Kukuli Velarde

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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.

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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.

Steve DeFrank

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Artist’s Statement

 

Art is not something I discovered in museums, but rather from the seat of a La-Z-Boy and the wacky wild world of Looney Tunes. I discovered a talent for unraveling hidden layers of queerness and subversion, akin to deciphering a foreign language. As a kid, I couldn’t help but believe that Krazy Kat and Ignatz were queer lovers or feel a peculiar excitement watching Bugs Bunny in drag kissing Elmer Fudd. As a painter, this sets up a tension between traditional painting and suburban popular culture creating a hybridization of images taken from hours of watching tv, mind-numbing malls, rebellious graffiti, a forbidden attraction to men that had to be subverted.

I create a collision of worlds. Imagine Bach composing an opus set in Barbie’s dream world—that’s the audacious fusion of high and popular culture that forms the backbone of my work. Inspired by the unexpected narratives born from unconventional unions, my paintings reveal a range of forms and images that contain tension, referencing the bulbous cartoon shapes and those found in graffiti. These images exist in sharp contrast with the process of my formal, traditional use of paint.

At the heart of my painting process lies an unwavering fascination with queerness. It is a singular obsession that drives me to infuse my paintings with a distinct queer sensibility. Beyond the tired stereotypes associated with the LGBTQ+ community, I seek to challenge and transcend, delving into realms beyond Tom of Finland and glitter. Through my queer-colored glasses, I reimagine narratives, provoke thoughts, and push boundaries. My desire to make the paintings queer is a quixotic one, where I am both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

When I’m not doing fieldwork analyzing Saturday morning cartoons, I walk the streets of different cities, looking at the graffitied-tagged buildings. I see these as Mayan glyphs or displaced Disney-like shapes, a language brimming with symbolism and meaning. I harness the raw energy, vibrant colors, and fearless expression of these forms in my paintings, combining an unschooled, unpretentious, urban, and suburban visual language with a trained academic style. I create an amalgam of tension and elements that contradict one another in a way that is important to the paintings. I identify as an academic figurative painter, and yet I don’t paint the figure. I utilize contemporary conceptual approaches using casein paint—an ancient milk-based paint deeply rooted in art history—transforming it like a drag queen that playfully places a big wet smooch right on the kisser of a cartoon hunter. This inherent contradiction encapsulates my worldview—I am disciplined and meticulous, lighthearted and playful. I weave together diverse concepts and traditions using an academic structure.

Through blurring the boundaries between the unapproachable ivory tower of the art world, the down-and-dirty culture of the street, the cultural wasteland of the suburbia I grew up in, and the silly goofiness of cartoons, I engage in a perplexing dance—a delicate balancing act. The outcomes are uncertain until the painting begins to come together, and this is the exhilarating, hair-pulling part—the element of surprise, the joy of the unpredictable. Following the painting and letting it lead me is what it’s really all about in the end.

Steve DeFrank draws his inspiration from countless childhood hours glued to Loony Tunes cartoons in the trenches of New Haven Connecticut’s suburban wasteland during the 1970s. His education at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the School of Visual Arts honed his technique and provided the skills for masking his suburban misdemeanors and generating a front of intellectual skills.

Fun fact: DeFrank trained as a luchador, a Mexican wrestler, during his stay as a Fulbright scholar in Mexico City. In his view, Mexican wrestling stands as an allegory for painting.

DeFrank has had many solo shows including at the School of Visual Arts Flat Iron Project Space, most recently a two-person show at Townsend Galley in Watermill NY. His works have been featured in countless group exhibitions, notably at Provincetown Art Association and Museum in Massachusetts. Steve was proud to be included in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oaxaca. He received the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Foundation Grant for an outstanding painter as well he was acknowledged by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which awarded him the distinguished Willard L. Metcalf Award.

DeFrank’s works are in the collections of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, SEI/West Family Collection, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Eli and Edyth Broad Art Museum in Los Angeles. His work has been reviewed in various publications, among the standouts are Vanity Fair, Artnews, Craines, New York, and The New York Times.

