Bad At Sports

Nura Ali’s wide-ranging practise investigates the linguistic scaffolding upholding the assumptions we bring to the act of reading and writing. We speak about her most recent exhibition, blackness, whole-ness, the power of language, and the power of cultural unions.   Nura Ali is a visual artist, writer and curator, living and working in Calgary, Alberta. She received a BFA in Visual Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, a BA in English Literature, Art History and Italian from the University of Leicester and a BA in History from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her work has been shown nationally and received numerous awards and grants; most recently from the Calgary Arts Development,  the Rozsa Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. She is a founding members of the Vancouver Artists Labour Union; a unionised workers cooperative whose mission it is to transform labour practises in the arts sector and create fair, equitable and sustainable working conditions for artists and cultural

Today on Bad at Sportscenter: Kelly Lloyd! Yes, that one. Kelly and Jesse sit down in the cupola at the Ox-Bow School of Art — mere hectometers from where they met almost a decade ago — to talk about practice (and practice talking), about the naming of the thing, about art education and parties. Kelly’s practice spans genre and form and most actively in this moment revolves around her research and its public instantiation, the (excellent) podcast This Thing We Call Art, for which she interviews artists about their livelihoods and labor. You can probably find it wherever you found this (including on WLPN).    http://www.k-lloyd.com https://www.thisthingwecallart.com/   (photo credit: Cat Garcia)

Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett explore the interspace between seemingly polarized entities: light + dark, nature + culture, DIY + institutional, individual + collective. Based in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, the duo centres their practice in relational space, conceptualizing installations and interventions primarily for the public realm. Their projects beckon viewers with novel materials and participatory contexts, inviting strangers to share in collaborative viewership. Beautiful, subversive, playful, and radically inclusive, their works transform the everyday through a critical shift in perspective. We talk through hibernation, place as space, the magic of light, a physical glitch art (the show image is an image of the work "Carbon Copy", 2022)and the magic that could be in post-social practice "New Genra Public Art." Oh, and Duncan tries to defend the Stampede. https://incandescentcloud.com/ This is part of a series of conversations curated by Naomi Potter and the E

This week, a little nod to the Lore is Ness sector of our collective imaginary as John Rossi and Mac Akin join Jesse in a conversation about their practices, their lives at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist Residency in Saugatuck, MI and their intersects. Through a meandering exploration of the psychic and physical, we learn more about the folk horror legend of the Prickerman, the strange shibboleths of souphead and some of what it takes to make and maintain a community of openness and improvisation.    @shesnotachristian @miwolf156

In this episode Duncan reaches out to Naomi Potter and the Esker Foundation to curate a series of conversations, in the hopes of evolving a portrait of the future of Calgary’s contemporary art world. It is an idea about investigating places though conversations with artists. As though, through a series of conversations with sensitive and emblematic makers we could come to a greater understanding of a context, not just artistic practices. It is kind of an experiment. The Esker Foundation is Calgary’s and one of Canada’s premier contemporary art venues, and an incredibly unique Canadian investigation into alternative arts funding and philanthropic artistic support thanks to arts patron, Jim Hill. We did a show about it.  Here is a link... https://badatsports.com/2019/episode-695-naomi-potter-and-the-esker-foundation/

Is it ever possible to escape the language that contains us? Or find joy while subverting myths? Laura Letinsky breaks down her practice in photography and ceramics with Ryan and Brian on this week's Bad at Sports.    

This week Nick Cave chats with Brian and Ryan about his career-spanning survey exhibition Forothermore at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Cave shares his process conceiving of his dazzling soundsuits and sculptures, as well as how to find exuberance in resistance and activism within a work of art.

This week Maryam Taghavi casts a spell over Brian and Duncan. Will they recover? We don't know. What we know is this... Taghavi plays and pulls codes at the edge of beauty and language. What about languages beyond languages? In her work she uses and recreates a language of the occult practices derived from Islamic mysticism. Her sigils promise to evoke real and active metaphysical powers. These forms become channels, lovely and beyond form itself – concept to volition, presence to absence. The works are a wish invoked. The conversation a wish fulfilled. Will Brian and Duncan ever be the same?   https://www.maryamtaghavi.com/ https://artadia.org/

The Bad at Sports crew is joined by Azadeh Gholizadeh. Her works explore the body, landscape, and the fragmentation of memory. Her works use weaving and needle work to generate and worry her images and objects. The works call to mind a powerful connection to place and dismantle that connection through a glitchy digital memory and build towards a reassembled experience. Azadeh Gholizadeh is a Chicago-based artist and educator, and a 2022 Artadia awardee.   https://www.azadehgholizadeh.com/ https://artadia.org/  

