Kukuli Velarde

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

I am a Peruvian-American artist. My work, which revolves around the consequences of colonization in Latin American contemporary culture, is a visual investigation of aesthetics, cultural survival, and inheritance. I focus on Latin American history, particularly that of Perú, because it is the reality with which I am familiar. I do so, convinced that its complexity has universal characteristics and any conclusion can be understood beyond the frame of its uniqueness.

While growing up my visual surroundings were always the same: contemporary urban and rural scenery against the monolithic presence of pre-columbian and catholic colonial aesthetics, both of which conform and define Peruvian landscapes. My identity as a person and as an artist is marked by them and my body of work often summons their presence. Art produced in colonized territories up to modern times is often developed by populations compelled to follow an aesthetics that doesn’t reflect them. It intrigues me how such imposition has been accepted and negotiated, and how art makers may preserve characteristics of their own aesthetics in spite of cultural alienation. I believe that my work continues the efforts that were initiated at the time of conquest by my ancestors in order to survive as culture. In my work I approach Pre-Columbian aesthetics searching for cultural and ethnic commonalities, claiming them as my heritage while engaging the audience in conversations about colonization and coloniality, contemporary history, social injustice and racism. I envision societies with symmetrical opportunities for their different aesthetics to blossom. I envision a pluriversal aesthetic landscape where we all have the opportunity to be ourselves without ethnic, racial or cultural labels that undermines the power of our artistic speech.

Many years ago I saw an exhibition of Rauschenberg’s work in Mexico. I found the exhibition, albeit strong in typical Americana references, unrelated and disconnected to my Latin American heritage, both culturally and visually. I believe I have a wealth of visual information that corresponds more closely to my cultural make up. Pre-columbian art is my most genuine aesthetic inheritance. It is what people who look like me created to their likeness, long ago, when they were the center of their own universe.

Included here are works from several series. For PLUNDER ME, BABY, I wonder what would happen if pre-columbian ceramics in any museum of the world were to wake up from centuries of sleep. What would they think or feel, out of context and stripped of meaning? What would it be for them to be prisoners in a beautiful display or stacked in captivity in an anthropological museum’s storage room? I imagine them in despair and fear, and overcoming their defeat; owning themselves, no longer victims but witnesses of history, transcending their own existence. The title of the series is a defiance, a teasing invitation to futile aggression, for they are beyond harm. Individually their titles are composed of racial slurs still very much in use in Perú and Latin America. There is a sardonic commentary following each of them, stressing common stereotypes and condescending social perception.

WAQ’AS AND PACHAMAMAS depart from my prior referencing of early anthropomorphic representations, and acknowledge and convoke entities to a conceptual foreground as hypothetical imaginaries from “otherness.” Respectfully acknowledging surviving pre-colonial entities such as Pachamama protects and retains “their” memory, which lends an opportunity for reinvention as a second chance, to align a historical narrative on decolonizing terms. Borrowing Wari aesthetics, “Pachamama” is not idol, but earth, an inclusive omnipresent entity. “She” is where plants grow and birds sing, even if suffocated under cement, never losing the capacity to support life. I aspire to inform and affirm the ubiquity of non-Western entities, researching the geographical, and historical strata of archetypical landmarks, imagining and materializing their Pachamamas, rigorously informed by my findings.

A MI VIDA (TO MY VIDA) is a series of portraits of my daughter, who was conceived when I was 48. The idea of creating these intimate works came from anticipating the moment of separation, following American custom, in which children leave the house early in life. I give myself a chance to embrace her, forever, if only her effigy. But A MI VIDA is more than that. Within the frame of our political landscape it speaks of the pain of a parent and child separated by force at the border of this country. A MI VIDA is an urgent plea for empathy and protection against cruelty. Each piece has been made to be carried by a mother’s arms, they don’t belong on pedestals, their ideal presentation/state is within our arms. A MI VIDA is also a performance. It consists of my offering these figures to the audience to hold, and help me appease their crying.

