Tag Archives: visual art

Jeanne Heifetz

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Artist’s Statement

[W]ayfarer, there is no road, the road is made by walking.
— Antonio Machado, Proverbs and Songs 29

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
—Theodore Roethke, The Waking

As a child, I was always afraid of making the wrong decision. Selecting from many possible options was torture unless I could find a convincing rationale for my choice, some external justification beyond my own desire. Fear made me superstitious. I enlisted numerology, mythology, arcane patterns of all sorts to confirm the “rightness” of my decisions.

This body of work confronts decision-making head on. Still craving a system, I borrow one from nature: Plateau’s laws, which govern the branching and growth of many natural forms. Within that system, I improvise, lighting out for the territory without a map. Each drawing grows by slow accretion as I allow myself (or force myself) to make hundreds of tiny sequential decisions.

Working at the micro level, I have no idea of the macro consequences until I step back from the piece. Even then, because I work in ink, I can only move forward, building on what I have already laid down. There’s no turning back. The tiny decisions are irreversible, like scars and other indices of the unidirectionality of our lives. In this way, making the work is like life: a series of incremental choices whose full import we may not know for years.

There is no road: we make the road by walking, and learn by going where to go.

Jeanne Heifetz is an artist and independent curator based in Brooklyn. She has had solo and two-person shows at galleries, nonprofit art centers, and universities in California, Connecticut, Idaho, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and Oregon. Her work has also been included in group shows at galleries, universities, and museums across the United States as well as in Italy, Germany, England, France, and Israel. Her drawings have been included in Manifest’s International Drawing Annual and in the curated registry of The Drawing Center. Heifetz holds an A.B. from Harvard and an M.A. from NYU, neither of them in art.

Nathan Brujis

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Nathan Brujis was born in 1971 in Lima, Peru. He studied art and philosophy at Brandeis University and graduated from the American University of Washington with a master’s degree. He has been awarded the Deborah Josepha Cohen Memorial Award for Excellence in Painting in 1992, the New York Studio School Faculty Award in 1994, and il Premio per la Pittura Lorenzo il Magnifico at the Florence Biennale d’Arte Contemporanea in 2001 and 2003. He has exhibited extensively in New York, Lima, Peru, and Italy. He lives and works in New York.
Artist’s Statement

My paintings and drawings have evolved over time and continue to do so. They have undergone several shifts, like the one in 1996 when my work became completely non- objective. At that time I abandoned any direct representation of recognizable objects in favor of the abstract forces of two-dimensional images to convey the meaning in the works. Nevertheless, the works continued to carry the feeling of nature. I allowed them to remain on the side of the expressive and lyrical through a painting process of instant reaction and subconscious image searching. I never know what a work is going to be when I begin. Each piece is its own search, related to other works of the same period via form and content. Some works find themselves quickly while others take years to make. Some are like a song or a short story while others are more like a complex symphony or novel.

All the paintings and drawings arrive at their own image. To achieve this image, I allow personal experiences, events and ideas of the times, nature, mood, my environment, the art of the past, and most importantly the visual language I have developed over the past 14 years, to come together and create a sense of place. This place, a window or mirror into a landscape, still life, or por­trait, made up of simple geometric forms arranged in layers and organized in groups, solidifies into a multidimensional experience of color, space, meaning, and light.

Mie Yim

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Artist’s Statement

As a Korean-born artist, I am interested in the intersection of Asian pop visual culture and American post-war painting. My oil paintings are portraits of animal-human hybrids. They are beings that have gone through some kind of transformative journey, through the process of built up of form and figure and paint and surface. Erasing, rendering, smearing, modeling. I like the tension of having the range of illustrative figures, then loose, floppy paint obliterating the figure, letting abstraction come through, finding the balance. In my paintings, I foster multiple positions in the cultural, anthropomorphic and art historical identities.

As a child, I was weaned on Hello Kitty and various other hopelessly cute dolls and fluffy animals. Later, as an art student in United States, I felt nourished by Phillip Guston, Willem DeKooning, and also Italian painters like Caravaggio. I think of my characters as distant cousins of imagined creatures, avatars of anxiety, lust and longing. They iterate playfulness with dark underpinnings. Maybe underneath the sugary puff balls and banal gaze, it’s all guts and turmoil and existential crisis. I hope the viewer can sense the edge of East/West, Abstract/Figurative.

The fragmental element in my life becomes whole in my art.

