The Open Call Podcast with Jodi Hays

01/27/22 • 14 min

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 Jodi Hays. Jodi is a Southern-identifying artist whose abstract paintings bring together new and reclaimed materials that she dyes, paints and assembles into works ranging from small to mural sized paintings. Her work pulls from a Southern vernacular and she pulls some of her imagery from care-worn and dilapidated aspects of the Southern landscape. She deftly layers formal, emotive, and conceptual elements as she explores ideas of gender, history, identity, and place.
Hays’ materials are often drawn from her environment, sometimes suffused with family history and sometimes chosen for their formal qualities like stripes or grids. She manipulates these materials and mines them for their inherent content, informing her interest in abstraction. Her paintings draw on her research into regional history, family, and land use. In this episode we caught up with Jodi in Nashville, Tennessee where she lives and works. Listen as she shares about her studio, working process, and the ideas that inform her work.
We hope you enjoy our conversation and please check out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of our guest's artwork. We release new episodes of The Open Call every 2 weeks. 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.

Previous Episode

The Open Call Podcast with Lisa Corinne Davis

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 Lisa Corinne Davis, an internationally known, Brooklyn based artist whose complex paintings contain coded narratives that layer warped grids, invented geometries, and map elements overtop of one another. Davis’ works are informed by her own lived experiences as a light-skinned African American woman and her desire to avoid categorization. Her paintings investigate the “complex relationship between 'race, culture and history”’ Using a visual language that is moreso felt than overtly political she explores ideas about “classification and contingency, the rational and irrational, chaos and order” in relation to identity.
Davis is interested in the multiplicity of perception and how our varied histories inform our interactions. She seamlessly combines contrasting elements like geometric and organic forms, and analytical and emotional color schemes in ways that create visually engaging juxtapositions and open up new space for interpretation. The titles of her paintings, containing two seemingly disparate words like Quizzical Quantum, are yet another tool she uses to prolong interpretation and avoid clear definition. Lisa maintains studios in both NYC and in the Hudson Valley. When we spoke with Lisa she was in Hudson. We discussed her process and got a glimpse into how she juggles multiple roles as artist, professor, and mother. We hope you enjoy our conversation and please check out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of Lisa's artwork.
We release new episodes of The Open Call every 2 weeks. 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.

Next Episode

The Open Call Podcast with Buzz Spector

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 has the pleasure of sharing with you part of our conversation with Buzz Spector. When we spoke, Buzz had recently moved from St Louis to his new home in the Hudson Valley, His studio was in the final phase of construction. Buzz is an internationally recognized conceptual artist who is perhaps best known for his work with books, but his vast body of work also includes drawings, photographs, collages, and more. He says of his practice, all of the techniques he uses “are techniques of intimacy in action, but our position to recognize them is retrospective - it comes after the fact. So the play of memory he talks about is one) of projecting your own experience and secondarily, of assessing the limited terms that our language gives us to describe what we witness.”
Buzz often uses language as a stand in for something that is missing. He considers all of his work through the lens of drawing and he talks about how “the distance between reader and page, between artist’s eye and artist’s pencil on paper, is an intimate space of noticing, empathizing, and of accepting that makes the experience shift from a reading of structural terms to an epiphany of identification.”
Buzz is also widely recognized for his critical writings about art. He describes his role as not simply providing an opinion, but instead as finding a way of faithfully describing what he has seen that will preserve something of that effect in the imagination of the reader. When he writes he chooses from a huge field of properties to describe one, then another, then another and that description doesn’t lead to a total picture of the artwork, but instead to a premise of the success or failure of the artwork. The structure of his writing is intended to clarify where he is coming from as the person on the other side of that written text.
We enjoyed a rich conversation that meandered through a variety of topics including his practice, critical writing and pedagogy. We hope you enjoy our conversation and please check out our Instagram -- @the_open_call_podcast -- where we share images of Buzz's artwork.
We produce three seasons a year during which we release new episodes every 2 weeks. 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.