Artists Speak

J. Jordan Bruns

2011-06-12T21:18:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?

Image a tall stone tower. Let's say 5-7 stories tall. It will have a spiral staircase in the center, and at the top of the stair case, a big white cube-shaped room with tons of strategically placed sky lights and very nice track lighting that adjusts with the time of day. White walls, very clean oak hardwood floors with comfortable benches placed around the hole in the center of the floor where the stair case emerges. Climbing the staircase would make the viewer a bit dizzy, which I think would be kind of fun.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us? What does art do best?

Well, I'll answer this question as it applies to painting. Good painting asks questions. It's at its best when the viewer has to work to connect the dots. This means that not everything is explained at first, and the viewer is forced to ponder, decipher and examine the painting to get the most out of it. I get very bored when people try and paint a painting just like a photograph. It's equivalent to someone giving you $10,000 for doing nothing; the work would not be worth as much as if you had worked for the $10,000, except for the emotional worth. Good painting asks questions of/for the viewer, and when/if that happens, it is more rewarding and enjoyable. People grow from art.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you like them to know about your work?

I don't expect anything, really. However, I do wish that everyone did not just see the post apocalyptic world in my work. I don't deny that there are elements of destruction, but I still see the rebirth in it too. The themes I explore are akin to a yin and yang. I think everyone is just so depressed about the state of our economy, jobs, wars that everyone just looks for the negative in every situation. At the same time, I don't want to be known as the guy who is "so cheerful in person, but paints such disturbing subject matter!"

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?

I would say, "Have fun playing chess for the rest of your life!" I remember going to Philadelphia and seeing some of his work. Duchamp painted a painting for every art movement from Impressionism to Cubism, and Philly had one of his from each - all in a row. It looked like he mimicked the movement, got all he could out of it, and moved on. As if all of Cubism could be explained in one painting! This is not to say I don't agree. I think that there needs to be a balance between retinal and thought-provoking.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's pluralistic climate?

I think it kind of depends on how artists persevere. When painting first had to deal with photography, everyone said that "painting was dead." Painting evolved, thankfully, and was more interesting, said more, and it truly was better off. Now, photographers have to deal with all the Sunday afternoon digital photographers. Everyone is a photographer now, and the skill and craft loses some importance. Not everyone is trained to understand what makes good pictures. I think that when everyone can do art as well as everyone else, art will cease to exist.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please feel free to answer it.

How about the age old battle between form and content. Which is more important?

Juergen Mayer H. / J. MAYER H. Architects

2011-03-16T14:33:00.000-07:00

1. In past interviews you have discussed the shift from thinking/designing from material to form to thinking/designing from structure to material. What is the role of scale in this transition?

JMH: If you develop certain questions about the potential of architecture and how it generates a dialog between client´s needs, context and an inherent architectural discussion, you will find that scale is increasingly unimportant, in other words, to investigate certain concerns in different scales cross-references from the object to the urban context. The small objects and furniture pieces start with a specific material and develop their concept from there. Houses and larger buildings focus on an overall atmosphere, including light, sound, noise, color and texture. The way we detail and select materials is based on the specific requirements for each part of the building, a complex patchwork of material selection with a homogeneous appearance.

2. What is the relationship to technology in your work? Architects have to contend with technology on so many levels. They have to ensure that it aids work-flow and that it enriches an experience.

JMH: One major investment in our work is looking at expanding the material of architecture, say beyond just building material. The influence of new media and new materials definitely expands our understanding of “space” as a platform for communication and sociocultural interactivity. We look closely at the site, critically rethink the programme and try to extract something that is special to the specific site. In case of Danfoss Universe for example the ground and outdoor quality was guiding the design process for the buildings as ground modulations. We believe that architecture should work as an activator to move people from a passive mode of expectation to an involved level of participation and attention.

3. The project that introduced me to your work was Cumulus for Danfoss Universe. I am struck by how accurately your statement that it "communicates between ground and sky" describes the project and outlasts the blink of an eye. How did you conceive of the form and most importantly how were you able to realize it? Does it constitute the beginnings of your recent book Arium?

JMH: Danfoss Universe is a science park dedicated to opening eyes and raising curiosity to explore the world. With our buildings, architecture becomes a major component in the educational and pedagogical landscape of Danfoss Universe. The height of the church tower nearby is the marker for the height of all buildings in the city of Nordborg. First this seemed to be a challenge for the multi-purpose temporary exhibition space building. Surprisingly the church immediately supported the project and its educational agenda for bringing mostly young people closer to technology and science. The integration of landscape, nature and technology at Danfoss Universe is a perfect mix to think architecture as one component of a larger environment. Arium is a guidebook to Weather and Architecture. Examining the relationship between the atmosphere, built environment, culture, and politics, this comprehensive research project. The book offers an in-depth look at our contemporary understanding of weather through critical examinations of design and architecture.

4. Receiving feedback on a project is about creating connections between creators and end-users. As a site of cultural production, what kind of feedback can architecture elicit at the scale of the city and the individual? What are some of your firm's projects that are important in relation to this question?

JMH: Architecture should work as an activator to move people from a passive mode of expectation to an involed level of participation and attention. It is my assumption that unconsciously we might built sculptural objects as buildings by challenging ourselves to invent new details in order to avoid details. For example, the project dupli.casa has a white coating. The whiteness envelopes the entire building and even extends in to the garden. From further away it all looks the same thing. However, when you get closer you might see changes in the materials depending on the specific requirements from stucco and polyurethan to rubber, etc. What looks easy and clear, is actually a very precise mix of various construction modes and material selection.

5. In Grey Grid you translate an object into an idea for a building. What is the most challenging aspect of this transition from a design perspective and from a logistical point of view?

JMH_ Formerly decorated with stucco ornament, this existant apartment building is transformed into 4 multistory townhouse units with a new roof top, and covered with a contemporary pattern. The grey color of the East German paint on the old building is transformed into pattern grids by multiple photoshop raster filter modulations. Facades, roof and courtyard show the same pattern in different materiality according to programmatic needs. Grey.grid overlays the regular window grid with an electronically generated relief.

6. This interview is about bridging between architecture as pure formal expression and architecture as an interactive environment, between architecture as icon and architecture as a sensory experience. Who are some important or interesting artists working at this intersection for you?

JMH: Architecture is a catalyst which is not a background to an everyday life, but something that provokes you to rethink spatial conditions. I always ask myself – how do we live? How do we occupy our spaces? I am looking for architecture that would foresee changes or even better – allow inventive social changes to take place. For that reason I really admire the work of Frederick Kiesler: "His unorthodox architectural drawings and plans that he called "polydimensional" were somewhat akin to Surrealist automatic drawings. (..) For it, he sought to dissolve the visual, real, image, and environment into a free-flowing space. He likewise pursued this approach with his “Endless House,” exhibited in maquette form in 1958–59 at The Museum of Modern Art." (Quotation: Wikipedia)

Vian Borchert

2011-02-26T15:26:00.000-08:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?

I would like my artwork to be displayed in metropolitan city galleries such NYC, LA, Berlin, Paris and other major cities, and in places like the Whitney Biennial, The Venice Biennale - Galleries such as the Allan Stone Gallery in NY and Gagosian Gallery to name a few. (This actually is my dream to show in such places).

Art can make your senses wake up. Art can do many things. It is used as a medium of communication to convey a message - be it to shock, beautify or touch us visually. Also, art can serve as a form of therapy for the maker of art, the artist.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you like them to know about your work?

I would like my viewer / audience / fans / public to appreciate and like what they see when they view my art. I like them to have a visual and an intellectual dialogue with my artwork. Also, I would like them to be visually pleased with this visual interaction.

For the second part of the question, I wouldn't like the viewer to know much or have any preconceived ideas about my artwork since I believe that artwork and in this case my artwork should speak on its own rather than me standing next to it and explaining it to the passers by or other form of explanation.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?

I like Marcel Duchamp because he was a creative thinker, and he always had a driven hunger for discovering interesting ideas and subject matters such as "ready-made art," like his Bicycle Wheel. For his time, he was a pioneer in innovation inspired art. And, yes. I agree with his statement above: there is more than meets the eye in "thinking outside of the box" art; there is a lot of thought, imagination and creativity that goes into Duchamp-ian kind of art.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's pluralistic climate?
Yes, as long as there are thinkers, there will be art movements. I actually think of myself or my philosophies on art, my views and making art as my own school of thought.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please feel free to answer it.
Most of the time, I try with my answers to cover the main picture that my art illustrates or conveys. Thus, in this regard, I can't think of a particular question that I would have liked to be asked.

Current Shows:

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 17, 7–9PM
Celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Annual Strathmore Artist Juried Exhibition.
February 26, 2011 - April 2, 2011
THE MANSION AT STRATHMORE
Free and Open to the Public
For more information call (301) 581-5125
The Mansion at Strathmore
10701 Rockville Pike
North Bethesda, MD 20852-3324

Title: "Vian Shamounki Borchert's Expressionist Journey of Multi Media"
Artwork is on display at the City of Gaithersburg's Kentlands Mansion Gallery (2nd Floor) from January 27, 2011 until March 27, 2011.
The Kentlands Mansion is located at:
320 Kent Square Road in Gaithersburg, Maryland 20878
Gallery hours: Monday - Friday from 9AM - 4PM
For a viewing appointment please call: 301-258-6394 or 301-258-6425

Lou Gagnon

2010-11-27T18:35:00.000-08:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
Rather than pursue ideal situations, I prefer to stay open to opportunities to connect with others. I have had the good fortune to see my work hanging in a wide variety of settings. including alongside my heroes, and found value in each.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Both of the above and more. Art can engage us in shared experiences that cannot be explained or located. It is at it’s best when it resonates and moves us.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
Nothing, it’s my job to communicate. People typically have a visceral response to my work (positive or negative) and “knowing” or “meaning” does not change that reaction. This is important to me because it's a chance to see their honest response and it helps me evaluate how the thing is working.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
We can excuse Mr. Duchamp for his ignorance regarding our contemporary understanding of the operation of our visual cortex. That he may prefer to tickle his pre-frontal cortex over his visual cortex is up to him and should not be used as a tool to isolate and or define art. His is more a political statement about exclusivity (still a powerful strategy) than an aesthetic statement.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
We have always lived in a pluralistic climate it is just that until recently it’s been isolated by geography creating the illusion of homogenous culture. Movements are a construct of art history and are best established with some distance. Artificial constructs will be seen in time for what they are, inauthentic.

That said, it would be fun to see a movement in art that parallels the locally grown, whole food movement. It seems we suffer from too many processed art products, impregnated with artificial nutrients and stabilizers vying for novelty and an extended shelf life. Enough with Twinkies!

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
Where can we see it? Red Dot Miami booth 108B. Touchstone Gallery in DC and you are always welcome to visit my studio or website for my exhibition calendar.
Why do you sell it? A large percentage of the direct sales from my studio and adult workshops subsidizes private art instruction for young people.

Betsy Medvedovsky

2010-11-07T18:21:00.000-08:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I want for my work to be handled and interacted with. I want people to play with the things I make, to finger the magazines I put out, to want to own them as objects. Posters are fun too, in that they make people stop and gape, which I always like; sometimes in design communities they even get stolen, which is the biggest compliment.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
If I use "art" specifically, to mean, art like in museums: I will be frank and say, I'm not sure, which is probably why I'm not an artist. At its standard best, art makes me laugh; in the extreme rare case, I am moved by it, but for whatever reason, I can't express, that's extremely rare. I guess I think art lets us express some sort of
general mood in a way not confined by language. I find language tough. It's fun to talk, but ultimately I don't think it gets at the gist of the things I'm saying. Which is probably why I gesticulate so so much when impassioned.

If I use art broadly to mean any sort of creative work, i.e. for me, design, I'd probably still stay with that idea: design lets us express ideas in ways that are not confined by language. So, there is an idea, but how can it be expressed not in a paragraph, but in a magazine, a website, an object, an experience? The great designers of Experimental Jetset say that they "turn ideas into objects." I cannot get away from that definition, really. Perhaps this can be extended to say that traditional, non-designed art turns moods or sensations into objects.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
Honestly, I don't want to expect anything from them. I know in my experience that a certain kind of viewer likes my things better--people who are more educated, perhaps, or more bored with straightforwardness and like a certain sort of decoding work. But for me: the brunt is on me, whether in art or design, to communicate. The greats--they made amazing work that communicated with people no matter the baggage they brought to the table. The form was that great, that engaging, that the content shone through.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
That I must run to the dictionary!

But actually, I probably agree with him. More and more the sort of art I enjoy is experiential. I go to museums not so much to see the paintings or objects on display but really for the experience of being in a designed, (more or less) non-commercial environment. I almost always don't like anything in museums--but I still go, because I enjoy that theatricality. (And it's nice to know what one is talking about before launching into an anti-art screed.) Dance and performance art installation art are probably my favorites right now, because they are inherently are temporal, give you that experience, that theatricality. I love theatricality of any sort, no matter how created. But also, why I love temporal arts: _That's_ when you know something is sincere: when it is beautiful and then gone.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
There's always room. One makes room. Or I don't know enough art history to weigh in.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
What are the inspirations of your life?

Lame question, huh? I used to think so, but I've gotten really into this stuff during a couple of problematic projects and the general increasing realization that I'm my own worst stumbling block.

Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit talks about creativity as work in a concrete way and yet is quite soulful about it. I really do go back to this book quite frequently. Natalia Ilyin's Chasing the Perfect makes an argument against modernism that one may or may not be interested in (hint: I am) but interweaves art on a personal and a historical level quite effectively, coming to the conclusion that one should do design out of love, not out of fear. Nothing groundbreaking, I guess, but it's a point I try to come back to, and she makes the case quite poignantly.

Clement Valla

2010-10-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

"Mechanical Turk is also twisted," said Clement Valla, who uses the interface to engage people creatively. He has written a software program that enables Mechanical Turk workers to create collaborative paintings made of up 1600 discreet one-square-inch pieces. He titles these works Seed Drawings because they emanate from a single tile that multiplies iteratively. Users are asked to copy the tile that is next to their own assigned blank tile, but because each new copy is essentially made by hand or an inexact process, each newly-filled tile ends up looking slightly different than the previous one. Sometimes a user decides not to follow the instructions, and whole new patterns evolve in the paintings.

Mechanical Turk is an Amazon.com platform for employing human users to perform tasks that a computer is unable to carry out. In an interview with Artists Speak, Valla explained the origin of the name. An 18th century contraption, the Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing automaton that appeared to be a robot. A reputed chess-champion, capable of beating most human opponents, the Mechanical Turk was actually a human disguised as a robot. Behind every automaton lies a human hand.

Before developing the software that would spawn his Seed Drawings, Valla elicited the help of distant human artists for his Master's thesis at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studies and teaches in the Digital + Media MFA program. Encouraged to work in an unfamiliar medium for an assignment in a theory class, Valla took on the challenge by ordering custom paintings from Chinese artist villages. What started out as an experiment would transform into an entire body of work for his thesis.

Fully embracing the digital paradigm of instruction-based art, Valla asked the Chinese painters, who all had Western names, to paint the view outside their window. Unlike most of the orders they received from other clients who asked for copies of famous Western paintings, like Monets and Van Goghs, Clement's instructions sought to humanize the process of ordering copies from a production studio accustomed to mass customization in an outsourcing economy. For the 2009 Wassaic Project arts festival, Clement ordered an oil painting that combined three different contexts and eras from the Wushipu Chinese Painting Village in Xiamen, China. Set against a background sky of a painting by the Hudson School painter Frederick Church and a Google Earth relief of Wassaic, NY is a building in Xiamen. The building just happens to evoke the stature of the Wassaic Mill, which is where the arts festival is held each year.

Drawing from the minimalism of Sol LeWitt and Mel Bochner, Clement Valla explores the structural potentials of form-making. His work examines repetition in a digital medium within the confines of a pre-existing system. When ordering paintings online from China, in order to communicate with artists, Valla subjected each image that was produced to a digital critique. He would send instructions to his overseas workshop by email, and with each exchange, a copy of a copy would insert itself into the internet-based feedback loop and ultimately make its way into the final object. The difference between the Wushipu paintings and the Seed drawings is that the former participate in an additive process where each new layer masks what was there before, whereas the latter record and divulge each additive transformation in horizontal and radial format. Nonetheless, for his thesis show, Valla had ordered copies of copies of copies of copies of paintings from artists working in China, and structurally, his commissioned, instruction-based collection looked a lot like the more abstracted and minimal Seed drawings that were to follow.

Digital production and hand-made craft combine nicely in Clement Valla's work, whether he is crowdsourcing the production of his Seed drawings or outsourcing his MFA thesis. The results are beautiful and document a modern-day palimpsest of working class creative output through a critical-productive framework.

Read Clement Valla's Master's thesis Original Copies:
http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_65/7166000/7166262/2/print/thesis.pdf

MoMA - PS1: Debo Eilers

2010-10-18T17:10:00.000-07:00

Debo Eilers Live at PS1

It's amazing how much you learn from talking to an artist. At PS1 I spoke with Debo Eilers about his sculpture work, which he recasts as recycled prop until someone decides to purchase it. From rebuilding Kanye West's sunglasses after a performance in which they were being handed out to children in Union Square in Manhattan, to hiring a 13-year-old to go shopping on Canal St. and then perform alongside him at a PS1 performance involving his work, Debo creatively reuses his pieces and reanimates them in various contexts. The canvas-size palette, on which he mixes his oils and resins, doubles as a wall hanging and a picture frame showcasing a photograph from the performance Secret Faggot, which was performed by a band of his friends.

In speaking to Debo, it is easy to see how malleable the vision of the artist can be. He nods and listens carefully and responds with new details related to the migratory nature of his work. On August 8th, during the well-attended PS1 performance, all the pieces he had set up in the space he shared with Tamar Halpern were moved or altered. The stage he had built for Secret Faggot was split into its constituent pieces and turned upside down. The broken mirror floor covering from his studio, which he had transposed onto the floor of the exhibit space, was stacked against a wall in pieces, and three of his mixed-media paintings had new plastic figurines of animals and fish stuck to them. The 13-year-old had made all the changes: she was empowered to alter the artist's vision as part of the performance.

Debo's work bears references to the aesthetic of Richard Hamilton, Cy Twombly and Gerhard Richter. He questions power dynamics in constructed interior environments, works with sculptural cutouts that are relatively two-dimensional and superimposes photography on painted cast plastic.

MoMA - PS1: Franklin Evans

2010-10-10T09:23:00.000-07:00

After reveling in watching a few others being playful, including a young girl and a group of 20-somethings running around in a frenzy, bouncing yoga balls, I clambered up the PS1 front steps and into the museum entrance. Feeling inspired, I asked the desk attendant if PS1 accepts proposals - still continuing to hope that she did not smile and shake her head no - as I bought a ticket and disappeared into the hallways of the former public school building. The first room I stumbled into absolutely floored me. Trust me, this is not a bad pun. The artist, Franklin Evans had covered floor, ceiling and walls in a labyrinthine pattern of tape, notebook paper and thread.

Franklin Evans

I could not help but take my shoes off when I walked into Franklin Evans's painting. It was like walking into someone's memory unraveling itself in still time. A chromatic masterpiece of tape, printouts and notebook paper, Evans's walk-in painting evokes a deconstructionist palimpsest space with the celebratory pomp of Constructivism. While easily conducive to hours of scrutinizing his writing, his small, pixel-based watercolors, which read like mini-landscapes on ruled notebook paper, and old printouts of critical reviews of his work, the work as a whole presents a formidable trompe l'oeil. Strips of color dance around the PS1 room his 3D painting inhabits: they take over the parquet floors, the white walls and even the ceiling, slicing their way through recursively. Some hang precariously, ready to snap off their axis and curl up on the floor. I wanted to use it as meditation space, but I am not sure if that is what the artist had in mind.

Artists Speak interviewed Evans about his work:

AS: You are primarily a painter. What made you create an environment you can walk into?

FE: Paint is one of the primary materials I am working with and with Painting historically. The walk-in aspect is linked both to an installation space composed of a traditionally flat medium and to the interior painting space that exists in what I perceive as a multi-dimensional brain. I hope the installation reads as thinking painting that exists as object, dissolution of object and peripheral information (history, criticality, process, failures) that are part of making things.

AS: Work/Play/Space - where did this exhibition name come from and how does it relate to your work? I know that space is an important concept for you.

FE: Workplayspace is akin to timecompressionmachine whereby dissimilar elements are contextualized by one another, equal and unequal parts the seriousness of work, the free-for-all of play and the multidimensional of space (implying a non-linear time), space that is both literally and informed by past and future space.

AS: Are Marc Chagall and Frank Stella two of your influences? How have they influenced your work?

FE: Chagall not at all. Although I recently saw an amazing Chagall in Prague. Stella, quite a lot. In particular, Stella predetermined way of working in the Black Paintings and in his cosmologic spiraling forms of recent wall reliefs.

AS: In reference to freakout, the Jeff Bailey gallery press release describes your paintings as both "celebratory and psychedelic." What kind of planning goes into achieving these effects? What struck me about your PS1 walk-in environment was the simultaneous unity and chaos of the piece. It seemed to be in process. I almost wanted to pick up the threads on the ground and start adding to it myself. At the same time, there was a logic I did not want to disrupt.

FE: I appreciate that you did not physically disrupt the allusion to my working process. It is almost enough that you wanted to think about it and possibly take away from it to your own practice. The planning in my current work is quite active now. In “freakout” days, I was process oriented but only in the allowance for chance elements to watercolor on paper. Now I have many processes that I juxtapose in the hope that cross-contamination will lead to new processes (painted tape on wall grounds infecting the reframing of foundational viewing of art exhibitions, etc.) It is definitely not a free-for-all. For example, my floor piece composed of all the press releases from exhibitions I saw last year (extracted of the image) wore during the summer at PS1, particularly during the busy Saturday WarmUp Sessions. I was away all of August and upon my return, much of the paper had torn and scattered through the installation. It was exciting initially to see the change, but after a few minutes I read a chaos that didn’t connect to my intent. Thus I decided to reorder the torn piece back into the initial path but under a protective layer of bubblewrap. The path return to its initial form and the entropic process was highlighted.

AS: What kinds of collaborations have you participated in the past and what kinds of collaborations do you seek?

FE: I have collaborated performatively with writers and choreographers, both in visual design and in content of the performance. I have also collaborated as a curator with others. I look for collaborations that involve ideas that I cannot develop in my isolated practice. And I hope to stretch the boundaries of my practice through these collaborations.

AS: Tell me more about how you collected material for the PS1 exhibit.

FE: “Timecompressionmachine” came out of the work I started to develop in fall 2008 at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program in DUMBO. I wanted to use the entire studio as a working laboratory of space, idea, material, architecture. It was a place as much for isolated reading as it was for exploring materials. I documented this activity daily with still images for 12 discrete points in which the life of the studio would begin and end because of the know duration of the program (1 year). Much was open in what I could explore, but it was clear that the studio would only have a 1 year life. I described the year that in reference to Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” a coming to terms with the end of a life. I called it “Component System Sub-System: A Year of Magical Thinking.” Component was objects like watercolors, wall marks, brushstrokes, books, diaristic notes. They were arranged into sub-systems, usually wall or extensions from the wall – “turningtime” “treetarget” “friedrichspastfromthefuture”. And these became the overall system. This passed onto my solo show in Sep 2009 titled “2008/2009 < 2009/2010” the past always being less than the present (given the assumption of the lens of subjectivity as filter to anything that has occurred in linear measurement of time). I re-presented some of the elements from “CSSS: A Year of Magical Thinking” but had new architectural consideration in the gallery space and I was addressing more directly ideas of time and duration rather than time and closure. All this was brought forward to MoMA PS1 where I literally had to compress my working process of nearly 1 year into something that would be built in 3 or 4 weeks. Moreover, I was compressing one and half years into something that would be show for 5 months. My hope is that the piece is transporting on multiple levels (literal, fantastical, historic).

