The Open Call Podcast with Conrad Bakker

11/18/21 • 15 min

The Open Call Podcast, hosted by Anne Stagg and Laura Tanner, features conversations with contemporary artists about their work.
In this episode of The Open Call Podcast, we talk with Conrad Bakker who lives and works in Illinois where he is a Professor of Art at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Conrad makes carved and painted sculptures of ordinary objects and inserts them into existing economies as a way to challenge value, perception and our relationship with the objects around us. His works range from everyday things like doorstops and electrical cords to generation defining icons like his large scale crumpled blockbuster sign. He places these objects in consumer contexts and galleries that are often transformed into a provisional marketplace. Many of Conrad’s projects are participatory. His immersive installations harness the power of nostalgia to encourage conversations about the many political economies associated with a single item.
Check out this episode to learn more about the concepts and processes that frame his work. Also be sure to visit out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of the artwork that we talk about on the podcast. New episodes of The Open Call are released every 2 weeks so be sure to check back to discover new artists and learn more about their practice.
Special thanks to Susan Cooper for voicing our Outro, Scott Stagg for composing our music, Judah Bachmann for our new music version as well as sound engineering, and to all of our wonderful research assistants: Erin Miller, Ally Price, and Nikki Cohen who provide production support, web, and social media design.

Previous Episode

The Open Call Podcast with Liz Cohen

The Open Call Podcast, hosted by Anne Stagg and Laura Tanner, features conversations with contemporary artists about their work.
In this episode of The Open Call Podcast, we talked with Liz Cohen who lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona where she is an Associate Professor at Arizona State University. Liz is an multidisciplinary artist who uses performative photography, sculpture, weaving, ceramics, and other materials to upend stereotypes and present new perspectives. Her work brings together themes of love, identity, politics, and belonging and challenges social stereotypes. Liz's projects often take years to complete. Check out this episode to learn more about her art, working process, and inspirations.
Also be sure to visit out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of the artwork that we talk about on the podcast. New episodes of The Open Call are released every 2 weeks so be sure to check back to discover new artists and learn more about their practice.
Special thanks to Susan Cooper for voicing our Outro, Scott Stagg for composing our music, and to our wonderful research assistants: Erin Miller, Ally Price, Judah Bachmann, and Nikki Cohen who provide production support, web, and social media design.

Next Episode

The Open Call Podcast with Elisa Insua

The Open Call Podcast, hosted by Anne Stagg and Laura Tanner, features conversations with contemporary artists about their work.
This week, The Open Call Podcast is happy to host Elisa Insua, a globally recognized, conceptual artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Elisa has a background in economic theory and her work explores consumption and waste as they relate to finances and politics. She assembles mosaics and sculptures from recognizable objects that have been discarded. The dense, rich tactility of her artworks underscores the different semantics and unexpected relationships between the embedded objects and the overall structure. Through these juxtapositions, Insua deftly posits new questions and narratives.

Elisa’s work embodies the expression, ‘one person’s trash is another person’s treasure’. She literally transforms cast away bits into lux visual critiques of socio-economic policies. The associations she draws between the objects she assembles in relation to her finished works is not dissimilar to the way that micro and macro economics work to show how separate things come together to inform a broader understanding of the bigger picture. Giant barcodes are formed from plastic containers placed alongside deprecated technologies like old cell phones, various monetary instruments are created from cheap and colorful plastic beads, and large razor wire fences are assembled from hundreds of gold chains and bits of lost or discarded jewelry. Insua uses color and texture to lure viewers to explore her work in detail and simultaneously examine our relationship to the objects we see.
Check out this episode to learn more about the concepts and processes that frame Insua's work. Also be sure to visit out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of the artwork that we talk about on the podcast.
We release new episodes of The Open Call every 2 weeks however we will be taking some time off in December for the holidays. Listen to some of our past episodes to get caught up and we will be back in January 2022 with new episodes.
Special thanks to Susan Cooper for voicing our Outro, Scott Stagg for composing our music, Judah Bachmann for creating a new version of our podcast music and for sound engineering, and to our wonderful research assistants: Ally Price, Nikki Cohen, and Erin Miller who provide production support, web, and social media design.