Tag Archives: visual art

Camille Eskell

Posted on by

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

My current series, The Fez as Storyteller, is a group of mixed-media sculptures and works on paper that explores the social and psychological legacy of my Iraqi, Jewish and Indian multi-cultural history, and more broadly questions the attitudes, conventions, and indoctrination that religious and social systems perpetuate over generations. Steeped in memory, the work addresses gender bias, entrenched customs, control, and the emotional turbulence that formed this heritage to critique yet commemorate this tradition.

Resembling artifacts, these works are a culmination of my lifelong interests in art, history, clothing/fashion, and psychology. They combine and contrast material elements, cultural symbols and associations from Middle Eastern, South Asian and Sephardic traditions with reconfigured imagery of family and place, suggesting irony and contradiction. I use the fez cap (traditional Middle-Eastern headgear) as a structural base for the storytelling to reflect the foundation established by my forebears, who left Iraq for Bombay to become traders of the hats in their adopted land. The crafting of each piece is meticulous, time-consuming, and process-driven. It consists of designing the piece, composing the multi-layered images digitally (some up to 80 layers), procuring the various elements from resources such as consignment shops, thrift stores, fabric and accessory vendors, and devising the best techniques to combine them. Disassembling and re-working existing garments, accessories and decorative items, hand-sewing, beading, and intricate fastening are some of the methods used.

Award-winning artist Camille Eskell exhibits her work throughout the U.S. and abroad. Her work is in public and private collections, including the Chrysler Museum of Art/VA, The Hudson River Museum/NY and the Housatonic Museum of Art/CT. She recently received her third Artist Fellowship grant, this from the Connecticut Office of the Arts; reviews in The Huffington Post, The New York Times, D’arte, Art New England and The Examiner, and residencies at the Weir Farm National Historic site and the Vermont Studio Center are among her distinctions. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Queens College/CUNY, and lives/works in Connecticut.

Gabe Brown

Posted on by

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

As an artist, I search for meaning in the unknown. Exploring a world beyond my own tangible reality, I see myself as part of a larger, richer universe. A universe that expands further through a conscious effort to embrace the meaning of that which I create in my own personal life, as well as the experiences generated by the lives of those around me.

Art is like magic, an illusion created by the force of humanity. Our choices in life can be amazing portals for adventure. For me, these possibilities present themselves through the process of painting: researching potent images, configuring them on canvas, and struggling to imbue them with a sense of myself and my own wonder at the enormous complexity of the world. I seek a better understanding of truth in nature with constant comparison and evaluation of opposites. Using a visual vocabulary derived from a world that often goes unnoticed, everyday events such as conversations between birds, forces that drive water, or the cellular structure of plant life, I begin to reinvent reality. This experience enables me to come closer to an understanding of how it is that I identify with the world. The concerns that arise from this process reveal themselves to me as subversive dualities existing in both the natural world and the man-made. When we consider something in a new context, having unearthed the intrigue that lies just beneath the surface of the seemingly simple, the original meaning is altered and brought to a new level of consciousness, creating metaphor. In this way, I can see, and show, that the natural world is not unlike our own man-made realm, an alternate universe filled with an active power to recognize desire, temptation, and frailty.

The paintings create a secret recipe for an inner landscape of the human condition; narrative vignettes that are both alluring and mysterious. Nature, and those elements existing in its microcosm become metaphors for a strange and at times super reality, a parallel universe that questions the natural scheme of life itself.

Gabe Brown was raised in New York City. She received her BFA degree from The Cooper Union and was awarded a Full Fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She went on to receive her MFA in Painting from the University of California, Davis.

She is a 2018 recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and one of two artists chosen to be included in a public arts project for ArtsBridge. She has been a Resident Fellow at The Saltonstall Foundation, Anderson Center at Tower View, and Women’s Studio Workshop. Her paintings and works on paper have been exhibited nationally in galleries and museums such as Kenise Barnes Contemporary Art, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Butters Gallery, Matteawan Gallery, Adah Rose Gallery, The Saratoga Arts Center, Garrison Arts Center, John Davis Gallery, ArtsWestchester, Schweinfurth Arts Center, SUNY Brockport, The Horticultural Society of New York, Albany International Airport, Sears-Peyton Gallery, and Carrie Haddad Gallery. Her work is included in both public and private collections.

Gabe Brown is an Adjunct Professor in Painting and Drawing at Fordham University and SUNY New Paltz where she has received three Merit Awards for Professional Achievement. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley.

Adams Puryear

Posted on by

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

Adams Puryear explores the Internet’s flow of convoluted information and how tactile materials and different media can represent it. Experimenting with physical translations of the Internet’s anti-filter rabbit hole, Adams continues to return to the materials of ceramic and gypsum to create historically sedimented sculptural elements contrasting present-day electronic displays and dynamic materials. Obsessively grazing over electronic images of history and culture, Adams understands the Internet’s growth and its visualization of time as one slowly unfolding in a nonlinear and ultimately muddled formlessness. In much of his work an amorphous and colored blob, moving in-real-time from a ceramic container, becomes another dichotomy to the push-pull of digital-analogue, historical-new, formal-experiential oppositional elements in the work. Paradoxically it is this oozey blob — a material with a comparatively short lifespan and history that over weeks empties from the sculpture’s body and continues to change until it reaches a solid state — which slows down a viewing and resists a tidy resolution. This is the work’s answer to our culture’s continued acceleration.

