Vol. III: Apophenia
Staircase courtesy Brian Matthew Hart
Peter Blegvad is an illustrator, writer, and musician, born in New York City, and based in London.
His cartoon strip, Leviathan, ran in The Independent on Sundays from 1991-’98, and The Book of Leviathan was published in 2000 by Sort Of Books (UK) and by Overlook Press (US). Two Chinese and a French translation have also been published since.
Blegvad has been writing and recording music since the mid 70s with Slapp Happy, Faust, Henry Cow, John Greaves, The Golden Palominos, John Zorn, Andy Partridge, and others.
A book about his lifelong epistemological project, Imagine, Observe, Remember was published in 2020 by Uniformbooks/Amateur Enterprises. Related works have been exhibited in Kunstverein Hannover and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2004), in the Kunsthalle Luzern (2007), in Extra City, Antwerp (2010) and elsewhere.
“Milk, Through a Glass Darkly’, a literary collage of 342 quotes about the numinous liquid was published by Uniformbooks in 2023.
His latest album is ‘Go Figure’ (2017) on the ReR MegaCorp label. The Peter Blegvad bandbox (six CDs with an 80 page booklet) was released on the same label in 2018.
Peter Blegvad was Awarded the Ordre de la Grande Gidouille by the Collège de 'Pataphysique, Paris, in 2000. In 2010 he was elected President of the London Institute of 'Pataphysics.
Peter, we adore you.
Oriana Nuzzi was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela. She obtained a Bachelor's degree in Design, graduating with honors from Universidad del Zulia. In addition to studying photography and visual arts, she has participated in several group exhibitions, such as Cuerpo en Cuestión (with Art Nexus) and Prácticas vs. Teoréticas.
Nuzzi’s work involves subjects such as the body, power, and femininity through performance, photography, installation, and writing. Oriana is also part of Letra Muerta Inc., a Design Studio and Archival Center that supports the work of Latin American artists, particularly women and other people in the periphery.
Oriana’s main interest lies in exploring the boundaries between one medium and another, and their relationship within the same body of work. She relies on collage and poetry to create free-associative interpretations across her work; language is the foundation, as much as childhood’s river.
Piotr Szyhalski is a Polish-born and trained multimedia artist working in the United States since 1990. The Minneapolis-based artist’s wide-ranging practice encompasses an array of media and genres, including drawings, posters, prints, photographs, painted murals, interactive digital media, sound art, installation, and performance.
In addition to a major survey exhibition at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis in 2022, his work has been exhibited at museums around the world, including: the International Center of Photography, New York; MOCA Cleveland; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; San Jose Museum of Art; ACC Galerie, Weimar; ICA Gallery, Winnipeg; LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón; steirischer herbst, Graz; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; and in his home city at the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Szyhalski’s work is in the collections of KADIST (Paris/San Francisco), Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Walker Art Center, Weisman Art Museum, and others. Recent artist monographs include COVID-19: Labor Camp Report (Frank, 2021) and Piotr Szyhalski: We Are Working All the Time! (Weisman, 2020).
Szyhalski is the 2021–2022 contributing artist to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, New York, and a professor of media arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
The son of Puerto Rican migrants, John grew up on Long Island and now lives in the Bronx, NYC. Mejias’ 2011 book The Teachers Edition collects his narratives as a public school teacher. Inspired by artists including Lynd Ward, Mejias applies a woodcut printmaking aesthetic to modern comics as he
illuminates marginalized narratives from experiences as a budget-strapped public school teacher forced to fill many gaps to create the understudied history of Puerto Rican nationalism.
His 2020 woodcut graphic novel The Puerto Rican War is a research-based narrative about an uprising of Puerto Rican revolutionaries in the 1950s and a failed assassination attempt against then-president Harry Truman. Originally self-published on newsprint, the book is forthcoming in a new edition from Union Square & Co., and was recently on view at the Thomas J Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A performer as well as a visual artist, Mejias has produced a puppet show based on the Puerto Rican War and sings in the punk band False Starts.
John organizes the comic/zine fair Hungry Eyes at the PIT (Property is Theft) radical community space in Brooklyn, and he is currently working on a book about the Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón.
Thoughts on Apophenia:
“I thought about the twisting of thoughts and ideas to fill in mental blanks. Sometimes based on our worldview or just what’s convenient to us.”