CORPUS engages with and confronts Perú’s colonial past, which reverberates in the construction of mestizo identity. The 15 sculptures that comprise CORPUS are entities who have survived for centuries beneath the guise of Catholic icons revered in the annual celebration of Corpus Christi in Cusco, Perú. Syncretic imagery blends pre-Columbian symbols and forms with European Catholic iconographies, asserting that these pre-Columbian entities were not vanquished, but blended with their Catholic counterparts, ensuring survival. Banners were commissioned to Peruvian artisans who craft traditional religious banners. The red tables reference legged structures carried by youths to rest the effigies on when not in motion in the procession. CORPUS is exhibited with an installation of flash lights and sound that seeks to provoke feelings of exposure and invasion from cultural “paparazzi.” The video with my father’s voice praying, has a Peruvian military march marking the real icons passing.

Kukuli Velarde is a Peruvian artist based in the United States since 1987. She has received awards and grants such as the Virginia Groot First Prize (2023), the Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), the United States Artists-Knight fellowship (2009), the Pew fellowship in Visual Arts (2003), the Anonymous is a Woman award (2000), among others. In 2013 her project CORPUS got the Grand Prize at the Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennial in South Korea. She held tenure as faculty at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2022.

Her exhibition credits include: CORPUS touring exhibition at SECCA (NC), Halsey Institute (SC) and Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (CO) among other venues in 2022 and 2023, KUKULI VELARDE: THE COMPLICIT EYE at Taller (Philadelphia, 2018-19); KUKULI VELARDE at AMOCA, (Los Angeles 2017); PLUNDER ME, BABY at the Yenggi Museum of Ceramics’ Biennial of Taipei (Taiwan 2014); CORPUS (work in Progress) at the Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennial (South Korea 2013); also KUKULI VELARDE: PLUNDER ME, BABY at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in (Kansas city, KS in 2013), PATRIMONIO at Barry Friedman Gallery (NY, 2010) and PLUNDER ME, BABY at Garth Clark Gallery (NY, 2007).

She is married to Doug Herren, sculptor, and they have a daughter named Vida. They live in Philadelphia, PA, USA.

positInkSpash131210.small

Kukuli Velarde es una artista peruana radicada en Estados Unidos desde 1987. Ha recibido premios y becas como el Primer Premio de la fundación Virginia Groot (2023), la beca Guggenheim (2015), la beca United States Artists-Knight (2009), la beca Pew en Artes Visuales (2003), el premio Anonymous is a Woman (2000), entre otros. En 2013 su proyecto CORPUS obtuvo el Gran Premio en la Bienal de Cerámica de Gyeonggi en Corea del Sur. Fue miembro facultativo de la residencia de la Escuela Skowhegan de Pintura y Escultura en el 2022.

Sus créditos de exhibición incluyen: CORPUS exhibición itinerante en SECCA (NC), Halsey Institute y en Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (2022); KUKULI VELARDE: THE COMPLICIT EYE en Taller (Philadelphia, 2018-19); KUKULI VELARDE en AMOCA, (Los Ángeles 2017); PLUNDER ME, BABY en la Bienal del Museo de Cerámica Yenggi de Taipei (Taiwán 2014); CORPUS (work in Progress) en la Bienal Internacional de Cerámica de Gyeonggi (Corea del Sur 2013); también KUKULI VELARDE: SAQUEAME, BABY en el Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art de (Kansas city, KS en 2013), PATRIMONIO en Barry Friedman Gallery (NY, 2010) y PLUNDER ME, BABY en Garth Clark Gallery (NY, 2007).

Está casada con Doug Herren, escultor, y tienen una hija llamada Vida. Viven en Filadelfia, Pensilvania, E.U.

Jeanne Silverthorne

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

These recent works continue a 30-year dissection of the studio, which has been variously the mythic residence of the genius and the failure, the haunted house of a former sweatshop, the inside of my head, the enclosing globe of the world, my father’s workshop and now in these new pieces “my mother’s house” (title of a Collette autobiography).