Galen Cheney

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Artist’s Statement

 

I have been dedicated to painting for the last 30 years. It is an intensely personal,meaningful and difficult pursuit that I have come to rely on as a way to understand myself and my place in the world. It is in the act of painting that I am both my most vulnerable and brave, where I take risks, face my fears, wrestle with my ego, and remember with urgency that there is no time to make anything that is not true. My paintings are abstract and generally large and are statements about energy made manifest through intuitive color choices, invented compositions, resounding mark making and the cathartic act of ripping and tearing past works in the service of the new. Both thematically and visually they address ideas of expansion and contraction, freedom and constraint, the hidden and exposed and interiority vs. exteriority. What I most want my paintings to convey is a raw vulnerability that is relatable to the viewer and transmits authenticity and beauty. I have long felt a deep kinship with graffiti of all kinds, from ancient cave paintings and centuries-old carved messages on China’s Great Wall, to tags on trains and city walls and declarations of love carved into trees. They all contain the energy of the human hand and the basic human need to tell a story, leave a mark, be remembered. These influences have been present in my work in various ways for many years. The work I am exploring now is a blend of collage, painting and weaving. The pieces are a synthesis of old and new; fragments and strips of paintings that I have ripped or cut up are collaged and woven into new works. Conversations between current and past ideas are embedded in the richly textured surfaces of the paintings, reflecting today’s fragmented digital world while nodding toward traditions of weaving and the handmade.

Galen Cheney is a painter living and working in North Adams, Massachusetts. She was born in Los Angeles and grew up in New England where she has deep roots and feels a strong connection to the land and architecture. After receiving her undergraduate degree in art and Italian from Mount Holyoke College she lived in New York City and worked as a magazine editor. Realizing she was in the wrong profession, she left New York after a few years to attend graduate school at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. Thirty-plus years later, she is still painting. Galen’s work has been exhibited and collected in Europe, the U.S., Canada, and China. She has had residencies at the Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, MASS MoCA, and DaWang Culture Highland in Shenzhen, China. A residency at Pouch Cove, in Newfoundland is upcoming in 2024. Past shows include Buffalo Arts Studio, Mark Bettis Gallery (Asheville), David Richard Gallery (NYC), University of Maine at Augusta, University of Dallas, The Painting Center (NYC), Gray Contemporary (Houston), and Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, among many others. Her work has been featured in many publications, including New American Paintings, Art New England, Tupelo Quarterly, Berkshire Magazine and Whitefish Review. She was recently interviewed for the podcasts Sound and Vision and I Like Your Work.

David Storey

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Artist’s Statement

I make paintings that engage the fluidly permeable boundaries between image and abstraction. Invention, configuration, clarity and the potential energy of color are essential elements to shape a painting that is being made to be uniquely about itself.

Painting is the proper forum for the description of an entire world. It can be an endless, timeless vista that seems to have boundaries yet presents no limits to the possibilities of ever renewing transformation.

Viewing and engaging with a painting is a contract. Once the terms are agreed upon all separations dissolve. The physical laws of here and now are void. Opposites merge. Painting brings us to another mysterious world within our own, collapsing sameness and difference into a universal visual moment.

David Storey is an artist who lives and works in New York. He makes paintings, drawings and prints that compound and condense the interaction between image and abstraction. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Fellowships include the Guggenheim Foundation and an NEA individual artist’s fellowship in addition to residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Public art projects include for the MTA, fourteen mosaic murals installed in the 20th Ave. of the N line subway in Brooklyn (2019).

Jeanne Silverthorne

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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.

Jane Kent

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Artist’s Statement

 

Printed images, to me, are built from the ground plane forward. Layer over layer. I begin with an object using drawing to uncover the oddness of everyday things. For this new work, I am using mirrors. Loosely drawn ovals and rectangles are placed over a backdrop of wallpaper; graphic shorthand of diagonal stripes represents reflective surfaces which become fields of color.

Previously, I have worked with unfolded cardboard boxes, shower heads, clock faces and
drafting lights. Now, I am looking at the distinct configurations of reflection — looking at subject as an invitation to look at looking itself.

Jane Kent makes drawings, prints and artists’ books. She has been working on an artists’ book project since 1999 and has just completed her 6th collaborative project in this series, Little Albert. Working with a previously unpublished prose poem by Joyce Carol Oates, Little Albert, published by Grenfell Press, will be released in May 2023. Kent’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Print and Rare Book Division, Beinecke Library, among others. She has previously shown at the Brooklyn Museum, Mississippi Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, International Print Center of New York, among others. She has been awarded grants from the Lower Eastside Printshop, NY (publishing residency), 2022; Barbara and Thomas Putnam Fellowship, MacDowell Colony, Artist Residency Fellowship, 2012; The Corporation of Yaddo (artists’ fellowship), 2017, 2004, 1995; National Endowment for the Arts (individual artists’ grant), 1990; among others. She lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Vermont.

Jill Moser

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.

Ron Baron

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Artist’s Statement: Shattered Vase Theory

 

Each of my sculptures is composed of a stack of found, commonplace ceramic objects that have been assembled into a vase-like form. These layers of castoff objects form a stratigraphy analogous to that of rock, soil and earth. But, unlike geological materials, these household objects once had a human function: family meals were served on them; they were collected as mementos; or perhaps they served as reminders of important events. Eventually, for whatever reason, the objects lost their value, and what was once cherished became obsolete and insignificant. It is the very forlornness of these abandoned objects that I’m attracted to—even as castoffs they reflect a life, a culture, a moment.

The same kind of artifact provides the raw material for the mosaic of shards that covers the exterior of my vessels. In a sort of reverse archaeology, I smash the whole object and use its fragments to create a Cubist-like skin for the vessel, thereby creating a new form that amalgamates the shattered traces of individuals and families who once possessed these objects. Collaged onto the fragmented surfaces are autobiographical images such as maps from my family travels and experiences. The result is a composite of culture, artifact, and personal history.

I began making these shattered vase forms at home during the COVID quarantine as two-dimensional collages on wood panels. When I was finally able to return to the studio I began to transpose them into three-dimensional bricolage sculptures. During this process I encountered the “Shattered Vase Theory,” a psychological concept introduced by Stephen Joseph in his book, What Doesn’t Kill Us – The New Psychology of Post-traumatic Growth. The theory grew out of a 1990s psychological study of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In Joseph’s concept, the shattered vase is a metaphor for someone who has experienced severe loss, trauma and PTSD. The essence of the analogy is that we begin as a beautiful vase, intact and lovely. Then tragedy strikes and the once perfect vase is shattered. There is a yearning to pick up the pieces, to glue and reassemble the vase as it once was, but this isn’t achievable. Instead, with some time and reevaluation one can begin to imagine that these shards could be transformed and reassembled into something entirely new and perhaps also wonderful.

This fresh perspective is what psychologists refer to as Post-Stress Growth (PSG), that is, the ability to transform a traumatic experience into a renewed possibility through an acceptance of change. Surprisingly, PSG happens to a fairly large percentage of people who have encountered severe trauma. Evidently, I belong to this group, in that my shattered vase sculptures bloomed from my family’s trauma.

Ron Baron has shown his work nationally and internationally since 1989 and completed over 25 public art projects throughout the United States. Some of his most prominent commissions are with the Metropolitan Transit Association NYC, Indianapolis International Airport, Board of Education NYC, Depart of Cultural Affairs NYC, Alaska International Airport, Chicago Transit Authority, Cleveland Transit Authority, University of Oregon, Portland Regional Arts Council and the Department of Cultural Affairs San Jose, CA. Baron has won numerous awards including New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner, Yaddo Endowed Residency and a Lila Wallace Endowed Residency at the Monet Museum in Giverny, France.

Soledad Salamé

—click on any image to enlarge—

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—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.