Brian Matthew Hart is a Minneapolis-based interdisciplinary visual artist who makes work with cameras, computers, and collaborators. Having spent the early part of the 21st century interested in drawing within the photographic medium, he has spent the last decade fascinated by and immersed in exploring branches of computational photography and computer vision systems toward expressive uses in artmaking. Working with digital processes has enabled his practice to expand outside the familiar realms of prints and screens and into jewelry and small sculptures. While his work has been shown in various galleries and cultural institutions around the world, Hart loves the relative accessibility of the internet & social media for sharing work and ideas across communities and cultures.
Thoughts On Apophenia:
It’s been bewildering to sit with the concept of apophenia as I realize I am probably an apopheniac - maniacally so. It’s an amusing way to navigate the world and a wonderful tool to toy with. I've always been obsessed with meaning and patterns - visual, social, and psychological. When I can't find that meaning, I create it - often through writing visual sentences and seriating multiple images together in an effort to communicate and deconstruct deeper obscurities.
Sonya Naumann is a visual artist and educator based in Los Angeles, CA. She works in photography and video as a means of exploring the varied complexities of the human condition. She was the 2009 Bodine Fellow at the U of I School of Art and Art History where she received her MFA, Cum Laude.
Naumann's work has been exhibited and published in various spaces including The Annenberg Space for Photography,
The LACDA, The Center For Fine Art Photography, The LA Center
for Photography, Fraction Magazine, F-Stop Magazine, and
the American Scholar Journal.
Diana López (Philadelphia, 1968) is an American/Venezuelan multidisciplinary artist and cultural manager. Currently, she lives and works in Caracas.
Diana studied at the San Francisco Art Institute under the tutorship of Kathy Acker, Tony Labat, and Doug Hall. López developed her artistic style in the 90s, focusing on participation and collaboration with other creators in the production of her pieces. In 1996 she participated in MOMA’s PS1 International Program. Her work incorporates photography, video, performance, and installations.
Her recent work "101dianas: Autos, Captures & Scrolls” (a sampling of which is featured in this volume) invites viewers to reflect on the blurred lines between personal and digital identity and how the internet has shaped our perception of self and others.
Diana López's work is a thought-provoking exploration of identity and alterity in the age of artificial intelligence, social media, and the World Wide Web.
d.e. paso
My heart resides in two places: Ireland and South Dakota. Born in Sioux Falls, and raised in Lake Norden, my earliest memories are of digging worms by flashlight, catching bullheads, and making bowls from the clay on the banks of Lake Norden. Minneapolis 1989: met a nice buachaill from Bayside, Co Dublin and off we went. London, Athens, Paris, Dublin. In Ireland we grew our family with four children. Then, in 2014, the six of us arrived in Brookings, SD. The children are nearly grown (only 1 has flown), the buachaill has taken up gardening, and I have taken up a PhD in Education. There are the normal work-a-day jobs, too. Oh, and 4 cats and a border collie. Ain’t Life grand?
These offerings of words are my examination of our rich and
beautiful world. Thank you for being here.
Thoughts On Apophenia:
Apophenia lit a spark in my brain! I can't stop thinking about it throughout my PhD work (qualitative research!), my work as a director of events and facilities, as I am driving around town, or just sitting and looking out the window. Patterns are everywhere! And nowhere! and I am sure that squirrel has a message for me if only I could read acorn.
Thoughts on Apophenia:
“I get very into pairs of ideas leaning on each other, showing surprising overlaps, bringing out new things in one another. The magic of coincidence meets the matter-of-fact context. Editing video to music can be a struggle, but sometimes, sometimes you drag a clip to the timeline, hit the spacebar, and watch a cosmic ballet no one choreographed.”
Jeremy Ylvisaker is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer, teacher, and visual artist who has worked with a wide variety of popular and underground art makers. His music and images are influenced by decades of these disparate collaborations and friendships, distilling into 3 solo records and 6 with his trio, Alpha Consumer.
Some of the aforementioned artists include Bon Iver, Jenny Lewis, Bruce Hornsby, John Prine, Grace Potter, Andrew Bird, Sandra Bernhard, Damo Suzuki (Can), Anais Mitchell (Hadestown), Gaelynn Lea (MacBeth on Broadway), The Suburbs, Prince’s New Power Generation members (in tribute after Prince passed), Mouse on Mars, Aida Shahghasemi, Swamp Dogg, Shahzad Ismaily, Eyedea, Suki Waterhouse, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and many others, playing in venues such as the Sydney Opera House, Carnegie Hall and on television programs such as Late Night with David Letterman and Austin City Limits. His music is also in films such as Reframed: Found Film Remembered (Walker permanent collection) and Wet House.
Jeremy's instrumental contributions to Apophenia are: