GAS Featured Artist and Poet: Irina Tall (Novikova)

 

    Irina Tall (Novikova) is an artist, graphic artist, illustrator. She graduated from the State Academy of Slavic Cultures with a degree in art, and also has a bachelor's degree in design.

    The first personal exhibition My soul is like a wild hawk (2002) was held in the museum of Maxim Bagdanovich. In her works, she raises themes of ecology, in 2005 she devoted a series of works to the Chernobyl disaster, draws on anti-war topics. The first big series she drew was The Red Book, dedicated to rare and endangered species of animals and birds. She writes fairy tales and poems, illustrates short stories. She draws various fantastic creatures: unicorns, animals with human faces. She especially likes the image of a man - a bird - Siren. In 2020, she took part in Poznań Art Week.

Links to her social networks:

Instagram

Facebook

Instagram 2

Withdrawn from circulation, like a banknote,

Covered with a touch of flame and burned in the crucible of words,

I'm here, I want, I can...

Those who could not do anything and I were doomed to something ..

At the end of the dark space

  Maybe there is a tunnel with access to space?

  I will come for you?

Someone told me, but he was deceived

With the words of sweet molasses and I got stuck in it like a moth ...

Don't think about me, I died in the dark...

Shadows leave blue marks on the transparent curtain and window sill

I drink bitter tea

And the taste of orange, sweet and fragrant, remains on the gums and tongue,

  Someone is drilling in the house with a drill outside,

  Change cover

But who will change my failed destiny?

  Sometimes I see the future I want

  But I lost it forever...

blue mug,

  sea ​​for me

shells on a black and dead branch,

  A living being that will also soon die...

Dogs skin their souls while they're alive

They are people in my eyes

I will cry at night to close the impregnable door

  that no one will reveal to me

I'll fly away from sleep like a bird

The warm and many-sided sun will shine behind the chain of many-tiered mountains...

GAS Featured Artist and Poet: Jeremy Szuder

Jeremy Szuder (he/him) lives in a tiny apartment with his wife, two children and two cats. He works in the evenings in a very busy restaurant, standing behind a stove, a grill, fryers and heating lamps, happily listening to hours of hand selected music and conjuring ideas for new art and poetry in his head. When his working day ends and he enters his home in the wee hours, he likes to sit down with a glass of wine and record all the various words and images that bear fruit within his mind. Jeremy Szuder only sets the cage doors free when the work begins to pile up too high. In this life, Szuder makes no illusions of being a professional artist in any way, shape, or form.

https://jeremyszuder.wordpress.com/

Son Of A Chance

Born from the body of a teenage girl,          

backbone still hardening.

Born swimming quickly

against the riptide of addictive tensions,

through oceans of alcohol,

and punctured veils smoked grey,

through sugar hurricanes spinning inside her

and not much water to speak of.

Instructions for mothering upon birth, yes, 

that would have been great.

Left instead with a whole lot of questions.

But the answer seemed to be that of;

“let him live”,

even if it came with the care tag 

of being passed along to a more

able bodied family, 

      

which was ruled out 

once teenage momma saw

determination and majesty in baby eyes.

Born sleeping wherever rain could not lick us,

sometimes sleeping under the steering wheel

of a Volkswagen, 

sometimes crashing at Grandpas home,

or the house of whoever had 

the good drugs that day.

Born biding time and PUSHING teeth 

through gum to bite the nipple of depression, 

        

no, scratch that, I mean, desperation.

Born wondering why the prophets of our times

would have wanted to do a gig like this 

more than once.

Born spinning clocks and tearing calendars,

waiting for the orchestra pit of my mother's 

body as instrument,

to finish tuning up or down

so as to allow this son of a chance to conduct

the symphony of archaic existence.

Says mother-“Listen to the sounds of my song 

play in the background of everything

you do, everyday of your life……………”

Like you,

dear reader,

I too will be

hammering out 

my visions,

my escaped artistry,

my life plans etched into

my mothers bones,

from out of that

battlefield I called 

the womb.