Mie Yim was born in South Korea in 1963. She grew up in Hawaii, earned a B.F.A. from the Philadelphia College of Art, and spent a year at the Tyler School of Art’s program in Rome. Her work has been displayed in numerous international exhibitions, including solo shows at Lehmann Maupin Gallery and Michael Steinberg Fine Arts in New York as well as the Galleria in Arco in Turin, Italy. She was included in “Selections” at the Drawing Center, and her work has been shown in group exhibitions at the ATM Gallery, Feature, Inc. and the Ise Cultural Foundation in New York, as well as Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas and The Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina. She has been selected for the AIM program at The Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Jurors Award at N.Y.U. Gallery. Her work has been collected at such places as the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City and the Chambers Hotel in New York City and published on the back cover of a textbook called “Social Text” by Duke University. Her writing has been included in “THIS,” a Collection of artists’ writings edited by Susan Jennings. She is the author of a book called “A.B.C. of S.E.X.” and a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowship. She lives and works in New York City.

Amy Pleasant

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Artist’s Statement

My work explores the body and repetitive gesture. With a limited palette and an economy of line, I paint, draw and cut fragmented forms of the figure. I am documenting essential, universal motions and human behaviors, simplified and stripped down.

Amy Pleasant, www.amypleasant.com, received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art. Represented by Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY and whitespace gallery, Atlanta, GA, her work has been shown at venues such as Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Atlanta Contemporary, Cuevas Tilleard Projects, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the U.S. Embassy, Prague, Czech Republic. Her work has been reviewed in Sculpture, The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, and artforum.com, among others. Pleasant was named a recipient of the 2015 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award.

Lori Anderson Moseman

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Two from Darn

 

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Artist’s Statement

If only we could mend the hole in the ozone with language, could use oration to staunch global warming. These poems are “place holders” in an ongoing manuscript called Darn—a book-space that contains my culturally produced apocalyptic angst. It also contains energy I generated by emptying and selling my mother’s house so she could migrate. Many of the images within the text are residue of/ reactions to “her” objects that now share the room I call my studio.

Lori Anderson Moseman’s poetry collections are Flash Mob (Spuyten Duyvil), All Steel (Flim Forum Press), Temporary Bunk (Swank Books), Persona (Swank Books), and Cultivating Excess (The Eighth Mountain Press). Her chapbooks are Host (Nous-Zot) and Walking The Dead (Heaven Bone). A collaboration with book artist Karen Pava Randall, Full Quiver, was released by Propolis Press in 2015. To celebrate writers and artists whose creativity buoys others, Anderson Moseman founded the press, Stockport Flats, in the wake of Federal Disaster #1649, a flood along the Upper Delaware River. Recently, her poetry has appeared in: 100WordStory, Barzakh, dislocate, divide, Dusie Magazine, Epoch, In/Filtration: An anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson Valley, PEEP/SHOW: A Taxonomic Exercise in Textual and Visual Seriality, Opon, Portland Review, Stolen Island, Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, Trickhouse.org, Tonopah Review, The Volta.org., Water~Stone, Zarf and Zócalo Public Square.

Sandy Litchfield

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Artist’s Statement

My recent work explores evolutionary cycles of cities. My paintings are informed by a diverse collection of imagery including old distorted maps, pictures of ancient and mythic cities, utopian blueprints and early renaissance landscapes. These are typically combined with my own photographs in studies using collage and paint. I look for compositions that emphasize our positional relationships to place- like being over, under, around, or inside. I also pay attention to the flows of traffic and the ways that transportation and infrastructure are formed over and around the existing environment. As living systems, cities share an uncanny resemblance to forests– both grow upwards and outwards on vertical and lateral frameworks; both can appear as glittering spectacles of light with variable contrast; and both harbor diversity and sustenance. The – the ways that urban infrastructure grows over (and out of) an old collapsed edifice- is also comparable to forests. Just as a dead tree provides nourishment for new under-growth, so do the old structures of a city enrich the cultural heritage of the metropolis. My approach to making art is initially research driven. Once an artwork has begun to take form, my process shifts away from the research towards a more intuitive approach, responding to formal elements, materials and surface. I use a range of painterly mediums along with collage and digital media. This method- of layering, cutting, drawing, tearing, painting, scanning, printing and gluing- obscures the distinctions between the mechanical image and the handmade.

Born in New York City, Sandy Litchfield lives in Amherst, Massachusetts where she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts. She received her BFA from the University of Colorado and her MFA from UMass Amherst. In 2007 Litchfield attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been recognized with grants from the New Britain Museum, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Puffin Foundation. Litchfield has exhibited in museums including the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Nicolaysen Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, and Hunterdon Museum. Her work has been selected for review by the Brooklyn Rail, New American Paintings and the Boston Globe.

Steve DeFrank

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Artist’s Statement

I unapologetically embrace all the formal skills of object making that engage old-fashioned, soul-baring individuality with absurdity, acknowledging the pleasure, pain, and awkwardness of being human. These works never take themselves, or the fabricated insights they open onto, too seriously. I see them as alive, as walking away from the wall. It’s a feeling that the works are energetic, active in our world, not separate —they have a sort of aliveness all their own. I feel as if they have a human scale, a figurative property; in some instances more obviously and in others, less so.