MoMA - PS1: SO-IL

2010-10-03T22:24:00.000-07:00

This time I walked to PS1. On a scorching New York summer day, I ventured out of my sister's Manhattan apartment on 20th St. and 1st Ave. and made my way north toward the Queensborough Bridge. I was going to see the annual courtyard installation before it closed on September 6th. My friend Ted Baab had helped design it while working for the architecture firm SO-IL, Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu. Before getting on the bridge, I stepped into The Orchard House Cafe, where the owner raised an eyebrow when I asked if he had iced coffee. It turned out to be an excellent choice, including the complimentary soy milk on a self-serve counter. Sadly, I finished my drink before I had crossed into Queens and suffered the remainder of the walk through the scorching heat, alongside bikers pedaling their way up the bridge ramp, and later on, other pedestrians crossing over sweltering tarmac, under softly screeching rail lines in Long Island City. It was a Monday, and I was thrilled that PS1 was open.

As I turned the corner into the courtyard on the right, I realized that I was walking on sand. Medium-sized green and purple yoga balls, rolling on a barely visible supporting net, hovered above me. For a moment, I thought I could hear the sound of reeds whistling in the breeze. Turning around, I read the explanation on the 20-foot high concrete wall that enclosed the urban courtyard-cum-urban beach. Vertical poles laid out in a grid and anchoring the overarching net generated sound. The sign encouraged me to try shaking one of them, so I did. A loud, windswept sound took flight, disappearing into the blue sky above the net. I made for the hammock in a corner and starting swinging back and forth on it, waiting for the movement to vibrate across the net/sound system. To call it an installation would not be doing it justice. The courtyard at PS1 had been transformed into an immersive environment with remnants of a bar in the corner opposite the hammock: PS1 hosts "Warm Up" Saturday parties during July and August each year with a lineup of bands.

I proceeded into the bigger courtyard, which leads to the museum entrance. In the center was a large bathtub filled with yoga balls. (At this point I had already begun to think of them as beach balls.) The net above this gravel-filled courtyard waned onto the bathtub, meeting it along its perimeter, but with two openings for ball retrieval. I decided to be playful and took a ball from the pool and threw it up onto the net through one of the openings. It rolled back in my direction and into the water with a glide. It took a few tries to get it to roll away over the hills and valleys formed by the net canopy. In select locations, tubes ran through the net and sprinkled water at their endpoints. Just the idea for such a hot day! I am sure the Warm Up partiers felt the same way.

SO-IL: Ted Baab

"The life of the structure is always changing based on its context. The proposal sought to accommodate both the Warm Up parties with 3000 attendees and daily museum goers," noted Ted Baab, a member of the SO-IL Pole Dance design team.

In an interview with Artists Speak, Baab recounted some of SO-IL's guiding concepts and the Brooklyn-based firm's local vision for the design. "You can only go to Zaha Hadid's Guggenheim if you fly to Abu Dhabi. The grid of poles references a modernist grid re-imagined in a populist way," he reported. According to Baab, the foam squiggly benches pictured above are a direct reference to Archizoom's reinterpretation of the modernist grid. The 1960s group constructed a node-based endless grid and imagined organic ways to occupy it.

"Florian started with the idea that it could be an unstable structure," Baab refers to Florian Idenburg, Principal-In-Charge of the SO-IL proposal. The goals of the project were to make something un-monumental, without an inside or outside, un-object-like and not stationary. "What is left over is totally defined by time, place and audience. The project creates a circumstance out of everyday things."

Under the constraints of the requisite $85,000 budget, SO-IL was able to mount the grid of fiberglass poles and wire them into the ground with sound filters attached to control the characteristics of the sound produced. The Arup Acoustics- designed sound room, which looks like a ticket booth at the entrance of the exhibit, automatically computes all the signals that the accelerometers attached to the base of each pole detect with changes in the speed and direction of movement. Constructed with off-the-shelf components, the installation is easily dismantled and recyclable.

Lauren Kotkin

2010-10-01T09:13:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I've always liked small, cozy spaces. So an ideal gallery space for my artwork would feel like a home -- an architecturally interesting and intimate place. And since my work is small, just 8x10 unframed, in an
intimate space each piece would have a chance to settle in, like getting comfortable on a couch, and not get lost on otherwise expansive walls.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art eliminates the need for words. It shares emotion and is provocative in an image. As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. For me, it's a way to express emotions without having to find the right word to explain what the feeling. It can turn negative emotions into an image of beauty.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I'd like viewers to know more about my paper and current process since the back story adds a complexity to my work. In 2006 I took photographs of the sidewalks in Prague: mosaic tiled sidewalks, not slabs of cement. Later, I became interested in who or what was "falling through the cracks" and remembered the sidewalks; I created my own paper with the sidewalk photographs. From that, I cut small pieces of roughly the same size though different shapes. The pieces get mounted on colored pastel paper and rearranged into an abstract design based on a visual representation of emotional metaphors. So, I create mosaic images from mosaic images--after first separating them. It's a bit meta.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
I say keep retinal art; it is here to stay. Art cannot be completely divorced from the visual. Entry point models validate varying ways to experience art. One can see a circle as a circle, or as pain or joy. If the former experiences the work as a simple circle--it's what is seen--who are we to say that what s/he sees or experiences isn't valid?

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Hasn't art always been pluralistic? There must be forms of expression which did not evolve into movements though human expression is as diverse as humankind. As an arts educator, I highly value creative expression. If we allow as much room as possible for creative expression, movements will be born or not born -- but the bottom line is people are making art of some form.

Edvard Munch at the National Gallery of Art

2010-09-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

In an intimate setting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, 59 of Edvard Munch's prints are displayed from now until October 31, 2010. Sometimes referred to as a Synthetist, a Symbolist, sometimes more broadly as a Post-Impressionist, and most often as a progenitor of Expressionism, the Norwegian artist is often identified through the expression of intense human emotion in his work. The Master Prints exhibition reveals a methodical streak in Munch's thematic unity of expression and does not overwhelm with the inclusion of his entire ouvre. Instead, it focuses on five discreet themes that the curators, Andrew Robinson and Elizabeth Prelinger have identified in the grouping they have assembled from three separate collections - the National Gallery's own collection of Munch prints, the Epstein family's collection, and the Blitz/Woodard collection in New York.

The intimacy that the small rooms, painted a deep navy blue, afford in the East Wing of the National Gallery is unprecedented. A close up view of the profile portrayal of his sister Sophie in The Sick Child shows the softness of linework that Munch achieves through lithography. With four renditions of the same image side by side, the power of repetition evinces a delicate regard for the subject, which Munch renders in cherry, red and yellow tones. The image appears scribbled with crayons, as if a small child had made it, but the boldness of composition is that of a seasoned artist.

It is impossible to make it through the exhibit without noticing compositional similarities in Munch's work. He centers the subject on the plate, the woodblock, or the stone - depending on the printmaking technique he is using - and prints a usually flattened composition that emphasizes color and bold strokes over depth. One of his last works, Kiss in the Field of 1943, is composed very similarly to Toward the Forest of 1897 with the figures set as outlines against an atmospheric background. Two Women on the Shore of 1898 also depicts two central figures, but in this case, the background is fragmented around the central subject, and Munch experiments with various intensities of color and texture to evoke the lone silhouettes of a young woman on the shore with death at her side.

The exhibit focuses on his technique and the variations Munch explores, rather than the biographical details that might have influenced his work. Two sets of dates accompany each print noting the creation of the printing matrix against the actual printing date, which usually came much later. Textual explanations throughout the exhibit refer to Munch's use of intaglio, woodblock or lithographic process, his habit of breaking a woodblock into pieces and then adjoining them to make a print, which in one instance of Two Women on the Shore, embosses the paper and defines disparate zones of color and depth that almost detach themselves from a compositional unity.

One of the first prints in the exhibit, a lithograph of Evening on Karl Johan Street of 1895, depicts a flattened street view with several ghoulish figures staring out of the composition and creates an instantaneous visual connection to Munch's Anxiety series, on which his most famous work, The Scream, is based. Themes that reappear in Munch's work include the tension between piety and sexuality, the myth of the fall, love, death and loneliness. A curious paradox that persists in Munch's work and that of the Expressionists is that the urgency of depicting an inner world through expressive linework and color participates in a self-conscious and self-questioning cultural context, which constructed itself as a measured reaction to the scientism of the Impressionists.

Melissa Lauren

2010-09-22T17:09:00.000-07:00

If you have seen the Arcimboldo exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, you will like Melissa Lauren's latest work. I visited her in her North Potomac studio, where large finished and in-progress oil paintings lean against walls and furniture. Her latest commission is a large bluish-green crab against a sandy background painted meticulously with daubs of white and burnt sienna. After discussing a career as a muralist and illustrator, educated at Parsons, Melissa placed three of her signature pieces next to one another. These unlikely portrait-landscapes are difficult to pin down. They are part of a series called Fantasy Faces and combine elements of landscape, portraiture, animals, fruit and objects framed against an easily identifiable and familiar background. The paintings are suitable for a plethora of contexts, and Face of the Bible is located in the Ratner Museum in Bethesda, Maryland. In this series, Melissa explores the boundary between traditional figurative painting and Surrealist techniques of distortion and uncanny superimposition. The artist describes these works as timeless and eternal - without a need for historical specificity. She is interested in their symbolic value and their potential as narrative devices.

The uncanny narrative in her work is not lost in some of her more traditional realist paintings. Whether she is painting crabs, canoers, children playing golf, window shutters or children watching television, Melissa composes her works with the viewer in mind. She wants her audience to be entertained and also to ask questions. Why is the crab off-center? What are elephants doing on a TV screen? Why do you paint evergreens in the fall? In Sunday Afternoon Football, two children are laying on their stomachs, and their bodies are foreshortened toward a TV screen. Their iridescent skin tones are reminiscent of Norman Rockwell's lanky figures. The painter's scrutinizing eye, with an almost unwholesome predilection for details, is evident in the treatment of the striped rug, the hardwood floor underneath, the neo-classical mantle and the children's feet.

Fall Pines is another of Melissa Lauren's paintings that arrest the gaze and tickle the intellect. Instead of painting golden fall leaves, she sets two rusting ornate garden chairs against a delicately-handled moire of evergreens. As usual, the composition does not center a subject but weaves an unsettling context. Three orange pumpkins figure prominently in the painting, but it is hard not to look beyond them at the pines and the low horizon line. The passage of time or a gust of wind could easily alter this precariously designed moment that is filmic in its off-center deadpan crop. Who designed this stage? Well, I can tell you the artist photographed it herself and then worked from the photograph to complete the painting.

Whether new or old, there is always a story behind Melissa's paintings. Her skill as a former muralist and illustrator, her sense of humor and her quick imagination are all there for our enjoyment. We just have to open our eyes and look and question. Voila!

Preeti Gujral

2010-09-20T06:26:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I'd like my work to be displayed in a small gallery with excellent natural light. Someone who is passionate about the genre of art that h/she shows would run my ideal gallery.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Just as expository writing informs, and geometry help to position in space, art makes us feel. Art draws the mind and soul of the viewer away from the surroundings and into itself. For the moment of viewing, the viewer becomes part of the piece. Art helps the viewer to momentarily transcend his surroundings.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I would like the audience to be aware of the multicultural aspect of my work. My work comes from the confluence of east and west and is about retaining what uplifts and letting go of what shackles, whether physically or emotionally.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
I agree that art should appeal to the mind and not just to the eye. In addition, I think that it needs to touch the viewer on a very visceral level. I feel that if it doesn't make you feel or think, it is not a true piece of art.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
I think that there is. There are many small niches within the art world, eg, street art, fantasy art, and culture- specific art.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
How does my art make me feel when I am creating it? It absorbs and fulfills me at the same time. Physical time stands still for me when I am creating art.

D-Torren

2010-09-18T13:36:00.000-07:00

Someone once told me that octopuses blush. I granted my friend the conceit without bothering to check up on it at the time. As it turns out, they do, and so does D-Tower in Doetinchem, The Netherlands.