GAS Featured Artist: Phil Demise Smith

 I’m an MFA, published poet, and edited a magazine and chapbooks by (Gegenschein Press) and produced of 50 shows of poetry, art, and music at The Gegenschein Vaudeville Placenter.  I’ve been published in magazines and have had a chapbook published What I Don’t Know For Sure (Burning Deck) and Periods, selected writings 1972-1987 (Gegenschein). I have given numerous poetry readings in the U.S. and Europe.

 

I began playing music in 1975. I was a part of the New Wave/Punk Scene in NYC, fronting two bands (The N.DoDo Band and Didus and the Fabulous Mascarenes). My latest band is anDna.

 

In 1987 I began to paint. I’ve had numerous one person and group shows of my artwork in the U.S. and Europe. In April 2012 I had a one person show at the Museé Création Franche in Beglés, France.

 

I taught art/poetry to K-5 students in NYC public schools for 19 years.

 

The Piece "National Headache" is a series of overpaintings on pages of The National Enquirer and prose poem captions for each page.

GAS Featured Artist: Jerome Berglund

 

Jerome Berglund graduated from the cinema-television production program at the University of Southern California, and has spent much of his career working in television and photography. His work has been featured prominently in many journals, including as haiga in Abstract magazine, gracing the cover of pacificREVIEW, and appearances in Drunk Monkeys, Evocations, Landing Zone, Oxford Magazine, and Please See Me last year.  His pictures have further been published and awarded in local papers, and in 2019 he staged an exhibition in the Twin Cities area which included a residency of several months at a local community center.  A selection of his black and white fine art photographs was showcased at the Pause Gallery in New York, and his fashion photography is currently on display at the BG Gallery in Santa Monica.

Heart

Long Shadows

On a Cloud

Shimmer

GAS Featured Artist Interview with Michael Jacobson by Sylvia Van Nooten

 Michael Jacobson is a driving force in the Asemic art and writing community. As the founder of Post Asemic Press (https://postasemicpress.wordpress.com), his vision for the future of asemics is as inclusive and inspiring as his art itself.  Each of his works feels like a small universe seeking to expand itself by allowing the viewer to experience rather than analyze.  ~ Sylvia Van Nooten 

Sylvia Van Nooten: What is behind your artistic vision? (Why do you do art?)

Michael Jacobson: As far as my personal vision goes I make art to get to the essence of the soul-seed of raw creation. I do art and writing because it is my reason for existence. I try to learn from the totality of experience and pluck out interesting details to run with, and then make up my own interpretation of the duality of hallucinations and reality. One thing I picked up on from other writers such as James Joyce, Xu Bing, Mirtha Dermisache, Basquiat, and Brion Gysin is to make art that pushes boundaries, but still has an entertaining quality, experimental but in a way that spiritually excites and is more interesting to read than accounting numbers. My long hieroglyphic asemic tale Action Figures tells my story from the pit of my mental collapse, and the Action Figures are what helped me climb out of the abyss of schizoaffective hell. For many years I self-medicated with alcohol, but I’m sober now (since June of 2020) with the exception being my meds, but I started to drink non-alcoholic beer to commune with the spirits on holidays.

SVN: How does being an artist help you communicate with the world?

MJ: Everything seems to communicate something, and nature, art, poetry, and music are the pinnacle as far as communication goes. I use my art to amuse myself and as a therapeutic process for coping with existence on this planet. There is so much pain and death in the world and in my personal history, and art helps me get through difficult times. I don’t know how to pray sincerely so I make art, writing, and music to cope and get through the bad days. So far I have published two books: one of asemic writing and one of senryu poetry: Works & Interviews and Hei Kuu. Two other books I am working on are Somnolent Game (2022) and id est (2023). Somnolent Game is a prose poetry novella written in a stream-of-conscious writing style. It’s about a bot maniac who has achieved sentience due to someone else's memories, and is trying to quit violence and start a new life as a clone in paradise. Id est: neo scribalist asemic expressionism is a book I just started working on; it’s a wordless pan-theistic illuminated manuscript (ok no gold is involved) painted using gouache paint on watercolor paper. I plan on working on it through 2022 and publish it through Post-Asemic Press in 2023. 

SVN: Have you built or joined a community of artists around the world? How did you do this?