The focus here is on the construction of the uncertain self that operates both in the studio and in the world, with figures that range from infancy to the edge of old age, wherein hints of the monstrous or “unnatural” contrast with the blamelessness of a baby. The perceived duality of a constructed self and a rapturous, dreaming self, of seeming innocence and born knowingness, can be summed up in two quotations: from D.W. Winnicott, famed child psychoanalyst, “There is no such thing as a baby;” and from novelist Clarice Lispector, “And the unfathomable night of dreams began, vast, levitating.”

While there are nods to my own family history, these sculptures remain allusive to specific studio tropes: storage in the form of bubble wrap, packing tape, two-by-four’s, crates, hammers, a dolly, a lamp modeled on an enlargement of a scrap of casting debris, images of exhausted and frustrated labor—all cast in rubber, my chosen material for many decades.

Jeanne Silverthorne is a New York sculptor. Solo exhibitions include the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Whitney Museum of Art, Rocca Paolinea, Perugia, P.S.1, New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the University of Kentucky Museum, career surveys at the Wright Museum, Beloit and Rowan University, a collaboration with Elaine Reichek at the Addison Museum, as well as one-person shows at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Verona, Seoul, and Ireland.

Her work is in the collections of the following institutions: Museum of Modern Art, New York, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., FNAC (Fondation Nationale d’Art Contemporaine),Denver Museum, Albright KnoxMuseum, Weatherspoon Museum San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts,RISDI Museum, Boca Raton Museum, Leeum.Samsung Museum, Korea, Sheldon Museum, the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii, Addison Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum of Art.

Articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Sculpture Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Brooklyn Rail, among other publications. 

Silverthorne has been the recipient of various awards and grants: a Guggenheim Foundations grant, a Joan Mitchell foundation award, Penny McCall award, Anonymous was a Woman, Civitelli Ranieri Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts.

Laura Moriarty

from rapt glass (detail)

Which Walk 0

re:assemblance

“Take a walk”
—Yoko Ono, WALK PIECE

and look out
as the broken world

breaks again
drawn to bits (I am)

deranged           iota              jot

flakes                 of fixed

whatnot

mechanisms meant
to broach when and where

to find or feel
a finite set with infinite

limitations as when
feast, fetish, or metonymic

gesture connects a personal
system with reference

to civic locality as
streets’ vocal

versions of themselves,
when what is heard

is seen, gleaned,
recollected, and erected,

luck, self-
defined, becomes us,

bent into position feeling to find

beads           balls           brass           steel

nailed                      screwed

scaled up                          run out

resurrected, inwardly

directed to
arrange and play
as we (rapt)
are carried off,

untroubled by resemblance,
guiding principle, or epistemic

framework, though having those,
while making these directed

acts of storage strutted,
glutted, taken up, as I/we

reaching back
to owned devices,

feel free, imaginary,
and tactile as the shudder

of daily acquisition,
domestic, timebound,

vexed by practitioners,
whose practice

like ours,
a consummation,

is thrown up and out
as the poison

presence of each entrance
of nonlife into life

twists            loops                  moves

circles         spits         and splits

giving                                       into

walking while

compromised by things
aging in place

as matter hardened to its
constituents is what

we find when we amass and
detach the past of an object
from its fate creating
an elegy for each fact,

used or not, whose provenance,
always one of loss,

rejection, and subsequent
stooping to find (oneself) with

items grounded by chance, labor
or the erasure of same

becomes stuff subject
to words like reality

adding up
to what we want:

an engine of past time,
creation, and abstraction

whose apparatus
reflects the precision of

wrapped          glass

collapsed         threading         through

the fastness

of everything as everything
found or findable

resolves into action

 

from rapt glass

 