The tower is a collaboration between artist Q.S. Serafijn and NOX architects.

Serafijn manages a website, which collects answers to a variety of questions on mood from volunteer participants in Doetinchem. NOX designed the structure, which is made up of milled styrofoam panels coated in epoxy. LED lights illuminate the tower, reflecting the prevailing mood of the survey takers by changing color each day. The colors green, red, blue and yellow correspond to four emotions: hate, love, happiness and fear.

A brilliant amalgamation of emotion and networked identity, the tower's static architecture contorts, contracts, droops and flexes as if compelled by an organic pulse.

The city of Doetinchem commissioned the 250,000 Euro project in 1998, and the structure came alive in 2005.

Here is a link to the project website: http://www.d-toren.nl/site/index.htm

Ai-Wen Wu Kratz

2010-09-16T19:15:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
As a professional artist, I would like to have my work exhibited in museums and respectable galleries.

My basic desire is to have them viewed in a large, uncluttered space. My large works need to be viewed at a distance. To fulfill my role as a visual artist in relation to society, I am most happy to exhibit my works in a public space, so as to bring art to the life of others. I think the arrogant attitude of Clyfford Still is wrong. Like elected government officials, artists should have servitude at heart. Still regarded his own works as being holy. He proclaimed that all those who wish to view his works ought to travel (so as to receive the blessing of seeing HIS art!) Art is in the field of humanity. How could Clyfford Still fulfill such a serious mission?

In group exhibitions, I want to see my work among the good company of strong works.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
The apparatus in art is the power to evoke and to connect; to speak without words; to reach without extending our hands. The hidden yearning, the basic goodness, the silent murmur in everyone's heart comes across in art. (Perhaps, an additional social dimension would be to reach out to social outcasts - so sad and sorrowful).

Imagine driving along a highway with a median planted with flowers versus one with a plain solid
concrete bank. With the hope of lowering the crime rate, Lady Bird Johnson initiated the wild
flower project along the highway and parks. In a way, this is the contribution of art to society.

Visual art, like its sister arts, holds the magic to heal and to respond to spiritual needs.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I hope the viewer is able to recognize that I have a poetic and fluidity in my gestures. Aesthetic could be a "bad" word in our time, but those who respond to my work are most likely drawn by the aesthetic direction that my works project. In addition, my creativity might intrigue them.

I would like to share that my works come from the purity of my heart, and from the much-treasured memories that sustain an internal fire that it will never die from obstacles.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
"Enough with retinal art!" could be an exclamation of Duchamp's personal dismay at what he saw around him.

Retinal art cannot and will never be cleanly wiped out from our society. Some, in fact, the majority, will always keep the tradition of retinal art alive. Blessed are those who find it a pure joy! Other artists follow suit because they do not know any better: they are not versed in art history, or do not have a sense of duty as a practitioner in relation to the passage of time, or have no interest in intellectualism .

How can one escape "retinal art" when one eats from a plate and sit on a chair everyday. Art and its applications are all around us, from a pair of shoes to a pitcher that pours out juice. "I don't know art, but I know what I like." Unknowingly, this frequently-heard proclamation is an acknowledgment and validation of "retinal art."

I admire Marcel Duchamp and am grateful that history is dotted with intelligent minds like Duchamp's and
Joseph Beuys's. The majority of common practitioners in the art will sleep through the centuries.

"Enough with 'retinal art'!" could reflect a decision of Duchamp's not to go the route of "retinal art", but rather to delineate a new direction with serious thinking, thereby, enacting a different attitude he dared espouse.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
There is room for art movements at any juncture in the history of art. Yes - even in the pluralism of our time.
Great thinkers give birth to movements. Each movement needs an unselfish thinker who has a pure interest in
intellectual exchanges. An unselfish thinker is someone who is dedicated to intellectualism and not personal glorification.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
Where will you be going from here?

Recently, I told a fellow-artist that in our studios, we need to keep "pushing." I meant we should not to give up or worry, but keep working. Here is a story; perhaps it is my version of an original. An old thrifty man prayed his heart out: "Lord, let me be the one who win the l o t t e r y this time! Just once, please!"
His earnestness evoked a voice from above: "You need to spend the money to buy one ticket, at least!"

The same is true for me: if I do not invest the time to do my studio work, I will never find my way.
My way is to attain what I want to see in my works when they are up on the wall. So far, mine are still in
the arena of "retinal art." I hope to develop as an artist through continuous working and thinking.

Dialectical Themes of the Artist: Robert Storr's Gerhard Richter

2010-09-14T12:51:00.000-07:00

Uncle Rudi by Gerhard Richter

In his introduction to Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting, a book of text and plates based on the 2000 MoMA exhibition by the same name, Robert Storr, Senior Curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, points out how Richter was more articulate about his own work than any of his critics or admirers. Richter is an interesting painter because he was working after World War II in Germany and painting both in the Abstract Expressionist vein and in a Photorealist vein. His work is infamously difficult to categorize and often stems from a photographic process. Richter paints everything, from buildings to people, with the same attention to detail and then adds a layer of mechanical blurring to the image. In his introduction Storr notes Richter's own assertions about the themes that appear in his work:

"faith versus skepticism; hope versus pessimism; engagement versus neutrality; self-determination versus fatalism; imaginative freedom versus ideology" (17).

He also notes the observed empirical dichotomies that help illustrate these arguably socio-historic themes:

"impersonal iconography versus delicacy of facture; veiled intimacy versus formality of expression; chromatic austerity versus rich tactility; optical splendor versus physical remoteness; gestural exuberance versus strict self-censorship; resistance to easy pleasure versus exquisite hedonism; somberness versus playfulness; forthright assertion of image as object versus mistrust of the image as representation" (17).

If one artist's work can embody so many of the conflicts that draw people to art as a flexible medium, then does this imply that we should study Richter as a master of subject and technique and as contending with a set of difficult historical variables, which he could not represent other than through a simultaneous sensitivity to realism and an urgency for expressionism? If Richter's simple blurring techniques can straddle the boundary between Abstract Expressionism and Realism, as artists, do we consider this a merely formal gesture that participates differently in a discursive realm, or do we say that it is a discursive gesture from the start because it is impossible to separate the artist from his/her reception? When an artist decides to blur an edge, can the artist translate the intent of the gesture to the public?

More on Gerhard Richter to come.
For now here is a link to an archive of his work: http://www.gerhard-richter.com/

Krishen Khanna

2010-09-13T11:59:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I would like to show my work when I think there is something worthwhile to show, but if the work is too private, then I don't think I would like to show it at all. There is an impersonal elements in art - ie. that which is given is also capable of being shared. There is an objective element, which correlates, maybe on many levels. I have had innumerable shows here in India, in Europe and the USA, and I felt marvelous when people whom I did not know saw and understood what I had tried to say.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
I am not sure that analogies help. Art has the capacity of drawing the artist right out. One can become oblivious to the effects one's own art have, and as we call it, one might transcend oneself and strike a note quite outside of one's own limited experience. One may thus be quite surprised at what came out of the work. Discoveries can be made, even small ones, which enter the experience of art.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
There are different levels of understanding and all are valid. A spectator's understanding is conditioned by his experience, which can, of course, grow until it surpasses his experience. This applies as much to poetry and music. Therefore, the spectator is happy even if there was a glimmer of a small meeting place in the experience of the work. It is rare that there is a total comprehension.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
Duchamp, great as he is, and interesting as he is, still belongs to a category of artists and thinkers who narrow down the art experience to the detriment of seeing and experiencing the whole. He may have been questionably annoyed at the emphasis on the visual element. I would then move on to another resolute element. Today everyone is shouting for the idea as the main mover. I am sure this will wear out. Ideas are always important, but people have forgotten the many other factors, which are equally important. We can learn with discretion, but we should not confuse it with the whole experience.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Art movements are specific - generally against the values held by the previous generation. So, a belief comes to be established that the new truth is the only truth. There is nothing absolute; there is no progression in art.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
I haven't given this thought! Maybe at the very end of discussions I would want a more resilient attitude, which would even take into account that which is not so good. There is always a long way to go and why should anyone be denying of even a poor start.

Malati Shah

2010-09-10T11:52:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
Different works show well in different spaces, of course. There is not that one gallery that would always work. For my recent watercolour paintings, I would like nothing better than to show all twenty of them in a natural light-filled atrium gallery, but I don't know of any, and 'any' don't know of me. Not yet.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art does so many different things; mainly, it triggers a cerebral or emotional response from the viewer. Sometimes it wrenches the gut, sometimes it soothes a broken spirit, sometimes a work of art challenges all that has gone before and opens a window to other possible ways of expression. So, the apparatus that art affords us is this: it allows us to be in touch with our most distinct human spirit.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
If someone appreciates my work, I feel on top of the world; what else could I possibly feel? If someone wants to buy one of my paintings, I feel - good heavens - do they like it that much or is it just me they like? Oh, it must be me, I tell myself, and then I don't feel as bad as you may imagine I should. I feel - heck - there are reasons and reasons to buy art, and if liking me is one of them, so be it! Then, if they display the picture they bought in their living room or some favourite place, my heart leaps up like Wordsworth at the sight of a rainbow. On the other hand, when I see it behind the toilet seat, I beg the buyer to please hang it in front of the toilet at least. This happened to me once. And - oh - that was such a subversive move on my part. Sitting there on the toilet seat, the buyer saw the painting everyday - every day. Low and behold, now it hangs over the fireplace in her living room in the high Himalayas. Ah, my heart leaps up, it does!

Another nice thing is when someone I don't know and who doesn't know me buys one of my paintings. Then, it is as if I have communicated in a larger way, somehow.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
I feel dazed and confused reading what Marcel said. He must have been having a 'bad retinal day' or something. Excuse my ignorance - I am just making pictures here and minding my own business.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Yes, I think there are. Indeed, there seems to be a movement to expand the vocabulary and tools of art to include the many new means of expression there are nowadays - from Lascaux to Adobe. Moreover, this pluralism itself is a movement, as I see it. This doesn't mean everyone has to engage the latest trends: one just does what one has to do and is compelled to create.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
Ask me the question: What do you think of Art as a commodity?

My answer: It is a tragic loss of independent assessment that people purchase and admire art because someone else told them to. Real art embodies the spirit of freedom, and for people to love it for reasons such as investment, or 'the Jones Effect' as I call it, well, that is the very reversal of what the work set out to do, or should have set out to do. The best purchase of art is when it is bought or acquired because there was something in the way it moves you and you don't want to lose it now, don't want to lose it now, to quote the Beatle's song.
The End.

Nihal Kececi

2010-09-07T23:12:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
In an ideal situation, I would like to display my art at the professional art galleries. There are not many of them in our area.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
I have learned that a painting can create a great connection with another soul in a second without knowing anything about it. Expository writing does that as well. It is matter of interaction time. In addition, the creative processes can be supported by explicit or implicit intelligences of writer and/or painter. Paintings are a form of the creative process. I create without knowing.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I am an intuitive artist. I do not look at an object and then paint. I do not make a plan before painting. I do not know what I am painting until the painting is finished. The titles and meaning of the paintings comes after the canvas is completed. Don't ask how do I know when the canvas is completed. I do not an answer for it.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
Love it...... good art should touch viewer mind, heart and soul.... not only the eye...

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Talking about today's art movements is a challenging task for me. I do read Art Collector Magazine on a regular basis and follow up with what the leading galleries, coast to coast, tell us is hot in their gallery and with the latest trends in their city. Based on this knowledge, I would say it is possible to have art movements today.

I also like what Marcel Duchamp said: "I don't believe in art, I believe in Artist. "

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
Why do I paint?

Nihal has current shows at the National Children's Hospital, the Touchstone Art Gallery in DC, the Blueberry Art Gallery in Alexandria, and the Howe Street Art Gallery in Vancouver.

