Cage Match Project Podcast

For this episode, we continue pairing up creatives for Ariel Wood’s “Round 21: cullective” exhibition on view from April 13th until July 7th at 916 Springdale Road. If you are just tuning in, Cage Match Project is a gallery that lives in an industrial caged trailer. Measured at 20x8x7 feet, this weathered and rusted container resides in a gravel parking lot in Austin, Texas, where it is under cons...

In this episode, artist and curator Michael Anthony García explains his concept of the cage as a ghost of an 18-wheeler and his use of material to create a visual story. Blanton Museum Associative Curator Claudia Zapata highlights the rise of the cage as a tool used to hold immigrants in detention centers inhumanely and the rising deaths of immigrant workers. This is a great conversation between t...

The curator of the Cage Match project and host for this podcast, Aryel René Jackson, interviews Maggie Jensen for the first episode of season 2. In each of her installations, Maggie Jensen becomes involved in different systems or aesthetics of authority, whether the art institution, a natural history archive, or extractive resource infrastructures. In this episode, Jensen discusses the process as...

The curator of the Cage Match Project and host for this podcast, Ariel René Jackson, interviews Rachel Means for the last episode of the season. Rachel Means is an Austin-based multidisciplinary installation artist. Means will be installing her project in the cage in the next upcoming months. We talk about Means' practice and how she incorporates line, natural fibers, and found materials to explor...

The curator of the Cage Match Project and host for this podcast, Ariel René Jackson, interviews André Fuqua, an interdisciplinary artist based in Austin, Texas. Fuqua's training in civil engineering and architecture guides much of his practice and his work explores ideas surrounding space, visibility, otherness, and power. He has strong interests in material ethos, the built environment, and hidde...

The curator of the Cage Match project and host for this podcast, Ariel René Jackson, interviews Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez, a second-generation Salvadoran-American born and raised in Prince George's County, MD and now based in Pearland, TX. Ramirez's photographs and installations utilize familial and historical archives as well as found objects such as emergency blankets to confront existing nar...

The curator of the Cage Match Project and host for this podcast, Ariel René Jackson, interviews Aimeé Everett, a New Orleans native currently based in Austin, Texas. Everett creates visual diaries through abstract paintings, utilizing her thoughts, inspirations, and experiences as inspiration for generating line and color. Her work explores portraying silence oftentimes using a circular surface of...

The curator of the Cage Match Project and host for this podcast, Ariel René Jackson, interviews Torkwase Dyson, a painter working across multiple mediums in order to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Dyson's abstract works grapple with the ways in which space is perceived and negotiated, particularly by Black and Brown bodies. In this episode Dyson describes...

The curator of the Cage Match project and host for this podcast, Ariel René Jackson, interviews Mukhtara Yusuf, a Yoruba-Nigerian-Muslim designer and scholar whose work focuses on decolonizing design, sustainability, alternative economies and design in the global south. Their interests explore the relationship between science, code, Ifa, and colour in order to bring Yoruba epistemological knowledg...

The curator of the Cage Match project and host for this podcast, Ariel René Jackson, interviews hiba ali, a digital artist, educator, scholar, DJ, experimental music producer and curator based across Chicago, IL, Toronto, Ontario, and Austin, Texas where our paths crossed during our time as graduate students attending The University of Texas at Austin. ali is currently a PhD candidate in Cultural...

The curator of the Cage Match Project and host for this podcast, Ariel René Jackson, interviews Betelhem Makonnen, an Austin-based artist whose practice challenges societal limitations regarding identity, migration, and time. On this episode we focus on time as our metaphorical cage regarding the demand for productivity and how we might resist having to choose between that and exile. Makonnen talk...

The curator of the Cage Match Project and host for this podcast, Ariel René Jackson , interviews Round 14 artist,   Taylor Barnes , an Austin-based artist whose interdisciplinary fiber practice engages a research-based approach to internal and external complexities of her experience as a Black woman in America. Her current research in Barracoons utilizes wood, nails, and fiber to transform th...

The curator of the Cage Match Project and host for this podcast, Ariel René Jackson , interviews Round 13 artist Kara Springer about her practice as well as her installation for CMP titled   "Hold. Elmina, Ghana (2012), Austin, Texas, United States (2020)" . Check out photos of Kara's installation at www.cagematchproject.com We talk about Kara's transition from an industrial designer, foundin...