Which Walk 5

the maid real

“Old Woman, your eye searches the field like a scythe!”
—Robert Duncan, “The Structure of Rime VI”

like a sigh, permitted or not,
these visits to Mira Vista

Field            fair            farm            (or look see

place)            which            with

walking               later

renounces            renunciation

the better to incantate as
phrase after praise betrays
the visible day to the visible

night today singing what can you say,
moment by movement, or see

worried, wise, amazed—
heard, herded, heralded, crazed

by this old epithet, rule, and designation

of hags for which read old
women whose presence
absent to some,

purely physical to others, despite being where
and what they/I, are required to be, go, say,

and know            noting            how

dreamed of            mental            meeting

protocols in the form of songs and knowledge
combine the known with the read, said,
intoned, and suggested,

along with the berries there, also
red, thorns with which to be bled,
leave one stepping out attired

with gown, crown, and scythe
clearing what has died into

what is born by the poem of the mind
including words not me but mine

while I, menaced by remembered threats,
summon my ways and those of my actual

mother, Mae Belle Reynolds,
to push in and back out while
hatted, masked, cloaked, fraught

being with her (withered) wrought

where            belief            relief

knowing            & going            are brought

along with these steps at the feet of which lay

we, reconfigured into us, who
write what is read, said, and

displayed, resolving the “made place”
into the made real day

 

from rapt glass (sketch)

Which Walk 6

problem of reversible time

“. . . which am I?”
—Rumi, The Essential Rumi

who (exigene)
portends to redeem

exigencies of a woman
and man in a van when

our names meant light, knight, air, and ones who fly (are flown) when you,
Sufi, carpenter, botanist, and me, writer, waitress, artist of cards and
fortunes, later lose our clothes on the way to losing our minds and hearts
(mine) in a known place where written as played

a woman much withered, a maid
a maiden with a wand a handsome
maid, a white wand with a peacock of
solid gold on its tip

(we) submit
to the reversible fortunes

of muscle memory and the
illusive person in the poem

including types of knowing as when

The Land That Time Forgot
or trip into symbolic space

whose            trace            discloses

beauty            at intervals            as            (not)

lucid            eyes

of mind remain blind to the
inevitable arrangement’s

transformation of attitude,
and altitude calculable only from

the surface or search image
of a specific person

whose comparative anatomy
comes into play when the algorithm

leads us farther into the past—
but if this is the solution

please explain the bones
in the ghost story of the other
lover or the card games there.

Bring in Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale

and other extinction events.
It was crazy for anyone to try

to cross the Sierras in October.
What happens next as we

decohere among the hominins (despite
the abstraction, attraction, and object lessons)

is anybody’s guess.

 

untitled

Which Walk 7

what and who

A dark day finds
heart’s head hatted

and masked with crime
being read into its head

as descent into the local hell

means taking in the ashy
remains of everything with

each breath a reckoning, each step
the mistake of not sheltering in place

while            elsewhere            breath

taken            fills

the same head with fresh despair
of the deadly situation where seconds

become minutes then
centuries where the dead lay
with vast fires closing in

but not here or not yet as
trying for a semblance

of thought            as active            leveraged

expression            of fair

weather’s            familiar

talk while reassembling the same
everything in head’s heart

of later air clear for now

though nothing is better
except if it is when

kinds of crime rhyme
what is wrong (but present)

with what (and who) are gone

 

untitled

symmetry
  

Are there two lines because there are two feet, hands, eyes? Maybe. This walking and making is a process, a procession. When she called an earlier book Symmetry she meant to dismantle this concept with each gesture. Is this that? she wonders, but suspects it is not—as, falling endlessly forward, she moves through space like a sound or a bird. A need for trust occurs. Balance. Emptiness. You can’t think about every step, but you should, she worries. Situational awareness. A military term. A thing is exact. Or exactly not. Intentional. Intended. Once her project was something like courtly love but now she feels betrothed to her work.

The woman stares at herself in the mirror. She makes self-portraits less because of an interest in self than because she is her only model. She enjoys drawing her wrinkles because they add texture. Me and not me, she is simply a thoughtful arrangement of phrases, lines, and planes—scribbled hair.

—from Which Walks

Laura Moriarty was born in St. Paul, MN, and grew up in Cape Cod and Northern California. She attended the University of California at Berkeley. She was the Director of the American Poetry Archives at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University for many years. She has taught at Naropa University and Mills College. She was Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution for two decades. She won the Poetry Center Book Award in 1983, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature in 1998, and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. Her most recent book is Personal Volcano from Nightboat. Which Walks is forthcoming from Nightboat. She lives in Richmond, CA.

