politics. Attentive to both local and global perspectives, Iona’s practices fundamentally question restrictive definitions of human, motherhood, and reproductive justice.

Ceyhun Fırat & Maria Kuran

Ceyhun Fırat and Maria Kuran engage in a conversation, at times a personal one, exploring how local issues with respect to Middle Eastern identity can be translated to broader themes of exploration, of defining an oeuvre. Process here is of particular importance, for it is the journey in art making which encompasses every aspect of the artist’s practice, rather than focusing on the finished product alone and superimposing a story on someone else’s body of work.

C. Tai Tai (Tina Wang) & Carla Nunez-Hernandez

C. Tai Tai (MFA) and Carla Nunez-Hernandez (MAPH) explore the relationship and contrast between dance and performance, body and movement, and resistance vs. transformation. Looking at Tai Tai's past work in dance into performance, and her application of ceramic armature and inanimate objects, we question the objectification and fetishization of the body in states of endurance through dance and performance, and whether it is necessary for endurance to end in transformation.

Caitlyn Au & Jack Schneider

Caitlyn Au and Jack Schneider discuss subjects and objects, resistances, and constructions. Focusing on Au’s recent work, place of them, we consider the textures and forms of an inquisitive and exploratory practice.

Elissa Osterland & Xinyang Li

Elissa Osterland and Xinyang Li have a conversation on falling:
‍"On Falling, Part I"
‍surface/light/layers/the invisible/space/movement/embodiment/the sun/falling/flying/catching/seeing/falling/flying/sand