Sound and Vision

Peter Krashes' studio painting over the past decade stands as one complete body of artistic research growing directly out of his other practice as an unpaid community organizer in the Dean Street area of Prospect Heights in Brooklyn. As Peter says, "My work as an activist and my work as an artist extend from the same set of values. All of my works are derived from meetings I attend or events and initiatives I help organize. There is no room in political or governmental processes for many of the activities we involve ourselves in, but perhaps none more so than painting a nuanced image in the studio. As a result, the paintings are the last step in a process I have been engaged with from beginning to end. The imperatives I feel outside the studio are explicit so the outcome in the studio is particular and linked directly to the real world." Linking the practices of painting and of activism points out the problematic of actions that can be consumed, ignored, and considered irrelevant by those in official political power. Their human scale and material presence as paint on canvas positions these paintings outside the processes in which decisions are made instead of seeking recognition in political discourses of power. Taking a different approach to generating cultural power, Krashes has generated this body of paintings through working out questions that arise in his range of collaborative activist practices. For example, frustration with the narrow, sometimes apparently biased focus of the media has led Krashes to make paintings depicting the glare of cameras pointed in elected officials' faces or expansive interiors of government chambers with recurring images of empty microphones. He also paints the flipside of this equation, namely that individual voices speaking collectively can exercise power. Neighbors painting protest signs, children's face painting, Easter egg hunts, seedbombs tossed into empty lots, and block parties claim space—marking the presence of the communities willfully neglected by those in power. Brian spoke to Peter about his practice, his community activism and much more.

Enrico Riley is an artist and the George Frederick Jewett Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. He currently lives in Norwich, VT. Enrico received a BA in Visual Studies from Dartmouth College and an MFA in painting from Yale University School of Art. He is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Visual Arts, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize in painting and a Jacobus Family Fellowship through Dartmouth College. He has exhibited work both nationally and internationally. Selected exhibitions include: Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn, NY, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, The American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA. The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia, The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH, The Museum for the National Center of Afro-American Arts in Roxbury, MA, Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Rome, Italy, Rhode Island School of Design Ehp, Rome, Italy, Teckningsmuseet, Laholm, Sweden, Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, CT, SACI School of Art Florence, Italy, Pageant Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, Lori Bookstein Fine Art in New York City, The Painting Center in New York City, SACI School of Art Florence, Italy, His work had been reviewed in Art New England, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review and the New York Times.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967. In 1989 he received a degree in Physical Chemistry from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. He is a Media artist who creates platforms for public participation using technologies such as robotic lights, digital fountains, computerized surveillance, media walls, and telematic networks. He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition at Palazzo Van Axel in 2007. He has also shown at Biennials in Cuenca, Havana, Istanbul, Kochi, Liverpool, Melbourne NGV, Moscow, New Orleans, New York ICP, Seoul, Seville, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, and Wuzhen. Collections holding his work include MoMA and Guggenheim in New York, TATE in London, the 21C Museum in Kanazawa, Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul, SFMOMA in San Francisco, and many others. He has received two BAFTA British Academy Awards for Interactive Art in London, "Artist of the year" Rave Award from Wired Magazine, a Rockefeller fellowship, among many other awards. He has lectured at Goldsmiths College, the Bartlett School, Princeton, Harvard, UC Berkeley, Cooper Union, USC, MIT MediaLab, Guggenheim Museum, LA MOCA, Netherlands Architecture Institute, Cornell, UPenn, SCAD, Danish Architecture Center, CCA in Montreal, ICA in London, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Yulia Iosilzon is a painter who was born in Moscow and spent her formative years in Tel Aviv and currently lives and works in London. She earned an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London, and a BA in Fine Art from Slade School of Fine Art in London. Recent exhibitions include Carvalho Park Gallery in Brooklyn, Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Leeds Art Gallery in Leeds and South London Gallery in London, Wolves by the Road at Assembly House in Leeds, Something Else at Triumph Gallery in  Moscow, The Origin of Who at Kvatdrat 16 Gallery in Copenhagen, and Varieties of Disturbance at Shelf Gallery in London. Written press about her work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar Russia, Afterview Art Review, AucArt, a Renli Su collaborative project, and Young Space. She is the recipient of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries Prize and the Audrey Wykeham Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Hix Award. Sound & Vision is sponsored by Frederix Canvas and Golden Paints.