Sue Havens

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

 

My interdisciplinary practice and unconventional approach, embodied in abstract painting, sculpture, and installation, are inspired by the spectacular and mundane of the world’s visual vernacular as revealed in my surrounding environments. These disparate influences — such as the lights on amusement park rides at the state fair, dotted sidewalk pavers, painted lines in parking lots, thrift store fabrics, cracked pavement, Turkish kilims, supermarket packaging, miniature golf architecture, and tree bark — are bolstered by my ongoing investigation of flatness, dimensionality, color, and pattern within painting and sculpture. I create new forms by culling references from the areas I live, the places I travel, and the objects and ephemera I collect so that content might be remembered, discovered, and felt.

Sue Havens (born 1972 in Rochester, New York) is an artist based in New York and Tampa. Havens received her BFA in Art from The Cooper Union for The Advancement of Science and Art in 1995, and her MFA in painting from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2003. Havens is a 2008 Fellowship recipient in Painting from The New York Foundation for the Arts and a recipient of the 2017 McKnight Junior Faculty Development Fellowship. She is currently an assistant Professor of Art at The University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida.

 

Havens has exhibited internationally and nationally in venues such as The Knockdown Center in New York, Galerie Nord in Berlin, The Museum of Drawings in Laholm, Sweden, The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art at UNLV, Regina Rex, Underdonk, The Switzer Gallery at Pensacola State, Jeff Bailey, PS 122, Postmasters, Frederich Petzel, Art in General, Momenta Art, Sara Meltzer, OK Harris, Pierogi, The Tampa Museum of Art, and Mindy Solomon in Miami among many others. Havens authored, designed and illustrated the book Make Your Own Toys (2010). Her work was featured in Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, New American Painting Magazine, the Korean International Ceramic Biennale.

Soledad Salamé

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

—images courtesy of Goya Contemporary and the artist—

Artist’s Statement

 

My art is a conceptual and visual exploration of the intersection of science, technology, and social justice issues defining the age in which we live. Engaged with the political implications of environmental issues, my recent work maps vulnerable marginalized communities suffering the greatest consequences of natural disasters.

Working in glass, silk, and paper effectively extended my visual vocabulary, incorporating textual relief elements to underscore collective negligence regarding climate change, including rapid melting of glaciers and polar ice caps. Climate change has triggered people’s migration from areas affected by rising water and unstable weather. In the USA, Border security policies intensify the social impact of migration, exacerbating unsustainable environmental practices.

Our world is in a constant flux and transformation. The way we communicate our actions’ consequences has been transformed. We once created a tactile object – a newspaper — providing a richly physical interaction made from plant-based paper; today, with the slow death of print media, we interact with world news through digital reporting, easily distorted or manipulated.

I wish to record this change as a call to action to protect both the earth’s precious natural resources and its people, while pointing to the fragile beauty surrounding us. By magnifying the pleasures inherent in natural materials — paper, textiles, and even sand-based glass – my work seeks to remind us of the magnificence and splendor that may be lost if we do not protect the environment.

Soledad Salamé, American, was born in Santiago, Chile in 1954. She currently lives and works
in Baltimore, Maryland, where she directs Sol Print Studio, an experimental space for artists to develop and refine their printmaking skills.

 

From 1973 to 1983 Salamé lived and studied in Venezuela. During this time she was exposed to the rainforest, a pivotal experience in her artistic development. As an interdisciplinary artist, Salamé creates work that originates from extensive research of specific environmental and human rights topics. In the pursuit of new ideas, she has conducted intensive field research in the Americas, and Antarctica.

Her work has been presented at multiple venues, Baltimore Museum of Art, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD. Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Denver Museum of Art, CO; Miami Art Museum, FL; El Museo Del Barrio, NY; The Women Museum, Washington DC; and the Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile.

Salamé’s work is represented in private and public collections internationally, including The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, The Baltimore Museum of Art. Her work is included in The Contemporary Museum, 20 Years, by Irene Hoffman, Latin American Women Artists of the United States, by Robert Henkes and Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century, by Edward J. Sullivan.

