Tag Archives: ceramics

Matt Nolen

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Artist’s Statement

As a painter, architect and storyteller, clay provides the means by which I can marry my loves: the painted surface, three dimensional form and narrative content. Ceramics gives me the language to communicate my stories to a world audience. The themes of my early work have included a broad range of social, political and psychological subjects.

Most recently I have turned to the figure as form departing from the lavishly painted vessels and tiled environments of previous works. In doing so the stories I am telling have become more personal and often are informed by the inner landscape of self: notions of shelter that explore what we protect and keep private vs. that which we choose to reveal, escape through dreams, and contemporary takes on ancient Greek and Roman portrait busts and the load bearing caryatid and atlas. I have also expanded my use of sculptural materials to include found objects, metal, wood and stone.

My figures tell the stories of those who are challenged by conflicts and are in the midst of emotional or psychological transitions. It is life lived within the complexity of these “margins” that interests me the most.

Matt Nolen is a studio artist living and working in New York City. Trained as a painter and architect, Nolen’s work includes sculptural objects and architectural installations using clay and mixed media. His work has been exhibited internationally and is in numerous private and public collections including the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, NYC, The Museum of Arts and Design, NYC, The Newark Museum, NJ, The Houston Museum of Fine Art, TX, The de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA, and The Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY.

Nolen’s work has been written about and reviewed in many periodicals and books including The New York Times, American Ceramics, Ceramics Art and Perception, Masters of Craft, Confrontational Clay, Postmodern Ceramics and Painted Clay. He has been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Mid Atlantic Foundation (regional NEA) Fellowship and international residencies in Israel and China. His residency at the Kohler Co.’s Art/Industry Program resulted in a handmade public washroom that has been named “Best Restroom in America” by the Cintas Corp. and among “The 10 Best Bathrooms in the World” by the Travel Channel. He has recently served as President of the Board of Trustees for Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle Maine and is Adjunct Professor of Art at New York University and Ceramics Area Coordinator at Pratt Institute. His work is represented by Stephen Romano Gallery, NY. http://www.nolenstudios.com

Matt Mitros

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Artist’s Statement

My work focuses on the creation of illusory acts of tension within a forced fusion between what is seemingly organic in form/behavior and what is clearly machined. The Organic, epitomized by my use of rough surfaces and plant-like shapes, is determined by Nature –in various states of decay. The Machined, as suggested by the clean lines of the slip-cast objects and the architectural resin panels, is fabricated by the rules of Man -products of our intent. Both, however, can be equally represented as natural. The machined object is the result of our ability to operate within the parameters of natural systems. The organic object is an agent that symbolizes a moment within these cyclical systems. The difference between these two lies within their inherent goals: the organic is predicated by a struggle for survival, whereas the machined is predicated for efficiency.

Matt Mitros was born in Philadelphia, PA. Upon completing his BFA in Ceramics at Penn State University, he was an Artist-In-Residence at Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts as well as the Archie Bray Foundation. Mitros completed a post-baccalaureate from the University of Illinois and holds an MFA from the University of Washington. He has taught ceramics and sculpture at the University of Washington, South Seattle Community College, Lakeside Upper School, Kennesaw State University, and is currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Alabama. In 2008, Mitros was an Artist Trust GAP (Grant for Artist Projects) recipient funded by the City of Seattle. His work has been featured in Art in America, Art LTD, Clay Times, Ceramics Monthly, and City Arts Magazine, as well as the book 500 Figures in. Mitros has exhibited work throughout North America and Europe, and recently finished a residency position at Red Lodge Clay Center. Mitros currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Kevin Snipes

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Artist’s Statement

Primarily I think of myself as a storyteller, submerged in the vivid passionate ardent fervent articulation of the ordinary.

Kevin Snipes was born in Philadelphia, but grew up mostly in Cleveland, Ohio. He is a full time wanderer, maker of exquisite objects. He gets his smarts from the streets but also managed to learn a thing or two at a couple of fine educational institutions. He holds a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art (1994) and did graduate work at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, Florida (2003). From there he participated in several short-term artist residency programs, including the Clay Studio, in Philadelphia and Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, in New Castle, Maine. He was also a visiting artist at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge and did a two year residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in 2008 through 2010, in Helena, Montana. His most recent residencies (2013) took him to Vallauris, France and to C.R.E.T.A. in Rome, Italy. Kevin currently maintains a studio in Cleveland, OH. Exhibiting both nationally and internationally, Kevin has exhibited as far away as Jingdezhen, China.