Splitting her time between Spain and Chicago, Selva Aparicio is a research based interdisciplinary artist, whose work includes sculpture, installation and performance. On today’s episode of Bad at Sports Center, Jesse and Ryan speak with Selva following the announcement of her 2022 Artadia Award. We discuss the origins of her medical research, the ethical means by which she sources her materials, and the context of community and place in her practice.    https://www.selvaaparicio.com/ https://artadia.org/awards/

On today’s harrowing episode of Bad at Sports Center the we are back in the WLPN studio (and we brought our old mixing board bumbles with us)! Polish-born artist, Inga Danysz, and gallerist, Hayes Riley, join Jesse and Ryan to discuss Danysz’s solo exhibition In Ancient Rome at Good Weather. We discuss the materiality and ontology of Danysz’s sculptural sarcophagi, and our orientation to the physical and metaphysical space they delineate. We also accept the fact that puns have been and will continue to be a part of our process.   

Everything Must Go, so let’s. Jeffrey Michael Austin — interdisciplinary artist and musician — joins Ryan Peter Miller and Jesse Something Malmed to talk about their reflective new exhibition at the Chicago Art Department. Hope in the dark, illusion, allusion, elusiveness, late capitalism, climate crisis, the collective, the needing-tending, the tenderness of a phrase like *help wanted* and enduring questions of scale and capacity guide our winding conversation. What else?   https://www.jeffreymichaelaustin.com/ https://chicagoartdepartment.org/

Bad at Sports welcomes Ashanté Kindle and  Josie Love Roebuck from LatchKey Gallery and their exhibition "CROWN" at Expo Chicago 2022. Working from a place of healing, "CROWN"  explores and rejoices in the legacy of Black hair. The exhibition, named after the CROWN Act - a law that prohibits race-based hair discrimination which is the denial of employment and educational opportunities because of hair texture or protective hairstyles including braids, locs, twists or bantu knots - luxuriates in the scope, range, beauty, and legacy that is black hair. https://www.latchkey-gallery.com/ https://www.latchkey-gallery.com/woks-by-ashant-kindle https://www.latchkey-gallery.com/artist-josie-love-roebuck  

This week the Midwest's greatest contemporary art podcast crew have what can only be described as an "encounter" with one of the Midwest's greatest living artists, Chis Larson! Hailing from St. Paul Minnesota, Larson's newest body of work started its life in Tennessee and slowly spun and wove its way to Engage Projects, Chicago. Taking up a former manufacturing space Larson asks that we consider our relationship to labor from the intimate to the global supply chain in a triumph of an exhibition. The Residue of Labor, April 8 - May 21, 2022   http://chrislarsonstudio.com/ https://www.engage-projects.com/

Gio Swaby is a Bahamian Toronto based visual artist whose work explores and celebrates Blackness and womanhood. Her elegant thread based portraits centres on Black joy as a radical act of resistance. Through love as liberation she explores pathways of healing and empowerment through conversation and observational drawing, allowing the strong and soft to coexist beautifully.  https://www.gioswaby.com/ https://www.claireoliver.com/artists/giovanna-swaby/

This week on Bad at Sports, Kera MacKenzie and Andrew Mausert-Mooney, the filmmakers behind Make A Distinction, join Jesse and the Block Museum’s Curator of Media Arts, Mike Metzger. Make A Distinction is an innovative, hybrid non-fiction feature that blends together strains of essayistic, observational and agitprop filmmaking into a blistering montage. Political in a capital P way, it’s urgent for most everyone, especially those of us in the so-called Chicago universe.    keramackenzie.com https://www.andrewmausert-mooney.com/ Block Cinema  

Rachel Adams joins us live from the halls of EXPO Chicago to talk about all things Bemis Art Center and the Omaha Art scene! We learn about art, llfe, and a little about love as we bounce across the house of yes, residencies, exhibitions and how your dream job might not be where you thought it would be but it is no less dreamy.  

It's the first week in April and that means its time for EXPO Chicago. Brian chats with the fair's director Tony Karman about returning from the pandemic after two and a half years and how best to get into the art amid all the hubbub. And for our second trick we bring in Kate Sierzputowski to chat EXPO programing, community engagement, and the Barely Fair!   Almost as jam packed as art weekend 2022!

BEN FOCH! Marc LeBlanc? Grumpy digital skepticism? NFT revolution? Crypto currency wrestled with? EXPO party power? Hood Ornament? The Cult of the Cheetah revealed. It is quite the adventure. Pay attention nonbeliever because we live in the future.   Ben Foch Marc LeBlanc Cult of the Cheetah EXPO Chicago

This week Bad at Sports Center checks in with Chicago photo super hero Jessica Labatte and a coterie of Northern Illinois University students (Alex Dulski, Edwin Perez-Hernandez, and Emma Vitallo) as they work towards the construction of the world's largest paper snowflake.   Names Dropped: Barbara Kasten Ross Sawyers Jessica Stockholder Dan Peterman Gaylen Gerber Iowa Guiness Book of World Records Western Exhibitions