Donna McCullough

 

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

 

Fashion is well known as a reliable reflection of cultural trends and historical events. On a personal level, it has become my creative vehicle for exploring and recording life events—my three dimensional diary.

My inspiration arose from contemplating the dichotomy between the perception of women as fragile, delicate creatures, and the reality that most women are defined by resiliency and steely resolve. My work is about women and culture – women throughout history and women in my life. I employ a juxtaposition of extremes such as lightness and gravity, suppleness and intransigence, to convey feminine sensibilities.

Crafted of steel and embellished with flourishes of wire mesh, screening, cut-outs and bits of found objects, the dresses are at once both elegant and imposing. I use steel and various found metals including tin cans and vintage oil cans. Nearly all of the materials I use are recycled. I like the duplicitous nature of steel which can be manipulated to appear feminine and soft while actually maintaining its strength and rigidity—an expression in contrasts and complements. Through the dresses, I am combining opposites to activate harmonious and ethereal beauty.

Donna M. McCullough was born and currently lives in Maryland. Beginning her career as a painter and print maker, McCullough switched to sculpture in 1996. Working mostly in steel and found objects, she has also ventured into other media including stone and wood. She has exhibited at the Corcoran Museum of Art, the Art Museum of the Americas, the Hickory Museum of Art, the International Museum of the Horse, the Grounds for Sculpture, and the United States Botanic Garden. Her work is in collections nationally and internationally.

Ana Rendich

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

I have always been connected to the invisible and visible aspects of human drama, the particular and the universal. Although my paintings and sculptures are my own work, they are not intended to be about me. The subject matter is greater than me as an individual. My studio is like a lab, where space, form and meaning intertwine, shaping and filling my artworks.

I have been exploring the Japanese concept “Ma” (間), a concept embedded in our relationship with our space, internal and external, and how we relate one to another one; as well as the interpretation of time and space, pauses and silences, and the emptiness in a space, full of possibilities. This concept MA is the skeleton of my works, where my art starts. These sculptures, mixed media and paintings emerge from a thought, an infinite path with no endpoint, where resolution is impossible. Hope in the light of loss and displacement is my primary subject. The works are fragments of what has been lost, negated, and postponed. Their structures are a form of reparation, a healing tool, tying together absences and presences, sometimes in a meditative form.

In some of my sculptures, I incorporate resin, because of its reflective or opaque property, but I transform it, leaving my own fingerprints, and colors are mainly a tool that reveals presence. In certain works, the observer can see the ghostly effect generated by the reflection created by the mixed media illustrating the transient and mercurial nature of reality. Upon seeing my art, many find that the colors draw their attention before anything else. The story behind these colors is born in the interplay between these colors, but it is not color itself that matters most to me. Rather, the color is secondary, the whole composition makes the work… Colors and shapes are not separated elements, both are an essential symbiosis. When I make an artwork that contains individual pieces, it is always thinking that each piece must belong to the next artwork, creating a work, where all the pieces share the same space; the togetherness is what makes the work.

My work has been evolving and changing every year, incorporating new media and materials. Sculpture and mixed media has helped me to grow, and it gives me the chance to explore pieces rooted in the human condition, past and present social and historic events. In the WWII pieces, for example, the research in getting the letters from WWII has been a long road, it almost took me two years until I started to work.

The base of my art is bringing presence through absence. There are different types of absences: not only physical absence, but also the lack of the fabric that could make us better human beings. All these have created the need to incorporate other elements, according to the sensibility of each piece, like the use of wood, fabric, metal, yarn and paper, besides oil, silicone, etc. I enjoy immensely the closeness with my materials, that intimacy…the tactile and physical connection, too, aids to create a deep connection with space, form and meaning, leaving all decorative items aside, and helps me to concentrate more in exploration, questioning and contemplation. I see the reflections, materials and surfaces as healing presences, making the invisible visible.

Ana Rendich was born in Argentina and lives and works in Spotsylvania, Viriginia. She attended Instituto Superior de Arte del Teatro Colon, University del Salvador, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the National Academy of Design, New York, New York.

