Bad at Sports

In this episode Duncan reaches out to Naomi Potter and the Esker Foundation to curate a series of conversations, in the hopes of evolving a portrait of the future of Calgary's contemporary art world. It is an idea about investigating places though conversations with artists. As though, through a series of conversations with sensitive and emblematic makers we could come to a greater understanding o...

Is it ever possible to escape the language that contains us? Or find joy while subverting myths? Laura Letinsky breaks down her practice in photography and ceramics with Ryan and Brian on this week's Bad at Sports.    

This week Nick Cave chats with Brian and Ryan about his career-spanning survey exhibition Forothermore at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago . Cave shares his process conceiving of his dazzling soundsuits and sculptures, as well as how to find exuberance in resistance and activism within a work of art.

This week Maryam Taghavi casts a spell over Brian and Duncan. Will they recover? We don't know. What we know is this... Taghavi plays and pulls codes at the edge of beauty and language. What about languages beyond languages? In her work she uses and recreates a language of the occult practices derived from Islamic mysticism. Her  sigils  promise to evoke real and active metaphysical powers. These...

The Bad at Sports crew is joined by Azadeh Gholizadeh. Her works explore the body, landscape, and the fragmentation of memory. Her works use weaving and needle work to generate and worry her images and objects. The works call to mind a powerful connection to place and dismantle that connection through a glitchy digital memory and build towards a reassembled experience. Azadeh Gholizadeh is a Chica...

Splitting her time between Spain and Chicago, Selva Aparicio is a research based interdisciplinary artist, whose work includes sculpture, installation and performance. On today's episode of Bad at Sports Center, Jesse and Ryan speak with Selva following the announcement of her 2022 Artadia Award. We discuss the origins of her medical research, the ethical means by which she sources her materials,...

On today's harrowing episode of Bad at Sports Center the we are back in the WLPN studio (and we brought our old mixing board bumbles with us)! Polish-born artist,  Inga Danysz , and gallerist, Hayes Riley, join Jesse and Ryan to discuss Danysz's solo exhibition  In Ancient Rome  at  Good Weather . We discuss the materiality and ontology of Danysz's sculptural sarcophagi, and our orientation to the...

Everything Must Go, so let's. Jeffrey Michael Austin — interdisciplinary artist and musician — joins Ryan Peter Miller and Jesse Something Malmed to talk about their reflective new exhibition at the Chicago Art Department. Hope in the dark, illusion, allusion, elusiveness, late capitalism, climate crisis, the collective, the needing-tending, the tenderness of a phrase like *help wanted* and enduri...

Bad at Sports welcomes Ashanté Kindle and  Josie Love Roebuck from LatchKey Gallery and their exhibition "CROWN" at Expo Chicago 2022. Working from a place of healing, "CROWN"  explores and rejoices in the legacy of Black hair. The exhibition, named after the CROWN Act - a law that prohibits race-based hair discrimination which is the denial of employment and educational opportunities because of h...

This week the Midwest's greatest contemporary art podcast crew have what can only be described as an "encounter" with one of the Midwest's greatest living artists, Chis Larson! Hailing from St. Paul Minnesota, Larson's newest body of work started its life in Tennessee and slowly spun and wove its way to Engage Projects, Chicago. Taking up a former manufacturing space Larson asks that we consider o...

Gio Swaby is a Bahamian Toronto based visual artist whose work explores and celebrates Blackness and womanhood. Her elegant thread based portraits centres on Black joy as a radical act of resistance. Through love as liberation she explores pathways of healing and empowerment through conversation and observational drawing, allowing the strong and soft to coexist beautifully.  https://www.gioswaby.c...

This week on Bad at Sports, Kera MacKenzie and Andrew Mausert-Mooney, the filmmakers behind  Make A Distinction , join Jesse and the Block Museum's Curator of Media Arts, Mike Metzger.  Make A Distinction  is an innovative, hybrid non-fiction feature that blends together strains of essayistic, observational and agitprop filmmaking into a blistering montage. Political in a capital P way, it's urgen...

Rachel Adams  joins us live from the halls of  EXPO Chicago  to talk about all things  Bemis Art Center  and the Omaha Art scene! We learn about art, llfe, and a little about love as we bounce across the house of yes, residencies, exhibitions and how your dream job might not be where you thought it would be but it is no less dreamy.  

