Nick Mauss & Ken Okiishi | Artist Talk

Featuring Mauss, Okiishi, and Barbara London.

Tuesday, March 18, 2025. 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific.

Register here.

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Artists Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi join Rail Editor-at-Large Barbara London for a conversation.

In this Talk:

Nick Mauss has developed intimate ways of working with materials such as ceramic, textile, and reverse-painted glass to make works that catalyze cognitive and bodily shifts in the viewer. Mauss confronts his studio practice with histories of performance and staging. Proposing new relations between spectator, performer, artwork, and institution, his exhibitions include Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc. at Kunsthalle Basel; Transmissions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Intricate Others at Fundação de Serralves, Porto, and interventions including Transcorporealities at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Florine Stettheimer at the Lenbachhaus, Munich, and Designing Dreams: a Celebration of Léon Bakst as well as Eccentrique Bébé at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.

Ken Okiishi’s films, media artworks and paintings incite poetic fissures and new possibilities in how we form ideas of ourselves and others: from a crumbling space of images of the self, languages and global-city-forms in feedback-loops of translation and migration in (Goodbye to) Manhattan (2010); to the space of childhood in a "homeland" made perpetually "foreign" in A Model Childhood (2018); to a film, Vital Behaviors (2019), which finds an undoing of the suffocating space of social media in a miraculously sensitized re-performance; to a raw studio practice of painting, which first emerged publicly in the works from the series gesture/data (2013-), where painting, screens, and brain space collide in an entwined unraveling. 

Barbara London’s curatorial projects focus on sound art and new media. She joined the curatorial staff at the Museum of Modern Art in the early 1970s, where she founded the video exhibition and collection programs. While at MoMA, she organized many media exhibitions and one-person shows, and led the acquisition of works by Laurie Anderson, Nam June Paik, and John Simon, among others. Her book, Video Art: The First Fifty Years was published by Phaidon in 2020. She also produces the podcast series “Barbara London Calling.” London has taught in the Sound Art Department at Columbia University, and in the Graduate Art Department at Yale.