Artist Heather Benjamin discusses the works in her first solo show at NYC's Olympia Gallery, NEW STRANGENESS BLOOM. Benjamin’s paintings investigate the hyper-vulnerable experiences of existing in a female body. Building on her formal printmaking background and a prolific, two-decade-long zinemaking practice, her autodidactic paintings emerge as self-portraits. Through a diaristic lens, Benjamin’s figures—part goddess, part flawed protagonist—manifest spiritual transformation. These figures navigate imagined desert landscapes, alive with unnameable flora shimmering under electric skies. Both literal and symbolic, these "strange blooms" embody perseverance and renewal amidst psychic and physical terrains that are barren, parched, and alien. Benjamin’s approach to painting nods to Surrealist modes of narration and the idiosyncrasies of outsider art. Motifs such as impassioned couples floating in clouds or emerging from extraterrestrial blooms evoke dream states, memories, and internal monologues. Words scrawled across cowboy hats and bootstraps read like fleeting, nonlinear poems. In New Strangeness Bloom, Benjamin explores sexuality, gender, trauma, and self-perception through intricate, labyrinthine mark-making, maximalist palettes, and a developed personal symbology. Broken mirrors, dead cockroaches, nail-polished claws, and butterflies blend with retro-futurist Americana, warping, refracting, and reimagining mythologies of femininity.

Artist Heather Benjamin discusses her new painting series NEW STRANGENESS BLOOM

<a href="https://www.hellbentart.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">JMikal Davis, aka Hellbent</a>, is a muralist, painter, and street artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Davis began making street-based artwork in the late 1990s while still in art school at the University of Georgia. Upon graduating and moving to Brooklyn in 2000, he took up the nom de plume Hellbent, experimenting with various media and becoming known for his hand-carved plaques that he pulled throughout New York City and eventually across the globe.&nbsp; Since 2011, the backgrounds that started on these plaques became the focal point of his work both on and off the street. The abstract configurations of multiple patterns layered on top of each other are derived from American quilt-making and folk art traditions, inspirations not typically associated within murals and street art.&nbsp; In his public work, he aims to include elements from different textiles associated with the citizens of the community and weave them together harmoniously.

JMikal Davis aka Hellbent discusses his unique approach to creating art in public spaces

A candid and expansive talk between INTERLOCUTOR Contributing Editor Logan Royce Beitmen and Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, the Managing Partner of CANADA Gallery. She plays a key role in shaping the gallery’s program and strategic direction. She recently returned to CANADA after serving as Senior Director and Global Head of Online at Pace Gallery, where she expanded the gallery’s artist roster by bringing on renowned painter Kylie Manning in Spring 2022 and spearheaded its digital evolution by establishing and activating a robust online sales strategy. Boyle’s curatorial practice is driven by a commitment to equity and intergenerational dialogue, as seen in her debut exhibition at Pace,&nbsp;Convergent Evolutions: The Conscious of Body Work, which brought together 17 artists from the gallery’s program alongside figures from her wider network. She continues championing new perspectives in contemporary art through exhibitions such as&nbsp;Beyond the Frame: Abstraction Reconstructed&nbsp;and&nbsp;Rest and Reprieve: A Window into Creative Solitude. Through her work, Boyle remains dedicated to expanding the reach of contemporary art, engaging collectors, and fostering dynamic connections between artists and institutions.

Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle of CANADA Gallery

Musicians Asa Horvitz and Carmen Quill discuss GHOST, a multi-format piece of art that began its life as a touring multidisciplinary performance and later took form as a website with video and music components commissioned by Het HEM (NL) before finally taking form as an album with additional contributions from Ariadne Randall, Bryan West, and Wayne Horvitz. The lyrics for the work were generated by a custom Natural Language Processing AI system (designed by Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant and Alejandro Calcaño). Part experimental opera, part neo-Medieval reverie, and part avant-pop song cycle, it is now presented as a streamlined album of standout recordings made throughout the project’s long genesis.

