Episode 20: Expanding Your Constrained Universe: Angelic Goldsky and Hayla Ragland

We’re continuing to listen in on the 2021 Emerging Artist Residents! In this episode Angelic Goldsky and Hayla Ragland talk through their intermedia practices and the ways that their backgrounds, the site of Fort Worden, and time for focus has affected their work. Listen to a special track from Angelic and gain a deep insight into the future archives that both Hayla and Angelic are creating.

This conversation is generous, worth listening to in its entirety, and full of various ways to think about transformation and from what art emerges and where it can take us.

Angelic Goldsky
Angelic Goldsky [t(he)y] is Russian-Jewish trans-gender, queer poetry-excavator and performer. They have been honored to transmute words across Turtle Island and Europe, unearthing what was once buried in silencing language. Goldsky likes to rip apart and release definitions of queerness, transness, spirituality, refuge, migration and exile. They do this through clownery, spoken word music, and performance sorcery, leading them international stages with rabbis, queer clowns, trans politicians, the United Nations, TEDx and the Vogue Theatre. They have been published in Frontier Poetry and SAD Mag among other journals, as well as work on the editorial board of the Room Magazine. They have performed embodiment work exploring radical presence at the Belkin Art Gallery’s Spill: Response and the Or Gallery’s Resurgence exhibition. Goldsky has developed programs in partnership with The Museum of Anthropology, Jewish Queer Trans Vancouver and Everybody Is In Downtown Eastside, working in community cohesion through art and media. They love creating arts space where everyone can be celebrated and honored in full spectrum. They are currently the Poet in Residence at Roundhouse Community Arts Centre, leading various community arts engagement programs for youth and the LGBTQQ2SIA+ community. Angelic has been known to hate taxidermies and love timelessness.

Hayla Ragland
Hayla Ragland is a Seattle-based intermedia artist. They received a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Psychology from University of Kentucky, where they were a John R. Gaines Fellow for the Humanities. The artist’s practice is responsive to their work in social and cognitive psychology, including work at the Markey Cancer Center, the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging and as a caregiver. Ragland’s artwork maintains concerns for cognition, behavior, and health, and their interventionary roles in social constructs and racialized histories. Using textile, sculpture, and photography, they constructs motifs of the unsound body, investigating the seat of the grotesque in contemporary visual culture, with respect to race, gender, ability, and mediated conceptions of worth. Ragland has completed residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Artscape Gibraltar in Toronto Canada, and is the May 2021 resident at Oxbow, Seattle. They are the recipient of a Chinese travel grant from the Confucius Institute and a Names Fellow Award from the Photographic Center Northwest. Their most recent solo show, entitled /Sections, was on view at Shift Gallery, in Seattle, Washington in January of 2021.