She also has several shows coming up:

Bistro Blanc...Restaurant and Wine Lounge.... Solo show /Opening in September 30.
Art on the Avenue...Alexandria... October 2
Art Market...Alexandria...........November 6
Solo show at the Touchstone Art Gallery (DC) ....January 2011
Solo show at the Blueberry Art Gallery (Alexandria/Virginia)......February 2011
DC Metropolitan Art Expo/ Gaylord National Hotel at National Harbor ... March 26 - 27, 2011

The Rape of Europa: Documentary

2010-09-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

A French Jew was drafted by the Nazis to pack French artwork into trains, which would carry the art past French national lines, from what was then occupied French territory. Among the lootings, he discovered his own decimated family's possessions. He managed to snag away some family photographs. He has been holding onto them to this day. The Rape of Europa, based on Lynn Nicholas's book by the same title, is more than an adequate title for this documentary, which vividly recounts the brutal treatment of art collections and important monuments in seven different European countries during World War II. Chronologically beginning with the occupation of Vienna, and moving through Warsaw and Krakow, then Paris, St. Petersburg, Florence, Rome, Pisa and ultimately Berlin, the documentary highlights a series of complex attitudes toward the cost of human life incurred during the protection of the art, while all the time maintaining that art and human life are interlinked and one is meaningless without the other.

The film contains disturbing footage of important European monuments in ruin, monumental and seminal artwork packed into wooden boxes, jam packed into trains, salt mines and Medieval countryside castles, and even an Allied bombing raid on the train yards in Florence, which according to the film harbors 10% of the world's art. The postwar restitution of artwork pillaged by the Nazis is another complexity the film explores. Interviews with agents involved in transporting or protecting artwork during WWII reveal a deep attachment to art as cultural and national inheritance.

Eliza Bishop

2010-09-04T21:25:00.000-07:00

Eliza Bishop documents her performative process-gifts through photography.

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
My art-meditations are a collaboration with mother earth and human beings. My creations, are not independent of their surroundings, but in fact, a revealing of the interdependence of all life. Therefore, they can be viewed anywhere and anytime.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art accomplishes itself when it is shared. The process of sharing is a tap-root to experience to the mysteries of the cycles of life on this blue planet.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I expect nothing. My art is an impermanent offering, an act of rejoicing.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
Duchamp insisted on matter as mediation, which is part of the process of art becoming what it is now - form that melts form - to be here now, experiencing this experience of eternity.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
This pluralistic climate of art is a multi-layered communication from multiple points to other points, like a flowing current, uncontainable.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
How is your art universal? It is an environmental awakening.

An artist who practices internationally, Eliza Bishop has two upcoming shows in Berlin - a performance this weekend at a festival called BELOVED and a show at Let It Bleed gallery at the end of September. She also has an upcoming show at the Miami Art Museum.

Gavin Glakas

2010-09-03T09:18:00.000-07:00

Demeter - Gavin is preparing for a museum show at the Ratner Museum in Bethesda.

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
A bartender would be slinging martinis and the Beatles would have gotten back together while my work was on display at The Louvre, Met, Great Wall, Buckingham Palace, Mount Rushmore and the Moon.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Once we get to the point where we've stopped worrying about our immediate survival, we are able to start enjoying ourselves, and art is the enjoyment of life. Once cavemen stopped worrying about saber-toothed tigers, they started drawing. Once people have enough money left over to spend on something, they start buying paintings and going to concerts. Art is fantasy and reality all rolled into one

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I can't really expect anything or ask them to know anything. The work really does have to speak for itself. I've fallen in love with songs that I've heard in airports and paintings that I've seen on calendars. I just hope that what I create grabs people - I can't really ask for it to work the other way around. People aren't going to seek it out. They're too busy.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
I would submit to Monsieur Duchamp that if all of the art in the world were for sale for $100, under the proviso that it would not go up in value, the abstract-expressionist junk would be left on the floor when the sale was over and everything else would be up on people's walls. I think that most people are tired of having to be told why they should like something or why it is "good." The moment that someone walked into an art gallery and said, "That stinks," and someone else said, "No, it's good. Let me tell you why," was the moment that visual art deviated from music, literature, cinema and whatever other forms of art, and became stigmatized as pretentious. Also, I think those who were told in graduate school that art that resembles things is worthless and have spent their careers justifying their jobs, are almost ready to retire.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Totally. Art is just someone trying to make a statement. Why could you do it in one medium and not in another?

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
Can I buy a piece? The answer is "yes."

Jesse Boardman Kauppila

2010-09-01T06:50:00.000-07:00

Jesse Kauppila has remastered Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music," so that it can be played on a record player or printed through a printing press.

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I hate to say it, but a lot of my work really benefits from the white cube environment. My work often requires precise lighting conditions and little distraction to see subtle differences in the results of the often repetitive processes I use to create my work. Also, the white cube allows the viewer to see the subtlety of precise intentions.

Occasionally, I like to create work for abnormal locations and situations (bunkers, barns, fields, fountains). This allows me to build on what is already present, to riff on it, add to it, or spring from it. It's an interesting challenge and a lot of fun, however, I consider my more sophisticated projects to be better presented in the white cube because I like to build systems from the ground up and show everything I have done. The white cube provides the opportunity to see a stand alone project.

I also like to do performances in non-standard settings. I like to do conceptual work in these settings because I am able to show people that might not otherwise be interested in conceptual art what I am doing and win them over. This sort of "missionary" work is something that is really important to me, especially when done in rural settings.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
If there were a spectrum of apparati between expository writing (used to prove a point) and geometry (used to describe objects in space), I would say that modern art tends toward expository writing. An essayist (though not a novelist) establishes his/her thesis and sets out to prove it within a given piece of writing, the artist has no such luxury. I also don't believe that art is used to describe the world in the way that geometry is (at least modern art doesn't operate in that manner). What makes art unique is that artist establishes their own criteria, which they fulfill in the creation of their work. The viewers then use their own criteria for understanding the piece. It is this gap, the question of criteria for judging, which creates much of the confusion around contemporary art. I think most art is more interesting when you have some notion of what the artist is trying to do and then you can evaluate the artist against his or her criteria and against your own criteria.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I really like to make work that is accessible, period. I like making work that is accessible to different people with different backgrounds. A lot of my work relies on my knowledge of printmaking. I like it when printmakers see my work and “get it;” they know the technique on which I am basing my work. Similarly, I like stories and like it when people know the story on which I am basing my work. I am also interested in science and math and appreciate it when people understand those aspects of my work.

I guess I like a curious audience best - an audience that is able to understand my work on its own terms.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
I like retinal art - particularly retinal art that is conceptual. If I don't find work to be visually interesting, I rarely spend time to figure out the other aspects of the work.

That being said, different people react to different inputs. I like work that is interesting to the eye, the ear, the mind, etc... If an artwork provides more than just retinal points of entry, more people can open up to the work.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
I don't think their is room for movements. The most recent sort of notion of a movement was probably "relational aesthetics," which I thought did a particularly poor job of encapsulating what that sort of work was all about. With studio movements such as surrealists, dadaists, etc... you can see a real core of people controlling what the "movement" meant from the inside (often by expelling dissidents). Perhaps this is what enabled those movements to retain their aesthetic coherency. I don't think anybody can really exert that sort of control these days. This might be due to mobility these days: artists can't really develop together for long periods of time, because people are all over the place all the time now. I've regretted that I haven't been able to continue to work, uninterrupted, with many artists I have collaborated with.

I am really interested in artists reworking and working within preexisting movements, riffing on them or whatever. I'm really interested in work like that, I find work that tries to do something new to be quite tedious often. It's the whole standing on top of giants thing. By basing your work in that of others you can go so much further.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
Recently I have been interested in the role of the gimic in my work and art in general - the role of humor; but one of the most pertinent questions for me is the role of tradition and its meaning. For a long time tradition and traditional art forms were really important to me. There seemed to be something really authentic there that I didn't find anywhere else. I wrote my thesis on tradition in contemporary Haida and Yoruba art, and my pursuit of printmaking was rooted in an interest in traditional printmaking.

That being said, the stuff that I'm interested in doing now isn't really all that traditional, but there is still a certain rigor and it is of traditional methods (perhaps its craftsmanship) that is really interesting and important to me. I try to maintain this rigor in whatever work I do, whether my work be traditional or not.

Ben Cuevas

2010-08-31T20:55:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
Ideally? At the Whitney or the Venice Biennale! I jest (sort of). I have a tendency to dream big, which is why I seek out out venues that afford artists ample space and an eager audience. As an emerging artist, having just graduated from Hampshire College this past May, I've been very lucky to exhibit at two art festivals (The Wassaic Project in NY and Smokefarm in WA), as well as in a solo show at Canal Gallery in Holyoke, MA. Canal Gallery was an ideal space for me in many ways. It is an enormous industrial warehouse with two floors of exhibition space, including a 40'x40' white box room. In general, I find the white box to be a very appealing place in which to install work for its endless possibilities and conceptual neutrality, as well as for allowing the focus to be entirely on the installation. However, I also enjoy the challenge that alternative spaces provide. Working within the architecture of any given space, or the varied terrain of the outdoors, can further enrich the concept in ways no white box can.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art expands consciousness. It transforms the mundane into the profound, challenges ingrained thought processes, and transcends preconceived notions. Art is the impetus for growth.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
All I expect from my audience is an open mind. While craftsmanship is an integral part of my practice, I'd like to remind the viewer that much lies beneath the surface of the material.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
Duchamp is right on. Art should be more than something to look at. It should incite change.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
I think art movements are happening all the time, but the nature of them is constantly evolving. In a rapidly globalizing culture and an economy where emphasis increasingly is placed on the "niche market," art movements will be as pluralistic and varied as the infinite niches that exist within the human psyche.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
Do you have gallery representation? Not yet, but that's a major goal of mine. If someone would like to contact me about representing my work, they can email me at bencuevas@gmail.com

Julie Hart

2010-08-31T20:54:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
In a perfect situation, I would display my work in a few different galleries that could sell my work consistently. I think my art would appeal to a wide audience. I would also sell prints of my "Rescue Animals" series in gift shops to raise money for homeless animals.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art gives us so many things. First, it gives us beauty and visual stimulation. Without art and design, the man made world would be very dull to look at. Secondly, it gives people a different way to use their mind than everyday tasks demand. While I was teaching art, I realized how much it differs from other subjects kids learn in school. They are free to explore their own ideas and have to problem-solve in a visual way. There is also no right or wrong answer. The only mandate is to please yourself or your audience. (Being satisfied with their own work was very hard for some kids because they wanted to please me and asked my opinion of their work all the time.) As for myself, art offers me an escape from my everyday tasks of a stay-at-home mom and a way to release my need to create. It allows me to explore my interests in a field where there is enormous room for developing a style and interests as an artist.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
Perhaps I am a bit jaded, but I do not expect much from my viewing public. I have done outdoor art fairs and generally received nice comments, but I learned not to expect anything. You never know who will buy and who will just talk. I would like people to know just how hard it is to be an accomplished artist, and how hard most artists work at their craft. I would like the general public to be more appreciative of artists. I would also like to spread the word that there is a lot of art out there - especially from emerging artists - that is affordable.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
I appreciate Duchamp's contribution to art history, but I like "retinal art." I like things that look nice or interesting. I want everything I create to be pleasing to the eye, regardless of the message. That said, the great thing about art is that there is room for many different styles.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
I'm sure 100 years from now an art historian will see movements. I see them when I look at magazines, although what I note are more like trends. One artist starts painting doughnuts - then soon you see paintings of doughnuts and other sweets everywhere. Will this be known as the Doughnut Period and be equated to America's obesity issue?

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
Not sure, but I know I don't want to be asked how long it takes me to complete a painting.

Lori Surdut Weinberg

2010-08-31T20:50:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I would ideally show my work in a well-known gallery in an international location. I have had shows in Philadelphia and Boston, and it's been a lot of fun. I would like my shows to attract a lot of people from various parts of the world and get as wide of an audience as possible. I have traveled throughout Europe, and I think my work would speak to that kind of audience. A metropolitan location would be ideal.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
I think art clarifies a point; it gets to the essence of an artist's vision and expression. It's about individualism and evoking an emotion in the viewer. It's a sort of mirror into the artist's soul and a visual way of connecting.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I always aim to evoke a mood through my work and to engage the viewer through my landscapes. Sometimes, I leave areas fuzzy or undefined in order to encourage the viewer to use his/her own imagination. I provide a focal point and leave the rest of the work loose. My work addresses the same issues the Impressionists were engaging.