An exploration of mourning and loss: Asa Horvitz & Carmen Quill discuss their new album GHOST

A conversation with the executor of the estate of Joshua Caleb Weibley and composer Jordan Dykstra about their installation Projection 010:&nbsp;Game Transfer Phenomena, now up at NYC's Chart Gallery through February 15, which consists of 7 crates made to hold objects derived from Tetris’s 7 Tetromino shapes. The installation, curated by Alex Feim, takes its name from repetitive gameplay’s influence on spatial reasoning and the visual/auditory hallucinations it induces. These perceptual occurrences were first observed following the wider release of Tetris during the late 1980s and are also called “The Tetris Effect.”&nbsp;

Game Transfer Phenomena & The Tetris Effect: A Conversation With the Executor of the Estate of Joshua Caleb Weibley & Composer Jordan Dykstra

INTERLOCUTOR Magazine Contributing Editor Logan Royce Beitmen interviews author and journalist Talia Lavin about her new book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America. Lavin is also the author of the critically acclaimed book&nbsp;Culture Warlords, in which she invented online personas that allowed her to meet and expose fascist white supremacists who gather in chatrooms and websites; the book also traces the historical roots of these contemporary phenomena. In&nbsp;Wild Faith, she investigates the rise of the Christian Right over the last half-century and lays out the grim vision evangelicals are attempting to enforce in the United States.

Talia Lavin discusses her new book WILD FAITH: HOW THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT IS TAKING OVER AMERICA

A Cultural Anthropologist trained in Linguistic Anthropology, Ethnomusicology, and Folklore, Alex E. Chávez is the author of the book <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/sounds-of-crossing" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sounds of Crossing: (Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño).</a> Chávez's debut album,&nbsp;<a href="https://alexechavez.bandcamp.com/album/sonorous-present" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sonorous Present,</a> an immersive poetic and musical passage, extends sonic meditations on loss, migration, and mourning across America’s borderlands. What began as an improvised performance in 2019—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s book Sounds of Crossing—has been reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer <a href="https://quetzalela.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Quetzal Flores</a>.

Alex E. Chávez discusses his new album SONOROUS PRESENT

An interview with Chloë Cassens about the influential French artist Jean Cocteau

<a href="https://www.chloecassens.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Chloë Cassens</a> is the representative of the Severin Wunderman Collection, the largest in the world of works by iconoclastic French artist Jean Cocteau. It makes up the entirety of the contents of the <a href="https://www.museecocteaumenton.fr" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Musée Jean Cocteau-collection Severin Wunderman</a> in Menton, France.&nbsp; She is a longtime scholar of Cocteau with a unique perspective, as she is Wunderman’s granddaughter. Her past research has centered around Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles and its echoes in the later life and work of Yves Saint Laurent, as well as Cocteau’s Opium: Journal d’une désintoxication and how it illuminates the role that drug addiction and sobriety plays in the lives of creatives.&nbsp;In this extensive interview with <a href="https://interlocutorinterviews.com/new-blog/tag/Logan+Royce+Beitmen" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Logan Royce Beitmen</a>, Cassens discusses Cocteau’s massive cultural influence and her efforts to increase awareness about his life and legacy.

SACRED MONSTER ~ Chloë Cassens discusses JEAN COCTEAU

An interview with author Julia Hannafin about their debut novel CASCADE

Julia Hannafin is a writer and artist from a two-mom family in Berkeley, California. Their first novel,&nbsp;<a href="https://juliahannafin.com/cascade" target="_blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Cascade,</a>&nbsp;was published with Great Place Books in April 2024, an independent press founded by Alex Higley, Emily Adrian, and Monika Woods. Cascade is a propulsive novel set on the Farallons—a rugged set of islands off the coast of San Francisco—about addiction, sex, gender, loss, and whether any of us can escape our biological inheritance. After her mother’s overdose, Lydia goes to work for her ex-boyfriend’s father, tagging and monitoring great white sharks. As rare and unforeseen interactions between species threaten her team’s research, so does Lydia’s growing infatuation with her boss.&nbsp; In this interview, Interlocutor Fiction Contributing Editor Nirica Srinivasan talks with Hannafin in detail about Cascade and its development.

Author Julia Hannafin

INTERLOCUTOR Interviews is the podcast for Interlocutor Magazine, which features in-depth coverage of creators, thinkers, performers, and artists of all types

INTERLOCUTOR Interviews

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