Steffani Jemison lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2003). Her work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Kadist, among others. Her work was included in the Whitney Biennial 2019 as well as in the touring group exhibition Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem (2019-2020). Other collaborative and group exhibitions include the Drawing Center (2014), the Brooklyn Museum (2014), and the New Museum of Contemporary Art (2011), and many others. She has served as a visiting artist at many institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hampshire College, the Evergreen State College, and Georgia State University. She has taught fine art at Columbia University, Parsons The New School for Design, Wellesley College, Trinity College, Rice University, the Cooper Union, and other institutions, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Design at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University New Brunswick.

Emily Ferretti is a Melbourne-based artist. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and an Advanced Diploma of Visual Arts, RMIT University in Melbourne. She completed a residency at the prestigious Greene Street Studio in New York (awarded by the Australia Council for the Arts), and has also undertaken studio residencies at Gertrude Contemporary, the Australian Tapestry Workshop and at the Cite des Arts Internationale in Paris (awarded by the Art Gallery of New South Wales). Her work is held in major collections including at Artbank, Monash University Museum of Art and in the Macquarie Group Collection, as well as in private collections in Australia and the UK. Sound & Vision is sponsored by Golden Artist Colors and Frederix Canvases.

Bonus! Brian's new podcast, BRAVE NEW WORLD with JERRY SALTZ. Welcome to Brave New World, a podcast with creative people speaking to the challenges of our new current environment. We’re asking our creative community about how they are adapting to difficulties in the current landscape and how we might all move forward together. Hosted by Brian Alfred. @bravenewworldpodcast

Maysha Mohamedii is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Her Recent exhibitions include Nicelle Beauchene, NY, Fourteen30, Portland, The Lodge, LA, Lowell Ryan Projects, LA and she has an upcoming solo show at Halsey McKay Gallery in Long Island. Her work has been featured in ArtSlant, Afrtillery Magazine, Flaunt, Maake Magazine, Hyperallergic, the LA times, New American Paintings and many more. Sound & Vision is sponsored by Frederix Canvas and Golden Paints.

Los Angeles based artist Hilary Pecis (b. 1979, Fullerton, CA) and earned a BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Hilary currently has a solo show up at Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York as well as forthcoming group shows Timothy Taylor, Jack Shainman's Kinderhook School curated by Helen Molesworth, and Halsey McKay in East Hampton. Recent solo exhibitions include The Crisp-Ellert Museum, St. Augustine, FL; Halsey McKay, East Hampton, NY; The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; and Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA. The artist's work has been covered in ArtForum, The New Yorker, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Financial Times, Juxtapoz, ArtNet News, and Contemporary Arts Review Los Angeles (CARLA).

Austyn Weiner is an artist born in Miami, Florida. Austyn studied photography at the University of Michigan School of Art and Design and Parsons School of Photography. She’s had solo shows including Prenup (The Journal Gallery, 2019), (MID-EXPLOSION) (Bill Brady Gallery, 2018) , Wilhart and Naud (The Lodge, 2016) and curated the group exhibition We The People (2016), to raise funds for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) at Werkärtz, Los Angeles.Before moving to Los Angeles, Austyn worked as a commercial photographer specializing in photojournalism for backstage fashion shows such as Michael Kors, Anna Sui, and Elie Tahari. In 2018 she was invited to participate in a field visit to the Rohingya refugee camps of Cox’s Bazaar Bangladesh, and continues her work with UNICEF to Senegal, Africa. Austyn released her first capsule collection with French clothing brand Each X Other.Sponsored by Fredrix Canvas and Golden Artist Colors