Art Talk Tuesday is a monthly conversation that invites contemporary artists to discuss their work and the issues surrounding it, followed by a moderated Q&A with Brand staff member, artist and writer Jennifer Remenchik. Art Talk Tuesday artists are selected to reflect the diversity of the art scene of the greater Los Angeles area.
Sponsored by the Brand Associates.
February 6 | 7PM: Karen Lofgren - Visual Artist
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Karen Lofgren is a Los Angeles-based, Canadian visual artist, whose feminist and decolonial research centers on the living world: ritual, history, medicine, and how our cultural systems connect to other wild systems. Lofgren’s practice uses academic research as a basis from which to dream radically in an artistic context and to interpret the research on a subconscious level to address the epistemic crisis of reason: searching for a new language to interpret the world and knowledge itself. The type of experimental and eco-feminist research practice she engages in looks at the relative youth of our species and the very brief history of written knowledge, when considered in astronomical, biological, or geological time. It tries to tap into information held in the cells of the body to make new forms and to arrive at new approaches and expand western epistemology at a moment its most needed. Lofgren’s first monograph: emBRUJAda: Charms for the Living was published by Set Margins’ press in 2023. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, 2019 Pollock-Krasner Grantee, was Fulbright Core Scholar at UAL, Central St. Martins College in 2017/2018, and is currently supported by a grant from Canada Council for the Arts.
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Image: What is to Cure, installation view in “Brave New Worlds” at Palm Springs Art Museum, 2019. Photo by Lance Gerber.; Artist portrait above: Photo by Shayan Ashgarnia, 2022
March 5 | 7PM: Fafnir Adamites - Fiber Artist
​Fafnir Adamites is a fiber artist and educator. Using weaving, papermaking, and basketry, they create sculptures that act as monuments and reminders of trauma, intuition and the legacy of emotional turmoil inherited from past generations. Adamites works mainly with paper and wool, which they call “chaos structures”. Unlike a woven textile which is grounded in an orderly grid, chaos structures are open-ended and are based on a disorderly foundation. A powerful transformation takes place in papermaking and feltmaking when the millions of chaotic fibers bind together to make a strong, cohesive, singular piece. The conceptual depth rooted in these materials relates to their interest in reclaiming personal intuition and agency within the chaotic landscape of trauma. Adamites holds an MFA degree from the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Photography and Women’s Studies from UMass Amherst. They are an Assistant Professor in the Fiber Area at California State University, Long Beach and has taught workshops and intensives at Arrowmont School of Art and Craft, Snow Farm: The New England Craft Program and Women’s Studio Workshop.
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Image: Fafnir Adamites. What Satisfies an Encumbered Body, 2021, Abaca paper pulp.
April 2 | 7PM: Charles Gaines - Conceptual Artist
Charles Gaines (b. 1944, Charleston, South Carolina) engages formulas and systems that interrogate relationships between the objective and subjective realms. Working in a variety of mediums, Gaines has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the U.S. and around the world, most notably at Dia Beacon, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
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Images: Charles Gaines. Greenhouse, 2003-2023, Wood, metal, UV printed polycarbonate, stainless steel, electronics, polyester, software, monitors,
lights, Installation dimensions variable. Photo: Zachary Balber; Artist portrait above: Charles Gaines. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen; Both images: © Charles Gaines. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
April 30 | 7PM: Ara Oshagan - Diasporic Multi-Disciplinary Artist
Ara Oshagan is a diasporic multi-disciplinary artist, curator and cultural worker whose practice explores collective and personal histories of dispossession, legacies of violence, identity and (un)imagined futures. He works in photography, film, collage, installation, book arts, public art and monuments. Vectored by his own personal history, Oshagan is a documentarian and as well as conceptual artist. A descendant of communities who were deracinated from their indigenous lands by the Armenian Genocide in 1915, he was born in Lebanon (in diaspora) and displaced by civil war as a youth. Oshagan’s work researches and explores the associated visible/notvisible structures of identity, memory and histories of site/notsite. His lived experience, personal and communal history are deeply connected to his work. Oshagan lives and works among communities with histories of multi-generational displacement—that have been uprooted, dislocated and become multi-diasporic across time and space. His work is an attempt to articulate the various multi-valiant dimensions of “diasporic presence” and all its attendant ambiguities. Based in Los Angeles, Oshagan is a curator at ReflectSpace Gallery in Glendale Central Library and has published three books of photography (two more forthcoming in 2024).
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Image: Ara Oshagan. The Beirut Memory Project 56, 2018-2021.
Brand staff member and program moderator Jennifer Remenchik is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited in several institutions and galleries, including No Gallery, VIVO Media Arts Centre, HILDE, basement projects, Industry Lab, and The Contemporary Austin, among others. She is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic and has written for CurateLA, BOMB Magazine, and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles. Remenchik began Art Talk Tuesday to showcase artists who reflect the diversity of the art scene of the greater Los Angeles area.