portfolio: natalie a edwards

Carl says:

“Lost in the woods? Just come back from some mystical journey? Just got back from war? Just got back from killing everyone you know? Like to tap dance on flying swords? I like paintings about that. But to have all of that in one painting is something I don’t see. So I try to get as much of it in with my own work.”

Read the whole inteview…

From my feature on Kyle Beachy:

“Kyle Beachy answered his phone, “Kyle Beachy, published author.” It’s a joke. He isn’t married to the idea of being an author, even though he has just published his first book, “The Slide,” which was named “Best Book by a Chicago Author in the Last Year” by the Chicago Reader, and is working on his next.”

read more…

From my profile of Chicago artist Gregory Jacobsen:

Flags in butts, drippy cunts, shit beaks, and fleshy chunks of meat caught in seemingly intimate moments: these are the images Chicago artist and musician Gregory Jacobsen chooses to render in his awkward acrylic, confidently sensual world. “I was always interested in weird, fucked-up imagery and I always made ‘shocking’ little pictures,” Jacobsen says, “but it took me a while to really push it in a direction where it transcended ‘shock-art.’”

http://fnewsmagazine.com/2007-apr/the-crusade-to-save-artists–asses.php

From an interview with Barbara Degenevieve where she cooked me scrambled eggs:

Barabara says, “The ACLU told me that I was their ideal visual artist witness. My work is sexually explicit and if COPA (Child Online Protection Act) was to be put into effect, I could be in a lot of trouble, like being prosecuted, fined and imprisoned. A good portion of my work is sexually explicit: male nudes and sexually explicit text, language and video, not necessarily female nudes except for brief clips in Desperado. So if a child came to my website, because the child would be able to access my work without age verification, I would be liable for causing ‘harm to minors.’”

From my pathetic interview with the Wu-tang’s GZA:

“GZA: I stopped eating pork in 77. I stopped eating beef in 89. I stopped eating chicken and fish and turkey in 96 because I figured I don’t want to eat anything that’s dead. Meat is so contaminated. It’s so full of drugs and toxins and poisons – I’d rather not eat it. I think it was a piece of chicken that turned me off. It must have been really nasty looking.”

If you’re into boring interviews with unpopular women:

“I think the art scene in Chicago suffers from a Second City mentality. Having grown up as a New Yorker and having become a Chicagoan, I have always been amazed at how weirdly Chicagoans relate to NY. It’s such a love/hate relationship but nonetheless one that ends up making Chicago feel inferior. If Chicago would simply accept that its scale can never rival or equal that of New York’s but that there are terrific artists, curators, gallerists, museums and the best Art Schools in the country, Chicago could simply feel proud of what it has and encourage the range of experimentation that makes it unique. There is a confidence issue here that Chicago needs to overcome.”

Read on…

Profile of performance artist RRRRRRRRROberto Sifuentes:

“If Jeff Koons’ success is symptomatic of slack-jawed consumers eager to gobble up shiny, uncomplicated objects, Roberto Sifuentes is the anti-Koons. He doesn’t cultivate a celebrity to hide behind. He is inviting, rather than selling. He is not cynical or tongue-in-cheek; he is, rather, open and engaging. His performances are earnest, gruesome, unsettling, sad. He covers his body in blood, roaches, leeches and barbed wire, but when we met, he had a fresh haircut and a pressed shirt.”

read the rest. He’s interesting.

Interview with the dude that runs flowingdata.com:

“It’s hard to extract useful information from a table of numbers, but it’s easy to spot patterns in a picture. So it’s much quicker to get your point across with a visualization. People can see the pattern, non-pattern, clustering, or whatever instead of needing you to explain everything.”

read more. It’s way more interesting than you think…