Although I have worked a lot with oil pastels, and I like oil pastels, I have recently discovered water-soluble oils. You can move around the paint just like you can with regular oils, and you can do larger pieces. You don't have to put them under glass, which is nice. Oil pastels on the other hand are more intimate, and I started using turpentine with them. This was written up in Artist's Magazine, and it was very exciting to see my experiments in print. I teach at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) and what I have learned through teaching is that experimenting, mixing different media and exploring with your technique is how you get different and interesting results. You create your own way of painting, and you start to discover things.

Lately I have been working with water-based oils, and you can really manipulate them to look like watercolors or you can lay them on thick and move the paint around with a palette knife. My work is about building up texture and the contrast between smooth and rough gestures.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
Good question. I would agree with Duchamp. Art is about creating a relationship with the viewer, and the viewer doesn't have to see everything. If you want to get that specific, why not use a photograph? I am trained as an illustrator. I got my Bachelor's degree from RISD and a Master in Art Education from there as well. My mother was an art teacher, and I became her assistant. I enjoyed seeing the impact on students. Teaching is gratifying. As an artist I have had to be versatile. I have applied my experience and training to book illustration, greeting cards, creative art direction and teaching. To be honest, first, an artists works for himself/herself, and then, he/she makes art into a craft in order to make a living. The more versatile and skilled an artists is, the more marketable his/her work will be. You paint for your own enjoyment, but the thrill of selling something never gets old. Someone saw your work and wanted to have it in his/her home.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Sure. There is abstract art, realism...But art is global these days. Between the computer and the internet, art has shifted. I think of a movement as people working together to create their own approach to painting, but the market dictates a lot too. It's interesting to see what gets promoted. For instance, people who don't know a lot about art will naturally rely on galleries for a sense of what is "good" art.

I see a lot of trends in my students. After decades of work on the computer, hand craft is making a come-back. Computer-based art looks very similar so students want to infuse their work with something different. They want to bring life back into their work, so they work with me. On the computer you can't stop that line. It just goes on forever, uniformly. Paradoxically, you can control more variety with your hand. There is a place for the computer, but when you put the two together, computer and hand craft - that is when you get an interesting result. But I am finding increasingly that people are missing drawing and work with scanning to marry it to computer generated work.

I teach greeting card design, children's book illustration, and I also coach/mentor undergraduates and graduate students who are applying to art school or want a career change. I help people find jobs. I also enjoy classroom teaching. Mentoring is a great journey.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
I guess I would ask what makes my art different. My response would be that my delicacy of hand, the softness of my work, how I see the world and make the ordinary into the extraordinary are some characteristics that stand out. I find beauty in the in everyday and I memorialize it in paint. Some of my favorite artists are Monet and Degas, as well as Bonnard and Vuillard. There is a lot of drawing in Degas's work. I am fortunate enough to see beauty in everything, and this is why it is important that I capture it in painting.

Oliver Halsman Rosenberg

2010-08-31T17:22:00.001-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
My 4th dimensional holographic spectral sound vibration installations would be visible in the sky, free for all to see and interact with.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art expands possible views of what you are capable of creating.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I don't expect anything from my public. My work is for your grandparents and your grandchildren.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
I know Marcel liked chess better. Of course each of us cannot expect to feel the results of visual art if we are more prone to dancing or mini golf. Art exists for all just as a flower.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Art produced in a pluralistic climate is its own movement.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
What does it feel like to surrender to divine inspiration? - There is no one there to experience it.

Melissa Tenney

2010-08-31T17:22:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
Galleries that have a defined grace of professionalism is key. There is nothing more useless than having a relationship with a gallery that does not efficiently promote the artist. The gallery must know the clientele and their desires for a successful long term relationship. Most people who have money are told what they should like rather than encouraged to explore their senses. This is where the artist and the purchaser loses out. An ideal setting would be clusterfuck of thoughts and feelings pushed out in any given medium,style. The artist would feel released from a life long sentence of slavery to a Dealer and the purchaser could become more in touch with the art and not just it’s financial value.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art as a tool, in it’s most ancient uses comes as a possibility for survival and communication. That brings me to say that art is a result of being human.

Art in it’s first response is to hopefully relieve the artist of a most ensueing act of emotional and physical combustion. After that, if successful, it provokes thought, or the thought of the lack of thought.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
Personally, even after selling over 400 works, I never trust to expect anything from anyone. The people who buy my work are instantly possessed by its presence. It is something that naturally happens and still sends a rush though my heart to this day. To feel appreciated and loved, or connected with through the art you pour your life into is wordless, bountiful. Ultimately, you never know if you were a success until 20 years after your dead. I paint because I am a painter and a romantic. I am a seeker of truth. “I” is many, and we are all seeking truth.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
I love it. Lets unplease the pleased. Lets invoke the senses, lets invoke the mind. Away with the puritanical ways. There’s nothing to be afraid of but freedom.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Yes, there is always room for a revolution. However, we have been in a capitalistic and disembodying fog. We are making decisions or lack there of decisions today that will effect the next movement. I hope I live to see it.

Kreg Kelley

2010-08-31T17:21:00.002-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I think that an ideal space is a clean space. You don't want the art competing with the surroundings. White, tall walls like the National Gallery of Art are ideal. Being on Madison Avenue or Rodeo Drive doesn't hurt either!

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art helps us to connect things. Each reaction is relative to the viewer and how it moves or connects them with the world.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I don't expect anything. I hope that they enjoy the work and it touches them on some level. The point of art is to make people happy--- and that is what I aim to do.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
I can see both sides of this statement---I agree that landscapes, portraits, and realism can be boring, and it has been done for centuries. He is encouraging abstraction (I believe) and to lok at art in a different manner and I think that is admirable as it is the kind of work I do.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Just as music changes over the years as does art. Would it be strong enough to be considered a movement like Dada,etc? I don't think so. I think we've seen the majority of what art is---we've given that word so much meaning that it ultimately transcends all forms of what art is. I think art will merely 'fit into categories'. Its tough to reinvent the wheel but who knows what the future will hold.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
You got me! :) Thank you for your time!

Liya Sheer

2010-08-31T17:21:00.001-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
Ideally I would display my artwork in an art gallery event with a couple of other artists.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
In my opinion art creates feelings and emotions; stimulates the brain to think, explore, and question; allows the creator to express himself in a visual form, and the audience to read the painting and develop an intellectual connection with the artwork.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I would like them to wonder, question, and feel.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
I believe strongly in art that appeals to the mind rather than to the eye; however, in a tough and complicated world it is understandable for an audience to have a preference for pretty, perfect, calm pictures that would just be pleasing to the eye rather than art that requires effort to concentrate and exercise your brain. Some people prefer to have art that does not express any opinions or political views.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Yes, always.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
"How you develop ideas for your art work?"

Rachel Thern

2010-08-31T17:21:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
Wow, I feel like I should come up with a creative answer, like "on a wooded hillside, hung on the sides of trees", but I don't actually make site-specific work so really a plain wall without too much distraction is fine.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
This is a really interesting question - I like to think that art reminds us there are things not describable in words, hence the difficulty of writing an artist statement. If the purpose of an artist's art were easily put into words, the artist would have become a writer. But our senses take place before words, and emotions do, and our thoughts form in a preverbal way before we put them into words. So there's a whole range of stuff in internal and external reality that art is a direct expression and communication of; its purpose being is therefore very broad but also hard to pin down.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I don't ask anything except to take the time to look, and if it doesn't interest you, not even that. I put a lot into it, but that doesn't mean I'm necessarily owed anything.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
In my interpretation this was a rebellion against most previous art which had been focused predominantly on visual depiction as the be-all and end-all. Especially in the academic art where there was an emphasis on depicting certain things a correct way, and if you followed all the rules, you would get a certain result. For example, if you look at certain paintings in a museum the leaves on the trees are all painted a certain way regardless of how far away the tree is, and the painting has an overall sameness to it, so it's a case where the artist will have a bag of tricks and if they use them right they'll get the desired result, the painting will look decent. And if they're a talented artist, all these visual tricks/methods will be well-integrated and will add up to more than the sum of the parts. But some of the point of modernity is that we're free to think of the whole first, consider the whole work of art and its purpose, your own process and desired end result. We're freed from having to depend solely on recreating a preplanned visual experience.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
While everything looks pluralistic to us, there are probably a set of similarities among works made currently that will make people in the future think "that looks so 2010". A future art historian will make up terms for art with these characteristics, and if we're alive, we might be puzzled - artists don't always get to name their own movements, or they may not pick the name that sticks.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
You already asked all the hard questions so I wish you'd ask an easy one, like why I love oil pastels. They can do a lot of things like oil paint or soft pastels. Since they don't dry, I can continue working on my different pieces at any rate I feel like, as time and mood allow. Some people only remember cray-pas and are tempted to use oil pastels like crayons. Don't do this - think of them as you would paint.

Lori Anne Boocks

2010-08-31T17:20:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I’d love to show in a space with plenty of natural lighting. Large, uninterrupted walls. Lots of floor space to let the paintings invade that area, maybe even force the viewer to step over them in places. A space allowing me to explore what a painting can be and challenge viewers to re-think the “canvas-on-the-wall” mentality would be a dream come true. Other artists have done this of course, and I’d like to add my name to this list.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
For me, every piece of art is a potential mirror. We look at a work and if it engages us in some way, there’s the kind of viewer-art interaction that takes, say, a painting I made based on my feelings and experiences and invites you to react. Our experiences -- and how we experience the world -- are reflected upon the piece and the piece in return continues that dialogue or starts one I never imagined and will never be part of except as instigator. The viewer’s going to bring as much baggage (good or bad) to that moment of visual introspection as they want. And if we’re viewing the piece with another person… friend, stranger, relative… and we start talking about the piece out loud, well, the conversation can get even richer.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I think every artist hopes for a moment of the viewer’s time to see if engagement can happen. I would want viewer to know that I have them in mind while I’m making my work. In my head, I imagine people from all walks of life reacting to my paintings. Some may not like my stuff. Some may love it. Some are lukewarm. Throwing your art out into the world is a great unknown. A true risk.
4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
Hmmm. Does the eye make the art, or does the mind (or heart)? If I interpret it to mean he wanted us to stop making art that was purely visual, we would’ve missed out on some pretty amazing work.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
“They” say everything’s been done and we’re all stuck in appropriation mode. I’m not sure I buy that. Regardless of what I think, art critics and historians years from now will probably look back on our times and try to make sense of it all, connect those dots, and analyze trends. Finding and naming any movements will certainly make it easier for them to title the big books they tend to publish.
6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
I have a background in writing, and through that experience I learned that it’s not always the words themselves that give meaning and context. For me, it’s about the feelings that come from reading those words. So, while text is the framework upon which I build my paintings, it serves mainly to create emotion. The vigor of the writing, the lines of sentences, the dark charcoal marks… these are all the underpinnings that support color and paint stroke and texture. The title and a legible word or two may hint at the meaning of the painting for me as the creator of it, but in the end it’s all about what the viewer brings to the table.

Lori Anne Boocks

small boxes... some on fire
September 1 - September 25, 2010
First Friday Reception: 9/3, 6 - 8 pm
Artists' Reception: Saturday, 9/11, 4 - 6 pm

Studio Gallery - www.studiogallerydc.com

2108 R Street N.W. Washington, DC 20008 202.232.8734 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 202.232.8734 end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 202.232.8734 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Industrial Cathedral of Arts: The Wassaic Project

2010-08-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

Climb up the narrow stairwell at Maxon Mills in Wassaic, NY and peek into the dark openings overlooking a seven-story shaft that murmurs and hums with a deep, damp hollowness and the sound of various recordings by Leah Rico at each landing. The space is sublime. So is the artwork that sits within its cathedral-like exterior.