MJ: I founded the Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate Facebook group in 2008 as a FB platform for my blog The New Post-Literate: A Gallery of Asemic Writing. Over the years it has been interesting to watch it grow from a small group of kindred spirits, until now where the scribal tribe of Asemica has expanded to the size of a small city. It is completely out of my control now in a good way, especially since I am not as involved with FB as much as I used to be; so thankfully there are others who help administrate it. The widespread community on the internet for asemic writing was first collected by Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich. I stumbled into the small and dispersed group of asemic writers back in 2005 when I first gained an Internet connection. But I had been inventing symbols for a long time before I learned the word asemic. When I found the online asemic community I realized that I had located my creative home.

I also hang out and drink tea with my fellow Minneapoets Terrence Folz and Jefferson Hansen. We talk about the writing life in Minneapolis and the vibrant local literary community. I am also involved with many authors through Post-Asemic Press which I founded in 2017. On average, I’m publishing 4 books per year of asemic writing and visual and experimental poetry. I’ve published 15 titles so far with another 10 in the works. I may stop when I get to 30 titles or keep on going if the press eventually takes off. So far it is almost self-sufficient as far as money goes, but it’s asemic art and poetry so I’m not expecting to get rich. Recent titles from PAP are Glyphs of Uncertain Meaning by Tim Gaze, Unwritings by Laura Ortiz, and due out in October 2021 is Intimate h&s by Karl Kempton.

 

I am taking a semester off from college to get caught up with my writing and publishing, and to take a Finnish language class (my mother has Finnish Ancestry). I plan on returning to college in January of 2022 to continue studying creative writing and painting. In the future I would like to travel more and see the world like Anthony Bourdain was able to do. 

Michael Jacobson is a writer, artist, publisher, and independent curator from Minneapolis, Minnesota USA. His books include The Giant’s Fence (Ubu Editions), Action Figures (Avance Publishing), Mynd Eraser, The Paranoia Machine,  his collected writings Works & Interviews (Post-Asemic Press), and his autobiographical collection of senryu poems Hei Kuu (Post-Asemic Press); he is also co-editor of An Anthology Of Asemic Handwriting (Punctum Books). Besides writing books, he curates a gallery for asemic writing called The New Post-Literate, and sits on the editorial board of SCRIPTjr.nl. Recently, he was published in The Last Vispo Anthology (Fantagraphics), and curated the Minnesota Center for Book Arts exhibit: Asemic Writing: Offline & In The Gallery. His online interviews are at Full of Crow,  SampleKanon, Asymptote Journal, Twenty Four Hours, David Alan Binder, and at Medium. In the past he created the cover art for Rain Taxi’s 2014 winter issue, and as of 2017 he has become a book publisher at Post-Asemic Press. In 2019 he was written up in the book Asemic: The Art of Writing (University of Minnesota Press) by Peter Schwenger; it has an entire chapter dedicated to Jacobson’s calligraphic work. He also founded and administers the asemic writing Facebook group. In his spare time, he is working on designing a cyberspace planet dubbed THAT. His Ello studio can be found here: @asemicwriter. 

GAS Featured Artist: Ho Baron, by Sylvia Van Nooten

Ho Baron’s work and life are a testimony to the importance of travelling, both in the mental and physical sense.  His adventures and explorations--pushing him far from the boundaries of other’s expectations-- are reflected in his art.  The sculptures featured in this written interview are marvelous ventures into an unknown future.  Will we need new religions and new gods?  I suspect that yes, we will and Baron’s work shows us one vision of how this might look. (If you want to explore further but can’t visit his sculpture garden, I suggest buying his book, Gods for Future Religions.)

~Sylvia Van Nooten 

Ho in his own words:

I was born in Chicago, El Paso bred, and was raised in the desert on the Mexican border. After studying English in graduate school in Tucson, I taught in the Peace Corps in Nigeria and Ethiopia. It followed years of moving around. From Africa, I lived in New York, Philadelphia, Austin, the Virgin Islands, Belgium and elsewhere, then I returned to El Paso in 1980 to work for ten years in the family pawn shop. I earned a second master's degree in library science along the way, and after a stint in retail, I worked part time several years as an El Paso’s community college librarian.

