One Year Down, Two More To Go: Open Studio Event at Columbia College, Chicago

Announcing a very special event to celebrate the end of my first year of graduate school. My peers and I will be showing off the work we have produced over the last two semesters at the:

Interdisciplinary Arts MFA

Open Studios

Columbia College-Chicago

Friday, May 14th, 2010

1pm-3pm

Media

916 South Wabash

Second Floor

Rooms 204 & 205

4pm-7pm

Book & Paper

1104 South Wabash

Second Floor

Papermaking Studio

Featuring the Work Of:

CJ Mace

Victoria Bradford

Jenny Garnett

Kaitlin Kostus

April Llewellyn

Daniel Lubniewski

Haley Nagy

Michael St. John

Daniel Mellis

As you can see by the announcement, there are two buildings of fun.

My print projections and animations, a new body of work for me, will be installed in the papermaking studio of the 1104 S. Wabash on the second floor. I would love to see you, have a conversation, and hear feedback about these new pieces.

Many of you do not live in good ol' Chicago, so if you cannot attend the event, please come back here to Studio High Horse to see pics. They will be posted shortly. The animations and projections will also be posted on my flickr page.

Hope to see you there!

Select Impressions @ Highpoint Center for Printmaking

Thanks to everyone who came out to the show in Minneapolis at my old studio, in its new gorgeous space. The show was stacked with good work by young, local printmakers:

Roberta Allen Todd Bridigum Sam Brown Alisha Campbell Pamela Carberry Laura Corcoran Jessica Driscoll Stella Ebner Ruthann Godollei Fred Hagstrom Brian Hartley Sago Morgan Hiscocks KimyiBo Donald Krumpo Jeremy Lundquist Jeanne McGee Jon Neuse Joshua Norton Drew Peterson Robert D. Peterson Jenny Schmid Jeremy Schock Patricia Scott Katherine Shannon Tonja Torgerson Anna Tsantir Brad Widness Johanna Winters

My piece was hung without glass and in an unusual way compared to other shows I've seen at Highpoint, making it more approachable, which is always a goal of mine. Twist is a screen print and woodcut that is meant to be a modular print, both editioned and flexible enough to be hung in almost any space. Over the course of an exhibition, it has the potential to grow and change over the length of an installation. Because the portfolio review for this show was last summer, the project has grown considerably and will have a different iteration in future shows.

With three new galleries in which to hang work, the bar has been raised at Highpoint to have a cycle of intriguing shows of both local and national artists, so I am excited to see how they respond to the challenge.

Thanks, too, to both the staff at Highpoint and the three curators who helped make the show a success:

Darsie Alexander, Chief Curator at the Walker Art Center

Dennis Jon, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Diane Mullin, Associate Curator at the Weisman Art Museum

Chinese painter Ma Yanhong

                 

I am currently very interested in a Chinese painter named Ma Yanhong.  Her portraits are slightly confrontational, sexy, and real.  I love the contrast between the surety of the women in the painting on the left and the awkwardness of the women at right.  You get the feeling that the subjects of her paintings are her friends, not just models; that they inhabit the same social circle.  They gaze back with conspiratorial looks, like this painting is a project they are working on together.  These paintings make it rough for an American viewer to descend into some sort if stereotypical vision of Chinese women.  

I first saw her work in a book of young Chinese artists in the Walker Art Museum bookstore.  This is what little I know:

She is represented by Goedhuis Contemporary art gallery.

She graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2002.

She was born in 1977.

I am trying to find out more about her, and would love to see her paintings in person. 

Welding Rocks!

I have wanted to take a welding class since a very uptight college sculpture professor refused to teach us, his students, despite the fact we had welding bays just sitting there unused.  His reasoning--we wouldn't be able to complete enough projects if we were trying to master the skills of welding.  Well, I finally had the chance to do it.  The studio where I print and teach teens, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, is closed for the summer as it moves to an amazing, newly renovated space on Lake Street.  Chomping at the bit to get out of my tiny home studio, I decided to take Welding for Artists at Minneapolis Community and Technical College.  Incidentally, I have been going through the more than mildly frustrating process of applying for grad school.  What better way to de-stress and pass the time while waiting for responses from schools than melting two pieces of metal together.

My partner's Flashdance fantasies aside, metalworking makes me fell like a little bit of a bad ass.  Flying sparks, explosive gasses, temperatures in the thousands, toxic fumes--okay, I may be exaggerating the danger a bit for effect.  The sculpture I am working on is progressing well; I will post pictures when it gets a little more developed.  In the meantime, massage my vanity and check out these pics:

     

Jump right in!

So, this is it. This is my inaugural blog.  I am a printmaker and teacher living in Minneapolis.  I get bored easily, so my interests tend to fly all over the place.  And, let's face it.  There is a lot of boring art out there.  Now, don't be confused.  While I tend to be attracted to bright colors and flash, I also look for the quiet and the subtle.  But let us not confuse subtlety with tedium.  Art requires that we return to the same topics over and over again, rehashing ideas.  There are certain broad subjects we human beings obsess on: sex, death, violence, love, friendship, style, emptiness, loneliness, fulfillment. There is this myth of originality out there.  And sometimes, good work is just real nice to look at.

The goal of this blog is simply to get work out there that I like and to talk about my own practice.  Since the art world is nepatistic and I am not a journalist, some of this work will be by people I know and love at places where I have worked.  This is the caveat to all I write--I may be biased by these connections. In an underground economy, this is how we find shit out, especially when a lot of artists go quietly about their work without others knowing or are forced to have crappy day jobs to eat and support what they love.  If this limits the scope of my writing unnecessarily, let me know, and I will learn from your comments or tell you to kiss off.  Either way, I love to hear your thoughts.  And don't forget to check out my work because I really started this blog for completely selfish reasons.