A transcript can be read here.
Artists Chaz John, Matthew Kirk, and Nico Williams, whose work is currently on view in The House Edge at The 8th Floor, will speak about their contributions to the show as well as their wider artistic practices with curator Caitlin Chaisson. The House Edge will be on view the day of the discussion from 11am and partially on view from 5:30pm.
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Chaz John (Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska; Mississippi Band Choctaw) is a multidisciplinary Indigenous artist living and working in Santa Fe. He grew up in Topeka, Kansas, received his bachelor’s degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2019, and briefly attended the MFA program before leaving school to pursue tattooing and art full-time. He’s currently developing a new body of work tied to collective dreaming, tattoo imagery, and the parallels of history and tribal stories.
Matthew Kirk’s (Navajo Nation) practice combines the materiality of his long-held job as an art-handler with mark-making inspired by comics, abstraction, and Diné (Navajo) visuality. A 2019 Eiteljorg Fellow, his work was recently featured in The New York Times. His recent solo exhibition White Snake (2023) was presented at Halsey McKay Gallery in New York City. Kirk was born in Arizona, raised in Wisconsin, and is based in Queens, New York.
Nico Williams (Aamjiwnaang First Nation) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is centered around sculptural beadwork. A recipient of the prestigious 2021 Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art, his work has been included in Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 (2023), Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Terms of Use (2023), PHI Foundation, Montréal, Quebec; La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux (2021), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; and he will be part of a focus presentation at The Armory Show in New York in 2023. He is based in Montréal.
Caitlin Chaisson (Canada) is a curator and critic based in New York and holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She recently worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map (2023) and at The Drawing Center on Drawing in the Continuous Present (2022) and Fernanda Laguna: The Path of the Heart (2022). Previously, she served as the Director and Curator of Far Afield (2016–19), an initiative that supports regionally-connected artistic and curatorial practices. She has also held positions at e-flux (New York City), Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Vancouver), and AKA Artist-Run Centre (Saskatoon). Her writing has appeared in Canadian Art, C Magazine, and frieze magazine, among others.
Image description: Four headshots, clockwise: a person of Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska Mississippi Band Choctaw with long dark hair wearing a bolo tie, fringed brown jacket, and cartoonish blue cowboy hat smokes a cigarette while looking suspiciously at the camera; a person of the Navajo Nation with short black hair and wearing a black t-shirt, in front of various graphs and diagrams; a white woman with auburn hair and blue eyes softly smiling, wearing a light blue denim button-up; a person of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation smiling and wearing a black shirt and black cowboy hat with colorful embroidered flowers.