Steve DeFrank (stevedefrank.com), fine artist, lover of salsa but has no rhythm, a Lucha libre (Mexican Wrestling) fanatic, BFA, Maryland Art Institute College of Art; MFA, School of Visual Arts. Awards and honors include Fulbright Scholar Mexico, Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Foundation Grant, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award to an outstanding painter. Five solo shows in New York, two-person show Provincetown Museum of Art. Way too many group shows to mention. In collections of the New Museum, SEI/West Family Collection, and the Eli and Edyth Broad Art Museum. Cover Art for the New York Times Magazine. Publications include: New York Times, Art in America, New Yorker Talk of the Town, Village Voice and Vice Magazine.

Beth Dary

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Artist’s Statement

Bubbles of ancient CO2 captured in Arctic ice; mottled landscapes of mold that grew inside houses in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy; trails of fluid formed by the liquid contaminants in urban runoff – these phenomena represent nature in transition due to our culture’s impact on the environment.

The formations that manifest at such sites inspire me, in part because I have always lived at the water’s edge, from my childhood on Cape Cod to adult life in New Orleans and New York City. Hand blown glass sculptures evoke both bubbles in ice, and the fragility of the environment. A series of kinetic sculptures and wall drawings made of tiny black and white-headed pins borrow the patterns of mold in New Orleans after the floodwaters receded; a multi-channel video projected on to glass windows of a service station captures the chemical turbulence on the surface of puddles on the streets of New York, and an installation of over a thousand hand-built porcelain sculptures represents marine barnacles that will increasingly occupy coastal areas as our actions warm the globe and waters begin to rise.

Environments under stress are more than a thematic aspect of the work as the materials themselves have transitional qualities and are subject to interactive and evolutionary change. Ceramic sculptures are bisque-fired, without the final firing that would render them impermeable, leaving them porous and vulnerable. A series of blown glass “bubbles” installed in an outdoor urban lily pond take on water and algae as they become a part of the landscape, and reflect the world around them.

I explore the liminal space between nature untouched by human intervention and the “new nature” we create every day.

Beth Dary is originally from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and currently lives and works in New York City. Dary holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University and a Masters of Fine Arts from Memphis College of Art. She has participated in several artist residency programs including Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her work has been curated into exhibits at the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art in Russia, Satellite and Miami Project Art Fairs in Miami and Prospect 1.5 in New Orleans. Dary’s work has been commissioned by Battery Park City in Manhattan and she has received grants from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and The Manhattan Community Arts Fund. Her work is in several private and corporate collections, including the Edelman Corporation and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Renee Robbins

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Artist’s Statement

“Love Letter Etchings” stem from a deep obsession with the diversity of flora and fauna in the ocean. I see these pieces as analogous to love letters to my heroes or unknown celebrities. In contrast to some of my other work, which abstracts and imagines natural phenomena in densely layered painting compositions, the specimens in these compositions are based on actual creatures. My process involves lots of research about the creatures in order to learn more about them, consider their habitat, and respond to their unique characteristics within the love letter.

Renee Robbins is a Chicago-based visual artist who focuses on depicting micro to macro relationships. She is represented by Lois Lambert Gallery in Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA. Her public art commission in downtown Chicago, “X Marks the Milky Way,” is featured in the Wabash Arts Corridor. She has exhibited widely, including at the Fermilab, America’s premier particle physics laboratory, Alden B Dow Museum of Science and Art, Firecat Projects, Adventureland Gallery, Packer Schopf Gallery, and the Hyde Park Art Center. The Chicago Gallery News featured Robbins as a ‘Young Chicago Artist’ to watch.

John Hundt

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Artist’s Statement

Nature and the world around us is the inspiration for my work. I explore the notion of evolution that ‘took a wrong turn’, whether it be vegetation or animal, blending elements drawn from human, animal, geological, astrological, archeological, and others. The funny thing is, it is likely that over the hundreds of million years of Life on Earth, many of these strange little creatures of mine may have well walked the Earth at one time.

John Hundt was born in New Jersey, but his family moved to Los Angeles when he was five. After high school he moved to San Francisco where he put himself through the San Francisco Art Institute. John has had solo and two person shows throughout the US, as well as numerous group shows in the US and Europe. He is currently in a show at Stanford University. His solo shows have been reviewed in arts publications and his work published in New Collectors Book vol. 4 & 5. He is co-curator of the international collage exhibition, “Marvelous” (Sebastopol Center for the Arts, January, 2017). His work is handled by Aeterna Gallery in Los Angeles, Lauren Davies Projects in Cleveland and Jack Fischer Gallery in SF.