The Open Call Podcast with Lisa Corinne Davis

01/12/22 • 15 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 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.

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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.

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The Open Call Podcast with Jodi Hays

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.