Artists from all over the United States exhibited their work at the Wassaic Project on August 13-15, enliving the small hamlet, which is part of the town of Amenia about two hours north of New York City along the Harlem Line of the Metro-North commuter rail train. Visitors poured in from all directions and populated a designated camp ground with their tents and then rushed toward the Maxon Mill, once used as a grain elevator, to see the art and enjoy the live music on the front porch of the hotel that adjoins the seven-story industrial structure. The hotel is also no longer a hotel. Small rooms with slanted floors and half-height walls that allow natural light into the spaces through heavy-timber columns and beams housed a photography exhibit consisting of medium-size pigment and inkjet prints. It would have been a squeeze to have more than two people in each room perusing the exhibit. On a chiaro-scuro mezannine, a lone piano basked in the sunlight streaming through the windows, its keys rising and falling and clicking. No sound was produced. It was an exercise in silence and automation. Back on the main level of the hotel a tilted wooden model of a city block with photos pasted to the rooftops invited visitors to look through a magnifying monocular, which deciphered the contents of the photographs, otherwise too small for the naked eye to see. The piece referenced an ongoing participatory public/private urban spaces activity accessible by emailing the artist, Jo. Q. Nelson.

By no means was this the end of it. The exhibit wound up another section of the building with jubilant momentum. But safety first. As a volunteer at the festival, my job was to monitor the number of visitors climbing up the narrow fire stairs so that they did not exceed allowable capacity. I also had to make sure that nothing caught fire. Also acting as gatekeeper to the exhibits accessible through the back staircase, Gwen Charles's Safety Project provided orange life vests to visitors who wanted to wear them free of charge. "If you are not wearing a life jacket, it's not going to save your life," was written on the booth showcasing the vests. On departure, visitors could opt to buy these psychological failsafes for $45. Many who were wearing them commented on how comfortable and safe they actually felt with some degree of due irony.

With over one hundred artists showing their work, the festival could have easily become a maelstrom, but the narrow stairs controlled the flow of people very efficiently through the vertical stacks of the industrial space. When I took a break from my volunteer job, I had a chance to glance through the 2nd and 3rd floor exhibits. I stumbled upon a dark room with a wall-width projection of names. Stephen Eakin's In Memory Of, a compilation of names of deceased individuals allowed visitors to enter the name of someone they wanted to commemorate through a user-friendly, touch-based interface. Dim lighting gave the space the somberness of a mausoleum and the visitors the privacy of remembrance. I entered my grandfather's name in the dense pattern of names and returned to my post at the base of the stairs where I had an excellent view of Brinton Jaecks's Unconscious Collective - a vortex of carved wooden beds attached to the ceiling and to each other with smoothly carved wooden chains and spanning across most of the ground floor. The piece references institutions and has a musical quality expressed through compositional tension and axial rotations of the individual beds. It is also a fine work of carpentry.

The festival accomodated both digitally produced work and manual processes. Clement Valla engaged 1600 individuals in the creation of two composite paintings on mylar through online software. Mary Lydecker created imaginary cities with traditional collage techniques, but the intersections were so seamless that the places became believable in their own right. She combined imagery from Stockholm and Hong Kong or Cocoa Beach and Stockholm, establishing a picturesque ambiguity about the sense of place. Her collages bridge geographic distances yet seem perfectly familiar at first glance because the patterns of development over the last century have produced odd stylistic and scalar juxtapositions.

Although there were other noteworthy pieces participating in innovative and polemical trends in the arts at Wassaic, for the sake of brevity, the remainder of the article focuses on the work of four artists who made a particular effort to engage their audience.

Jesse Kauppila
Printmaker Jesse Kauppila performed live demonstrations of his Bitmap Machine project for his audience. Collaborating with a mathematician, Jesse is generating combinations of "bitmap" prints, which will function as 2D, scannable barcodes. At the festival, he could be found shaking a box he had constructed to print the custom barcodes and explaining the process outloud. A ball-bearing grid underlay a metal, pixellated grid. Each time he shook the box, the ball bearings would land into random quadrants of their underlying grid and push up on the individual pixels of the grid above them. Jesse would then ink the end result and print the bitmap impression on Japanese rice paper. He was able to carry out this process without a press because the box he had built for himself performed all of the functions of a printing press. His individual prints became part of a larger twine-stretched grid, which he used to hang his pieces and keep track of the random combinations generated by the way the ball-bearings fell into place. His project aims to marry traditional print-making techniques with digital barcode technology. Throughout the duration of the exhibit, Jesse never tired of elucidating his process and answering questions.
He is based in San Francisco, where he practices printmaking and seeks collaborations with other artists.

Ben Cuevas
Installation artist and avid knitter, Ben Cuevas is inspired by British artist Damien Hirst and French social thinker Michel Foucault. When his frind taught him how to knit, Ben focused on how surgical the process seemed. His knitted hearts, skeletons, colons and scrotums among others, appear soft and plush and evoke the sense of comfort that any knitted apparel might. Structurally they are familiar because they are based on medical illustrations rather than photographic images of human anatomy. It is difficult to remember that they represent a disembodied grotesque. However, Ben insists that his work is not about representation. The installation piece he chose to showcase at Wassaic Project features a knitted skeleton seated atop a pyramid of Borden's condensed milk cans and a cloud of screen prints on Plexi glass suspended above it. The prints are of disembodied anatomical parts photographed in high resolution with diagrammatic illustrative overlays. Ben conceives of the piece as a reference to material culture and Wassaic's local history (The Borden Company had a condensed milk factory in Wassaic.) and a meditation on transcendence. The knitted skeleton is seated in the lotus position. His piece, like many of the other installation pieces in the exhibit drew the attention of the improvisational dance troupe comprised of dancers Charmaine Warren and Ashe Turner and musician John Ellis. Ben is based in Los Angeles and attended Hampshire College in Mass.

Josh Atlas
Josh Atlas wants to make you laugh. His doughnut-covered disco ball, frosting-laden beach gear and picture frames jammed in buckets with foam cushioning evoke Wayne Thiebaud's pastry paintings. Josh's work is 3D, however. It responds to lighting conditions, and both kids and adults love it. In order to prepare the doughnuts for his disco ball, Josh had to coopt another artist's studio and set up a drying abacus. To preserve the piece, he coated all his doughnuts in urethane and the frosting in epoxy. In order to provide a stable substructure for his disco ball of doughnuts, Josh used a beach ball as the core. His meticulous and finely-crafted drawings demonstrate the care and effort that went into creating his wondrous glazed amalgamations. Their precarious balance is due to a finely-tuned process.

A visit to Josh's studio affords a glance at a large photoprint of Josh submerged in a bath of doughnuts. He invites all to take a dip or watch him bask in the pleasure. One question we can all ask ourselves is whether such quantities of doughnuts express a love of them or an uncomfortable overabundance. Josh says he is just obsessed, and that this is an object-oriented turn in his work. He is also based in Los Angeles.

James Weingrod
The cosmos in a petridish comes to mind when James Weingrod starts painting with his custom-created water-soluble pigments and resins. He uses a clay-surfaced wooden base and films the process. A drop of silver fizzles and bleeds outward melting into the black, phalo blue and veridian green sea that Weingrod calls the universe. He invites participants to create the universe with him and explains doppler effects and supernovas as he reconstitutes the painting laying flat. It took him three years to master his materials and learn to control and predict their behavior. Weingrod's materials come from a small independent store called Guerra in New York City. Although he does not claim to be a chemist, Weingrod mixes all of his own paints. Dressed in a Tyvek suit and a Fedora hat, he has a knack for his participatory act and is not shy about engaging an audience and opening up his simple yet mesmerizing and infinitely engrossing process to all willing participants.

The Wassaic Project is an annual event, and it is organized by artists for artists. All the co-directors - Eve Biddle, Bowie Zunino, Elan Bogarin and Jeff Barnett-Winsby - had pieces in the exhibit and spent all year planning the well-attended, three-day event.

Soline Krug

2010-08-04T12:50:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
A show in a respected, well-known gallery would be ideal for me. It would increase the visibility and the impact my work might have. Also, showing in a place like an Asperger’s association would mean a lot to me. I would think that my work would touch my audience, as it touched me and my family. I would want convert my work into an experience and ask other art forms to interact with it. I would also want butoh dancers to come and perform in the middle of my show.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art brings emotion, interaction and connects with the viewer/public. Art is not understood on a descriptive level. This is what art does best: art is free from description. It does not need description to exist. Art is about evoking an interpretation: ie. letting the viewer/public have their own. Art is about complete liberty.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I think I can expect the viewer to look at my work closely and look for answers, wish for something different, start a discussion about why and how.

I don’t know if I want the viewer to know so much. This is a little contradictory to the notion of interpretation that I bring up in question #2. I would rather witness a pure relationship between the viewer and my work. And maybe then, when they have had the chance to have their own story, I would tell mine.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
I have a lot of respect for Duchamp. He is an infinite source of inspiration for artists. But I see him more as a philosopher than as an artist since he is “missing,” even on purpose, the retinal component. But let’s face it, how could I blame him for wanting to bring art into a new dimension?

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
I am wondering if there has ever been “no pluralistic climate”. I think history is filtering a lot for us. So sure, history will do the job again and tell us what the art movement of the early 21st century were. I would mention street art as an example of a movement.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
You could have asked me what makes my art interesting. So let’s do some shameless self- promotion. I would answer that my work deals with the origins of the human being: the basic, everlasting dilemma between nature and society, the individual vs. the mass. Since I have been working on this subject, it seems to me as if this is the source of everything I see. There is still a lot to come because I had this kind of revelation only a few months ago. But I can promise that this is going to be an adventure to look forward to.

Josh Atlas

2010-08-01T08:45:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I want my work to be able to find its way into as many homes as possible. Because I aim to put a lot of my personality into my work, being in some one's home becomes a way to form a personal relationship. The work can spend time with the viewer. That allows the meaning/value to become something truly personal to them.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
I can't remember who to attribute the quote to, but I'm going to go with "Art is just an excuse for people to fall in love."

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
Because my work is based in comedy, I want to challenge the way the viewer internalizes the piece. Rather than simply remembering a description, I hope that they will come up with a joke that compliments the piece.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
Joyful agreement! Most art is still best viewed and experienced in physical space (as opposed to a digital form). If an artist is going to demand that a viewer needs to visit a specific location to see their work, then they owe it to the viewer to create a more full body experience.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Yes. Perhaps more than ever. As people get more and more connected, a variety of visual forms will take hold with new and varied audiences. The artist does not need the traditional means of success (a solo show at MoMA) to reach a community that finds value and meaning in what you do.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
Do you have any upcoming exhibitions?

I will have work in the Wassaic Project Festival, in Wassaic, New York. The festival runs from August 13-15. More information can be found at www.wassaicproject.org

Kathryn Trillas

2010-07-29T22:07:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
In a home. My work is meant for people.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
It provides eye candy or a voice.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
My audience already knows. I had a small blank book at Artomatic, and people wrote about the feeling my paintings evoked. They did not write about the image, nor the execution, just their feelings while they looked at the work. They were the feelings I had when I was in their place. I had no statement for them to read. Now, how can I improve on that? I have a voice without words, images that convey just a feeling.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
Duchamp could draw better that I can, so he should know.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
There are still art movements today. Robots seemed to be the popular theme of the last Artomatic. All you have to do is get enough artist together, and you will find any number of movements.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
What drives me to create the images that I make? I'm first drawn to a place for the beauty, peace, and sheer magnificence of it. But it's later, while looking a the drawings & photos I take of these places that I notice the powerful geometric shapes - the lights and darks that define the shapes. I like to solve problems, and use the block of trees, the movement in the clouds and water, as tools to express a place as I remember it. I like a bit of logic, greenish trees, light skys, but also a little bit of improvisation, like a base coat of bronzed sienna to paint on. If the end product happens to be a beautiful - a bit of eye candy - who am I to complain. The viewer seems to get the message.

However, I never stop exploring different ways to say how I feel.