 I traveled most continents, taught, did public relations, social work, construction, restaurants and labor. I grew in my personal expression from writing into the visual arts including photography, pen and ink drawing, painting to eventually create about 200 narrative bronze and cast stone figures. In addition, I published a satirical newspaper, "The El Paso Lampoon," had photo exhibits, and I produced a weekly "new music" radio program on the local NPR station.

My life-long art endeavors mostly fall in five areas: writings, the drawings, photography, the years of modeling and casting sculptures, then in creating doll assemblages in my ‘old years.’ Interestingly, the message in my artistic imagery translated similarly in my works and style, from my drawings to my super imposed photography, the sculpture and the assemblages.

I found fulfillment in the visual arts, and sculpture was particularly gratifying. I took a few art courses, but I’m self-taught, my expression is primarily intuitive and my modeling technique is rough. Sculpture has been my greatest passion, abstracting the human form with my motifs of surreal imagery and faces within faces.

With little formal training in the visual arts, my expression is free from rules and expectations. I label my imagery as surreal, because my figures are unreal and fantasy like. Maybe influenced by my travels, some say they are Asian in appearance, some say perhaps Mayan. My sculptures are water-like creatures, perhaps deities of an ancient culture pulled from a remote lagoon. Perhaps they’re ‘gods for future religions.’

My unrefined modeling style might pair me with outsider or folk artists. Casting in bronze, however, is not an outsider’s medium. ‘Original’ might be a better label, but that’s not academic sounding. Call me ‘visionary.’ The American Visionary Art Museum, where I have two works, makes a distinction between folk and visionary art. Visionary art, the museum wrote, is created by self-taught artists whose work is personal rather than folk art, which is developed from an existing cultural tradition.

As for art as a communication tool, different medium relates to different people differently or maybe not at all … lots of variables. I’ve made art mostly for myself, art for art’s sake, so my audience must inevitably be select, mostly other artists, a few fans and tourists looking for entertainment in El Paso. I’ve always known my unusual works would draw a limited audience.

It’s tough reaching an audience as an artist. My creative writings died in my files although I’ve found the visual arts easier to show. I’m old with massive work I’ve created. The future of my work is uncertain but so is the future with all. 

In terms of the artist community, many artists by their very nature are kindred spirits. Even though they can be critical of each other, we share a similar passion. I’ve met hundreds of other artists in weekend art fairs and at gallery openings and of course FB has assisted in drawing together those with similar interests. 

My gallery in my basement is closed, the Covid, but I welcome people to my garden. When asked why I make art, I say it’s my motto: “Make art.” Making art is fun, always gratifying and it’s my religion. Making a living in art is tough, however, but it’s worth pursuing a lifetime, I say to visitors. Art can be in many forms: the visual arts, the performing, graphic, decorative, cooking, gardening and so on. 

“First Person” 1980 is on the book cover of my “Gods for Future Religions.” This was my first sculpture modeled for a night course at the Philadelphia College of Art, my only work modeled from a drawing of mine. All following modeled works were improvised.

Surreal Sculpture Garden is my ‘open to the public’ garden behind my home. Read some commentary from visitors. 

 “Dysfunctional Family Tree” 2012 is a giant assemblage completed after the book was published. Visible as in the sculpture garden image, the tree was a beloved, a live nonbearing mulberry tree, wherein I added features when it died. The hands are plaster, the faces cast stone while the legs are actual mannequin legs.

 “The Water God” The date made was not documented, and the vines and decoration on the work is ever changing. There’s a video on it on You Tube and a further explanation of the work in my “Gods…,” monograph pp. 4-5.

“A Novel Romance” 2005 pp 38-41 Notes are on pp.40-41 and a photo on back cover. The sculpture is installed in public in front of the El Paso Public Library.

“One” 1994 Female on one side and male on the reverse side. On is p.12 there is related commentary. on the page.

“Horses and Riders” 1994 is on p. 29, probably the most outrageous depiction of the subject anywhere, both image and explanation.

“Post Nuclear Dog” 2007 pp. 50-51. The work is among my most popular and a copy is in the American Visionary Art Museum collection.  

http://www.hobaron.com/

https://www.facebook.com/HoBaronSculpture/
https://www.instagram.com/hobarone/