The Brand Library & Art Center invites the public to join them for Art Talk Tuesday — artist talks and discussions — held every first Tuesday at 7 p.m., September through December.
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. The series will feature Los Angeles-based artists Ting Ying Han, Ian James, Hayley Barker and Ray Anthony Barrett.
Han is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work delves deeply into the realms of memory, identity and belonging. Drawing inspiration from her own experiences as an immigrant straddling two cultures, her artistic practice is a captivating exploration of the intricate tapestry of cultural identity. Utilizing a diverse range of building materials and everyday objects, Han’s thought-provoking sculptural installations spark discussions around pressing social and political questions, shedding light on the evolving perception of place and space amidst the complexities of migration, urbanization and gentrification.
James is an artist who primarily works in photography. Interested in the metaphysics of objects, he restages New Age healing and healing device advertising and places these images in relation to one another atop laminate panels. These images indicate how a device should be placed on the body and how one should feel once the device is in use. In addition, James has been making pilgrimages to photograph pyramid architecture throughout North America and Europe as a form of late capitalist pilgrimage. The images he makes become a material substance for cast frame works, assemblages, sculptures, books, videos, a radio station and a virtual reality environment.
Barker weaves the personal with the natural world into her landscape paintings. Treating the garden as an altar, she has developed a practice in which her relationship to tending her intimate landscapes is echoed in the evolution and making of her paintings. Lightly layering oil paint on linen, Barker works with subjects that are near and dear: her garden, altars around the home and studio, her childhood home’s yard, the river in Oregon she returns to every summer.
Barrett is a visual artist and chef. Since 2018, his culinary pop-up, CINQUÉ, has been devoted to tracing the evolution of Soul Food from California to its West African origins. Barrett calls his food project Cinqué because he is Ray Anthony Barrett V but also as reference to Joseph Cinqué, the West African man who led the 1839 revolt aboard the slave ship Amistad.
Barrett’s experimental film, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” commissioned by Active Cultures, questions the evolution of agricultural and land practices and the impact of dispossession and colonialism on foodways, tracing its roots from white settler colonialism to present day modes of capitalism and overconsumption. Barrett is particularly interested in the contradictions and tensions of American foodways as they pertain to the relationship between Black people and the land they were at once forced to inhabit and indelibly shaped.
The Art Talk Tuesday schedule is as follows:
Tuesday, Sept. 5, 7 p.m. – Han
Tuesday, Oct. 3, 7 p.m. – James
Tuesday, Nov. 7, 7 p.m. – Barker
Tuesday, Dec. 5, 7 p.m. – Barrett
All installments of this series will be held in the Brand Library & Art Center’s Recital Hall.
This program is supported by the Brand Associates.
First published in the August 26 print issue of the Glendale News-Press.