Minimum Wage Art

2010-07-29T14:22:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I would display my work right where i sell it - at the farmer's market. My pieces are surrounded by ripe fruit and dahlias and homemade furniture. Over-friendly dogs step on my art and bugs land on the corners. My work is durable, so it works out well. It ages with the very things that inspired it.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art shows us the things we're too busy to see. I realize this statement implies a sort of superiority of the artist over the non-artists. I am not denying the accusation in all its serious and intent. My head is big enough to allow me to admit that I see things better than people who are not artists.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
The one thing that I hope for from my audience is a need to have art of their own. I began Minimum Wage Art as a way for folks to go home with a piece of art that they appreciate without selling a kidney.I think many aritsts conflate the price of their art with its worth. This is valuable information to the viewer when the audience is trying to understand the perspective of the artist, and those prices often hold just as much information as what medium was used and what the title may be. My pieces are worth very little to me; its the process of planning, creating, and then selling art that gets me all excited. Since I use salvaged materials for my art, my time is really the only vaulable thing that is being invested; that is why i only charge minimum wage for the time that went into each piece. My pieces are like kittens - I just want them all to have a good home. When someone feels like they have gotten a bargain on a piece of art that they enjoy, then I know I have done my job.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
Duchamp was brilliant and crazy. He was also wrong. Retinal art is doing perfectly well, and has been for the past 80-ish years - since he said that.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Art movements are always welcome! Of course, the thing about art movements is that you don't know there is one until it's already past.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
The one question I wish you had asked is how I have time to paint while being a full-time scientist. My answer is that I don't sleep for one night during the week, and stay up the whole night painting. I store up sketches from the week to inspire me during my frenzy and make sure that I have lots of sparkling water and blueberries to keep me going until dawn.

Pam Rogers

2010-07-29T12:52:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
Most often I find that showing my 2-D work and my sculpture together enhances the experience for the audience and myself, so finding a a space that lets both have enough breathing room is important to me. That said - I am not fond of the traditional formal gallery format. Ideally, if I had to define the perfect space it would be something similar to the covered courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery- it has an indoor and an outdoor feel and space to sit and walk and interact with the work. I would always want an audience to feel comfortable in the space while viewing. I have displayed work in large warehouses finding intimate corners - spaces within spaces, and that has been successful.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art can help us make sense of, or at least explore, what is happening in our culture and in the world around us. It allows a personal journey within that exploration, while at the same time drawing in and on the experiences of many.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you like them to know about your work?
I do not have expectations of my viewers. I assume that they have expectations of me. I don't make work for others. I hope my viewing public relates to or can find something that resonates with their own life, but I make work because I am an artist and feel that is what I need to do for myself. I have found that people often come to art with agendas, hopes, and fears. I only hope that they can take away something that resonates with them, something that someday will emerge in a thought or conversation, prompting them to remember the work or their experience of my work.

My work starts randomly, but it is finished with intention. It is, for the most part, narrative.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
The visual is only once aspect of art, and I have long felt that I need to engage the viewer on multiple sensory levels - smell being current favorite- to really experience the work. If Duchamp is suggesting that art has moved beyond the canvas or 2-D images he is placing his own limitations on the definition of what constitutes art. I would hope as artists explore and engage in multiple disciplinary art practices that they are not limited to 2-D art, but that it is not discounted simply because it is 2-D.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's pluralistic climate?
Why not?

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please feel free to answer it.
It would have been a question regarding my use of materials that directly relate to the narrative in my work. I am currently making pigments out of plants and soil, rocks etc.. and using this in the work. Sometime I have directly embedded plant pigments into the work and created images based on those. I go back and forth between making the sculptural pieces and the work on paper- each informs and enhances the other and together they begin to make sense and create the narrative I am interested in. I have a show opening at the Hillyer Art Space on Aug. 6th that will have both the sculpture and the work on paper in the same space, and that is exciting for me. Often a gallery is interested in one or the other, but this is a great opportunity for me to show both. I am excited to see how they work together in a fairly intimate space.

Nishith

2010-07-28T13:34:00.001-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I never thought of an ideal situation before. I did love Artomatic. One thing I would like to see is if Artomatic can somehow group things. What I mean is that I draw cartoon style drawings. I would like to see my work in some type of setting where the other artwork is also in cartoon style.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art soothes the soul. (Sounds cheesy....but it does...)

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I cannot expect anything really from audience. Art is subjective. One person may appreciate my drawings, the next person may not care for them.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
If he is saying too much art is visual art, then i disagree. Again, everyone is entitled to an opinion. But, I don't agree with what I think he is saying.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Art is always moving.

Eileen Williams

2010-07-28T09:42:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
The ideal situation for displaying my work would be a solo showing at a venue that has great exposure and where the atmosphere is that of a relaxed setting. I believe we should share art with others - from curious children to art loving adults.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art is universal. It needs no language to communicate. Art gives us the opportunity to explore the minds of others, and at its best, it awakens our senses at different levels.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
As an artist, I take pleasure when my art work evokes conversation, stimulates the imagination and engages people to feel something. I would like those viewing my pieces to know that they are one of a kind, created from the heart and as an extension of myself and my love for art.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
The beauty of art is in the eye of the beholder. Marcel Duchamp's statement, "Enough with retinal art" seems to leave no room for a personal view toward an art piece. What may be unfulfilling to one person, may give visual pleasure to someone else. On the flip side, if given a choice to attend a retinal art showing, (ie. a normal, traditional, unimaginative art show), my personal preference would be a non-retinal art showing. I love to view art that is different and outside of the box.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
In this ever changing world, there is always room for art movements. Although, "there is nothing new under the sun," art movements can bring what we may not have been exposed to and even an awareness about its existence to the forefront.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
If I could add a question related to my my art, I would ask: If you could never be paid for the art you create, would you still create? My answer would be yes, I would still create art. My relationship to my art is like a magnet to metal. Creating art is a huge part of who I am. As artists in these economic times, we are not always selling our pieces, but the love of our craft compels us to create.

Emma O'Rourke

2010-07-25T21:03:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I certainly would not say no to a show at the Saatchi Gallery or Tate Modern in London. I would love my work to be shown alongside a music and fashion event too, since these genres inspire me and resound with my work.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
I believe when I am in my most inspired moments, I am spiritually connected with the world and our Creator. I produce work that transcends explanation although inspired by personal experience. My work features flowers and nature as a means to express certain literal things. Ultimately, I believe the most wonderful paintings are beautiful, and thus evoke a Sense of calm for the observer. Although I like the Saatchi, I do believe that entirely Idea-based art is more akin to advertising and less what I am interested in.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I have no expectations. I Hope that people are enchanted by my work and want to spend time looking at it and living with it.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
This from the man who called a urinal art...? I believe any poop-related art should be kept in the loo for hygiene reasons, and because I don't want my children to grow up thinking making art from poop is okay.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
I am starting my own art movement as we speak...

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
That'll be $1,000,000, thanks - ;)

Natalya Andreyeva

2010-07-25T20:58:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
Ideal? It is all relative. Gallery is always a great option, but settings similar to Artomatic attract larger and more diverse audiences. I have done many outdoor shows, and while the outcome was good, it is hard on the artist to create, set up, promote and move outdoor equipment.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?

What does art do best?
Your question is written in a complicated manner, but, anyway - for me - the art has to awaken an emotion, a question, a thought. If it does not, it is not memorable. It is pointless.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you

like them to know about your work?
I am an abstract impressionist, but I do love all sorts of collage work. My recent project on the Evolution of the DC Metro is dear to my heart http://www.natyartist.com/Go_DC_Metro.html
I want my viewers to have a deeper understanding of currently "taken for granted" elements in city life and evolution and history in general through the collaged imagery of past and present America.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement? again, it is all relative.
In this economy, even retail art is soaring. I do think that schools and college programs should emphasize art education and appreciation of creativity. At the same time, when it comes to retail art (or sale of artwork) it all has to be accessible and affordable. I am not suggesting that artists should "sell out" and price their works according to IKEA's business plan, but I would encourage them to have a realistic approach in pricing art work.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's pluralistic climate?
Sure, but what is an art movement? A specific style, group, project? There is room for anything and anyone in America (I speak as as an immigrant from Ukraine). The challenge is - will it be sustainable?

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please

feel free to answer it.
Hmm...I would prefer to hear from the viewer about my art or art process. So, if you have a question in mind - ask away!

Denise Philipbar

2010-07-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
Ideally, I would display my work in several large galleries with someone else having to do the installation, marketing and sales. I'm happy to give them the commission.
Marketing/sales is not my strong point, and they are my least favorite tasks as an artist.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Art takes both of those apparatuses and combines them. My paintings explain and describe my own experiences to viewers in may ways. They also place my ideas in space,whether or not that space exists outside of the paintings, allowing them to take on a dimension they wouldn't have in my imagination. If anything, my work allows me to inform myself of my thoughts in ways I couldn't have imagined them without the medium in which I work.

3. What can you expect from your audience/fans/viewing public? What would you
like them to know about your work?
I have no expectations from the audience/fans/viewing public. Expectations of others only leads to disappointment in them. I'd rather place the expectations on myself. I know my capabilities. I would like them to know that my work is in transition. Having the intense experience of several critiques per week from professional artists working in the contemporary art scene, as well as viewing art with a group of informed, highly creative and imaginative people, can't help but have an enormous effect on what I will do in the next weeks, months and years. I'm excited to see where my work is taking me. It's an unfolding, and it's energizing.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
Duchamp was working in a time of great technological change that continues into our time, and on some levels, I agree with his statement. Art that massages the visual alone has its limits. However, art that captures the mind has no limits. This can be done in subtle ways. Duchamp lacked such subtlety. I'm trying to learn the art of capturing the mind. Time will tell if I succeed.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
I think the key to the question is movements. The patricidal nature of the art world, for the last century and then some, is diminishing. We don't have to replace the old with the new continually. In our time, they can live side by side. Art is becoming speciated and that is good.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
I can't think of one now. Ask me in a year.

Walt Bartman

2010-07-25T20:39:00.000-07:00

1. Where and how would you display your work in an ideal situation?
I would show my work in the light it was painted. Taking a painting from it's source, the painting changes in the light, so color is the most fleeting element. Like a sculpture in the making, the shadows are always changing, and so then is the sculpture. It is frustrating to say the least, but reality is such that everything changes, and your paintings are ideas - thoughts of the moment. I do not concern myself with where. It is the how. The challenge to make is central for me. Where they end up is not. That is why I do not paint as some others do.

2. If expository writing is good at elucidating and proving a point and
descriptive geometry gives us the tools by which to map objects in space
in relation to one another, what kind of an apparatus does art afford us?
What does art do best?
Painting expresses color, poetry love, dance/music, movement, film, violence. All the art forms have their specialty. I paint for the sake of color. It energizes me. Art expresses human emotion, and it can make you cry, feel hungry or sad, etc. Geometry does not. Artists - futuristic thinkers - usually come up with an idea, and science works toward it. Jules Vern is a perfect example of a visionary. Artists give us vision, or as in science and cloning and mythology, the centaur - the hybrid.

4. Marcel Duchamp said - "Enough with retinal art!" What is your reaction as an artist to this statement?
We don't see with our eyes. We see with our minds. It is our challenge to get our brains to see more.

5. Do you think that there is still room for art movements in today's
pluralistic climate?
Art movements usually come about when humans think collaboratively. Art is about personal interpretation, memory, and awareness. It is not about information. It takes futuristic thinkers to make great art. Unfortunately, culture (CNN) defines art. What we see in the great art movements is that they usually set a new standard. The impressionists were the ones to use all the color, because they were the first group to have it. There were definitely other artists who were painting good paintings, but they did not take up the new movement, so they were not deemed important. For painters to be important, they need to be and use the materials of their time. Remember, artists bring value to things we do not value.

6. What is one question you wished we had asked you about your art? Please
feel free to answer it.
For me, my art is about Walter Bartman's vision of the world, and what I feel is important to express, like a cold sun or a square sun or the difference between land and sea. Art has always been the bridge to understanding for me. It is the visible that is the clue to the invisible. I am about finding the invisible and making it visible, as I teach in my own understanding of color, which is dessert to my eyes!

Why do I paint? - Because it helps me see what's in my head.