 

Editors’ Notes (Posit 4)

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Welcome to Posit 4!

We are delighted to bring you the poetry in this new issue, which assembles a range of poetic approaches to the deployment of razor-sharp vision reflecting our selves and our world(s) with unnerving power and ineffable magic. As always, the work in this issue comes from poets at all stages of their careers and a variety of aesthetic and geographical milieus. We hope you enjoy:

Kristin Abraham’s elliptical yet potent lyric investigations into the violently carved ‘wife-shaped face’ of American femininity as well as the asymmetrical “hog-thick tension” and “derivative violence” of our diode-logical relationships;

Simeon Berry’s wryly wrought encounters of Nix, a “biped without a face,” with the “negative/cathedral[s]” of our final inevitable “unreal estate,” nimbly transmogrifying sound puns to meaning puns with wit and grace;

Dana Curtis’s hallucinogenic psycho-documentaries with their “known lights . . . spiraling out . . . into [a] fog shrouded museum;”

Raymond Farr’s wonderfully threatening contemporary mythology, replete with Delphic Oracle;

Derek Graf’s ‘forest’ of prose blocs in which the silent and the voiced intertwine to re-imagine tropes as rich and strange as “the cold equations of hills and the cloven vandal of the moon;”

Carolyn Guinzio’s unsettling gaze reflecting our world in the hypnotic spin of a snake’s eye and complicating meaning via a counterpoint of interwoven narratives emitting implications of incantatory resonance;

Tim Kahl’s blunt and surprising vision, inviting us in from the numb comfort of our societal “avoid room” and guiding us “into position to receive the new settings from the old intelligence;”

Drew Kalbach’s “polycarbonate enhanced/enriched plastic” urban techno narratives, gleaming like “pure chemical reactions where no chemicals are found and nobody takes a picture to prove it;”

Jared Schickling’s mad constructions, “an epicurean trip thru quantum entanglement” conjuring up verbal parallels to the work of Jackson Pollock;

Marius Surleac’s collisions of punk rock with bucolic pastoralism, making us “lose our minds smoking pot made of sharp corn blades;”

Lewis Warsh’s deceptively relaxed and conversational lines snaking from the daily to the universal, the evident to the profound, with lingering resonance and masterful grace;

and Karen Zhou’s deft and haunting constructions, weaving us into her magical world of “nebular wild white,” “tattooed tulips” and “the impossibility of brûléed snow.”

As ever, thank you for reading!

Susan Lewis and Bernd Sauermann

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And welcome to the visual art in Posit 4!

ShinYeon Moon’s work explores the masks that people wear and the people beneath those masks — who we appear to be, and who we fear we are. Deeply psychological, Moon draws the inspiration for these haunting works from poetry, mythology, and her own life.

Gina Pearlin’s paintings are like bits of half-remembered dreams of a bygone era in an unnamed country. Despite their dreamlike quality, there’s a solidity about these pieces that plants them firmly in time and space. At once surreal and concrete, her vision reveals a world that is grim yet strangely beautiful, asking questions only the viewer can answer.

James Rauchman’s paintings draw us into a world of organic shape and form. Densely packed, the canvases often seem poised to burst open. They pulse with a life of their own, like biological specimens under a magnifying glass. At the same time, Rauchman is addressing formal ideas of figure and ground. The paintings dance back and forth between foreground and background, creating a lyrical tension which addresses central questions in contemporary painting.

With a wry sense of humor, Kevin Snipe’s work documents urban life and relationships between men and women. He uses the physicality of ceramics to work around, in, under, and through the visual narratives. These sculptures operate on both two and three dimensions, the visual narrative of the drawings reinforced by the sculpted forms. Snippets of dialogue float through these pieces, like conversations overheard on a subway.

And Laura Sharp Wilson’s work assembles forms that hark from many realms: under the sea, under a microscope, and in the sky. They appear as both decorative and highly structured scientific portraits of an alternative universe. Using vivid and beautiful color palettes combined with precise drawing, these paintings suggest multiple possibilities stemming from the natural and scientific worlds.

Enjoy!

Melissa Stern