Holly Wong

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small
Artist’s Statement

I create installations, assemblages and works on paper that summon protection and celebrate female energy. Using materials such as colored pencil, drafting film, paint, and candle smoke, I strive to reconnect in myself what has been fragmented. Much of my work is constructed with ephemeral materials that are both strong and fragile simultaneously. Working often within the context of memory and impermanence, I gather images and patterns. I often name my pieces after Goddesses because my work once completed becomes a form of drawing down eternal energy and life force. I am calling upon those forces of protection through the practice of making artwork. Art is my form of magical practice which reveals the sacred in myself.
Holly Wong lives in San Francisco, California. She was educated at the San Francisco Art Institute where she earned a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in New Genres. Holly creates installations, assemblages and works on paper. She has been awarded visual arts grants from the Integrity: Arts and Culture Association, Barbara Deming Memorial fund, the George Sugarman Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, and a Gerbode Foundation purchase award. She has had over 70 group exhibitions and 10 solo exhibitions. She is represented by SLATE Contemporary Gallery in Oakland, California, and is a member of A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.

Joan Tanner

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

I am interested in encounters suggesting the fragile necessity of linkage inherent to art making.

Relishing in connections as well as contradictions generated by revising order where conflict becomes compelling, and solutions are deferred.

My work began in painting which I pursued until the early 90s. Then a significant change evolved from an intentional pursuit to take things apart and rebuild noting what needed another identity.

This shift began to disperse my attention to investigating sequence as an inevitable discourse of disruption and misdirection. Displacement being a persistent offering.

Born in 1935 in Indianapolis, Joan Tanner has lived in Southern California since the mid-1960s. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1957 and began her career as a painter. She has been consistently exhibiting her paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture and site-specific installations since 1968. Tanner maintains a vigorous studio practice somewhat akin to a laboratory and is inspired by spatial contradictions, archetypal geometric forms and raw materials. Her work is held in numerous private and corporate collections and in the following public collections: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Special Collections; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Harvard University, Houghton Library, Department of Printing and Graphics, Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York Public Library, Spencer Collection, New York City, NY; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California. Over the years, Tanner has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California–Santa Barbara, Ohio University in Athens, Illinois State University at Normal, and an artist-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Judith Henry

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small
Artist’s Statement

During my art career I have used various multi-media techniques to both explore and hide identity. I examine the friction between the interior life and public self. To stress anonymity, I have often used masks in my work. In this issue of Posit I am showing work from two series done recently. Beauty Masks is a book consisting of self-portraits made by covering my face with “found” faces. There are 120 self-portraits in this book. I juxtapose images of model’s faces ripped from fashion magazines over my own face as a mask. The images I have chosen to disguise myself are diverse in their race, hairdo, accessories and dress. There’s a stark contrast between the retouched and made-up faces and my actual hands and body — a reminder of the commodification of idealized beauty and a reflection of the fear of death. The second series, Casting Call, is a collection of almost 300 miniature sculptures made of detritus found in my studio, on the streets and in my kitchen. I utilized adhesive tape, push pins, paint tubes, sponges, cotton balls, swabs, nails, clips, screws, anything and everything I was able to glean. These recombinant icons emerged as an installation at BravinLee Projects in 2018.They extend my exploration of personal identify by creating humanoid surrogate identities that stand in for my hidden persona(s). The diversity of forms reflect the huge disparity found in any crowd. Having pursued a detached, perhaps secretive, or voyeuristic observation of people throughout my career, I believe that my work has evolved into a unique and revelatory depiction of human nature in all its diversion and mass commonality.
Judith Henry is a multi-media artist, born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. After receiving a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, she moved to New York and started making art that explored the misalignments between cultural representation and inner psychology. She utilizes drawing, photography, typography, video, painting, sculpture, and bookmaking. Henry has shown her art in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Cleveland, Philadelphia and internationally in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, London and Switzerland. Her most recent solo shows were at BravinLee programs, New York, 2015 and 2018, Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, 2016 and The National Arts Club, New York, 2017.