In Good Company
Stay tuned for future In Good Company programs. Coming up next is a program focused on conceptual artist Lauren Woods.
EPISODE 2: Title
DiverseWorks commissions artists to create new works, including exhibitions and performances, that are not easily categorized. We encourage artists to take risks, try new things and collaborate with other artists and the community.
Stay tuned for future In Good Company programs. Coming up next is a program focused on conceptual artist lauren woods.
EPISODE 1: SEBASTIEN BONCY IN CONVERSATION WITH JD PLUECKER
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In Good Company is a series of in-depth, online conversations made by and for artists. Adapting the format of a long-form television interview program to the web, IGC allows the time and space for deeper exploration into an artist’s life, work, and influences.
On Saturday, December 2, at 3 p.m., join us live for a virtual conversation between Houston artists Sebastien Boncy and JD Pluecker.
Framed and hosted by Pluecker, the program will focus on Boncy, the artist and one-man collective (Pugilist Press) behind Purple Time Space Swamp, a sprawling, open-source archive of daily pictures taken over the last nine years (and counting) of his adopted city – Houston.
Through an intuitive lens, Boncy chronicles the contradictory truths of a sublimely charming yet inhospitable place driven as much by self-destruction as reinvention. In Boncy’s Houston, people are scarce, but nature grows with and around our man-made progress and failures alike. For him, there is science fiction in what he does – a black man idling in a sidewalk-less boomtown – and in what he sees that can “trigger a strange longing for a new world to come.”
In Good Company is produced by artists Eileen Maxson and Arie Bouman in memory of their late friend and IGC collaborator Vinod Hopson.
HOW TO WATCH & PARTICIPATE
In Good Company programs air live on the Diverseworks website (recordings will be posted for later viewing). Anyone may watch the livestream; no log-in is necessary. When live, an interactive chat will be enabled. To participate, first, enter your name.
ACCESSIBILITY
In Good Company programs will be streamed live with automatic closed captioning enabled.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sebastien Boncy
Sebastien Boncy was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. At seventeen, he relocated to Texas to attend the University of Houston, where he received a B.F.A in Photography & Digital Media before going on to the University of North Texas, where he received an MFA, also in photography. In addition to a prolific self-publishing practice, Boncy’s work has been published in Sugar and Rice and Found Me magazines and the online publication Not That But This. Boncy’s recent solo exhibitions include Visible Records (Charlottesville, VA) and Galveston Arts Center (Galveston, TX), both in 2022. His past group exhibitions include “Photography in Place” at the Gaddis Geeslin Gallery at Sam Houston State University (Huntsville, TX). Boncy is all six members of the Pugilist Press Collective. He lives and works in Houston, TX.
JD Pluecker
JD Pluecker is a language worker who writes, translates, organizes, interprets, and creates. Pluecker’s undisciplinary work is informed by non-normative poetics, language justice, radical aesthetics and politics, and cross-border/cross-language cultural production. They have translated numerous books from Spanish, including most recently Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny (Deep Vellum Press, 2023), Gore Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), and Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016). Their book of poetry and image, Ford Over, was released in 2016 from Noemi Press. In 2010, they co-founded the language justice and linguistic experimentation collaborative Antena Aire with Jen Hofer, and from 2015-2030 worked as part of the local social justice interpreting collective Antena Houston. Pluecker has exhibited artistic work at the Blaffer Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, Project Row Houses, and more.
ABOUT IN GOOD COMPANY
In Good Company is produced by artists Eileen Maxson and Arie Bouman in memory of their late friend and IGC collaborator Vinod Hopson. In September 2022, Arie, Eileen, and Vinod worked together to create an online conversation between Eileen and Vinod. The experience inspired them to create In Good Company as an experimental platform for in-depth conversations between artists and friends. After Vinod’s passing, the hour-long conversation between him and Eileen is a bittersweet document of these artist-friends in dialogue and a record of Vinod’s warm, generous, and good-humored spirit. In the weeks leading up to our first official program, IGC is sharing our “pilot” program below.
Vinod Hopson
Vinod Hopson (1975-2023) was an artist and storyteller. His project, Those Who Desire, explored the lost, often difficult history of the city of Houston through performance and cartography. TWD took the form of bus and walking tours for tourists and locals alike – anyone willing to take a critical look at Houston with Vinod as their guide.
“The city of Houston is unusually diverse, and while the civic and tourist industries take great pleasure in touting that diversity, the origins of those diverse communities, and the stories of their growth and importance to the city are overlooked, or worse, woefully ignored. I have engaged in a pursuit of those stories, and the forgotten histories of the city, stitching them together to form a more fully understood and appreciated Houston.
I am a storyteller, and I’d like to tell these forgotten stories. They are powerful tales that resonate in the present. This is particularly true for the city’s traditionally minority neighborhoods, but there are plenty of other lost stories in every one of the city’s corners.”
– Vinod Hopson
Eileen Maxson
Eileen Maxson is an interdisciplinary artist working at the confluence of video, performance, installation, and photography. Previous exhibitions and screenings of her work include Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; Museum of Moving Image, Queens, NY; Aurora Picture Show, Houston, TX; and Light Industry, Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from the University of Houston, her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and attended De Ateliers, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Arie Bouman
Arie Bouman is an arts writer living and working in Houston, TX. His writing has been published in DE Magazine, Metropolis M, Arts and Culture Texas Magazine, and Glasstire. Bouman holds an MA from the School of Visual Arts and a BFA from the Aki Academie Enschede, Netherlands.
SUPPORT
In Good Company is produced by Eileen Maxson and Arie Bouman in collaboration with DiverseWorks. In Good Company is funded in part by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.