It's the first week in April and that means its time for EXPO Chicago . Brian chats with the fair's director Tony Karman about returning from the pandemic after two and a half years and how best to get into the art amid all the hubbub. And for our second trick we bring in Kate Sierzputowski  to chat EXPO programing, community engagement, and the Barely Fair!   Almost as jam packed as art weekend 2...

BEN FOCH! Marc LeBlanc? Grumpy digital skepticism? NFT revolution? Crypto currency wrestled with? EXPO party power? Hood Ornament? The Cult of the Cheetah revealed. It is quite the adventure. Pay attention nonbeliever because we live in the future.   Ben Foch Marc LeBlanc Cult of the Cheetah EXPO Chicago

This week Bad at Sports Center checks in with Chicago photo super hero Jessica Labatte and a coterie of Northern Illinois University students (Alex Dulski, Edwin Perez-Hernandez, and Emma Vitallo) as they work towards the construction of the world's largest paper snowflake .   Names Dropped: Barbara Kasten Ross Sawyers Jessica Stockholder Dan Peterman Gaylen Gerber Iowa Guiness Book of World Recor...

Today on Bad at Sports, special Guest Host Mel Cook joins Jesse for a lively conversation with Neal Vandenbergh. Neal has an alluring and excellent exhibition that calls itself Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake at Mickey Gallery up through April 10th. We move through Neal's practice, talk form, talk politics, talk process and laugh a bit.    https://www.mickey.online/ https://www.mickey.onlin...

Mark Bazer joins us to talk about the 12 years he has been doing  The Interview Show  live from  the Hideout  and on their broadcast partner WTTW. We talk about the interview and how best to knock it out of the park.   Selected Names Dropped: Jeff Tweedy and Wilco Scott Thompson Shannon Stratton YouTube John Green Fire Marshal   Hamza Walker Walker Art Center Jehra Patrick Cargo Space Chris Speran...

This week  Brian  and Ryan Roundtable with Asha Iman Veal ,  Tulika Ladsariya , and Mike Nourse of the Center program at Hyde Park Art Center . Antics ensue in discussions of life as a mid-career artists in Chicago and the exhibition Dream. 

On this week's Bad at SportsCenter we chatter about with  Lan Tuazon . A Chicago-based sculptor, Tuazon discusses the culmination of her 10 year trilogy,  Shift in the Order of Things ,  recently concluding at the  Hyde Park Art Center . From  Michael Reynolds' Earthship  to  Alfred Heineken's brick bottles , we unpeel a metaphorical onion to reveal the genius at the center of this epic series of...

This week's Bad at SportsCenter guest is Chicago expat Aaron Delehanty, a painter/sculptor and "dioramacist" based in Rochester, NY. Taking from his experience at  Chicago's Field Museum  and the  Rochester Museum & Science Center , Delehanty's  Loud Cow Studio  fabricates dioramas, replicas, models and murals. In addition to his most recent drawings and sculptures, we discuss the narrative of the...

  This week Bad at Sports gets back to trying to figure out NFTs and our Meta future with the help of Richard Holland, esq., Michael Kellogg, and Jennifer Kellogg.   Welcome to the future humans.   Names Dropped: Viridian House Neal Stephenson Ready Player One Cars.com Cornell Bob Dylan Warped Tour Jam Productions Foundation Nifty Gateway Makersplace Open Sea Decentraland Meta Mark Zuck Second Lif...

This week Bad at Sports/Center is joined by  Claire Ashley,   Judith Brotman ,  Cameron Clayborn , and  Meg Duguid  to discuss  Soft Allergy  at the  Glass Curtain Gallery  and  Tender Irritant  at the  School of the Art Institute of Chicago .   Names dropped: Columbia College Chicago SAIC Yale University

David Antonio Cruz  unpacks his work and process for  Tom Sanford  and Duncan MacKenzie at  Art Basel Miami with  Monique Meloche . Then Dana B returns with all the T.   Names Dropped: The Corner The Center for Subtropical Affairs Andrew Skate Shop Rene Morales Hair and Nails Gallery Dracula Dorys and Eli Manal Kara My Name is Maryan PAMM      

Return to Miami continues with our second day at the NADA fair. We rock the mic with Claudine Ise , Pedro Pedro , and Cash 4 . Names dropped: Goldfinch Mari Eastman Em Kettner 907 Crew UFO SMELLS Stickymonger Sickid Trice Lorenzo Lozini The Deuce Ryan Schneider Rebecca Morgan Ridley Howard Holly Coulis Sam Keller Scott Ogden (SHRINE Gallery) Rob Ober David Antonio Cruz Monique Meloche and THE BEMI...