Adams Puryear received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 2004 and an MFA from Indiana University in 2012. His work has recently been featured in exhibitions around New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, and the Museum of Art in the Dominican Republic among others. He is also the founder of FPOAFM Nomadic Studios, a project-driven experimental art/craft collective engaged in functional art discourse.

Julie Peppito

Posted on by

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

In “Nature, Fashion & War,” I have created large-scale charcoals and tapestries that draw connections between the human desire to want more of everything versus the destructive impact our consumerism has on the environment and the survival of our species. The colorful, multi-layered, fashion-inspired tapestries in “Nature, Fashion & War” contain objects that were on their way to becoming trash. At one time these items were desirable status symbols or served a functional purpose. By smashing, wrapping, and sewing old shoes, clothes, toys, jewelry, cans, and other debris into pliable surfaces, then combining them with carefully painted and drawn images of politicians, nature, people, and monsters, I create topographical narratives that comment on the systems destroying life on earth.

These works are my answer to author Naomi Klein’s assertion that “No Is Not Enough.” This exhibition speaks to the catastrophic effects unregulated industries are having on us, the role human nature plays in that, our coping mechanisms, and strategies towards a healthy inhabitable world. My titles often reference books and articles from notable journalists like Naomi Klein, Jane Mayer, Sharon Lerner, Brene Brown and Arundati Roy. Since the recent re-invention of “fake news,” I have set out to create mammoth illustrations interspersed with giant word balloons inspired by these authors’ well-researched works. These works are intended to illuminate the intricate web of violence, greed, love and beauty that comprise human nature, in order to help tip the future towards our positive instincts and away from those hurling us towards extinction.

Julie Peppito was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then moved to New York City, where she received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1992. She received her MFA from Alfred University in 2004, and has shown extensively for the past 25 years. She has received several grants including a New York Foundation of The Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in 2001. She has also created art for several New York playgrounds. In April of 2018 she presented her seventh solo exhibition titled “Nature, Fashion & War” in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has become increasingly involved in creating agitprop for marches and is now focusing on elections. Most recently she has co-curated an exhibit called “In Her Hands” with Orly Cogan (Robert Mann Gallery, New York City, June 14 – August 17, 2018). “In Her Hands” consists of portraits of progressive women candidates running in the 2018 elections, handmade by 15 women artists from across the country. To see more of Julie’s work, visit juliepeppito.com

Sam Nhlengethwa

Posted on by

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Sam Nhlengethwa has worked on a number of prints of goats, these are the second series of goat images that he has done at The Artists’ Press. The goats are drawn so as to reduce them to almost abstract forms. Goats provide metaphors for a number of human traits and Nhlengethwa plays with these in the titles that he has chosen and in the different ways in which he depicts the goats. In South Africa, goats are culturally and economically significant. Goats are a hardy and adaptable stock animals, surviving in both rural and urban areas. They provide nutrition as well as being used in a number of traditional ceremonies from welcoming a bride to communicating with one’s ancestors.

Sam Nhlengethwa is one of South Africa’s foremost artists. Born in 1955, he studied at Rorke’s Drift and the Johannesburg Art Foundation. He was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year award in 1994, the year South Africa held its first democratic elections and freedom was won for all its people. He has successfully exhibited all over the world from Senegal to New York and Cologne. His work is largely figurative and he explores themes that are close to his heart such as the plight of mineworkers, jazz and the physical space of contemporary Africa. In his prints and paintings, Sam Nhlengethwa uses overlays of techniques such as collage painting, drawing and photography. His fine sense of colour and form lend an abstract quality to his work. His work has been included in many contemporary South African art publications and can be found in leading South African and international collections.

Nhlengethwa has worked with The Artists Press since its inception in 1991. Mark Attwood and Sam Nhlengethwa were two of the initial group to establish the Bag Factory, also known as The Fordsburg Artists Studios, which is where they started to collaborate together on prints. Over the years The Artists’ Press has published 161 editions by Nhlengethwa, 65 of which are sold out.

Tanya Marcuse

Posted on by

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

Woven

The ancient Greeks imagined the machinery of fate as three women, weaving the lives of human and gods into an enormous tapestry, killing or giving life by snipping or knotting a thread. Through the medium of photography, in my new series Woven, I imagine myself introducing time and thus mortality, into the lush flora and fauna which make up the millefleurs backgrounds of medieval hunting and falconry tapestries. The 5 x 10 foot photographs sometimes take weeks to compose, and during this process of composition, of collecting, arranging, burning, painting, and transplanting, there is change. Flowers wither, spiders build webs, new shoots emerge, and corpses decay. Influenced both by the Dutch vanitas tradition and the allover graphic compositions of Jackson Pollock, I intend the photographs to be experienced as exquisitely detailed still lives when viewed from up close, but to hold together as a immersive, more abstract composition from further away. Although the pieces are all made on the same wooden frame and printed at the same scale, each photograph incorporates a distinct set of conceptual and visual ideas. Some are densely packed with rotting plant and animal life, and others more open, sprinkled with small brightly colored flowers or verdant moss. What is common to all, however, is a sense of opulence which verges on excess, a plenty which verges on plunder. In these elaborately artificial tableaux, the inexorable movements of nature are shown forth and growth and decay, beauty and terror, life and death are woven together.

Tanya Marcuse is an American photographer whose work explores transience among other ideas. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the George Eastman House, the Yale Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. She studied Art History and Studio Art at Oberlin and earned her MFA from Yale. She has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and has published three books with Nazraeli Press, Undergarments and Armor (2005), Fruitless (2007) and Wax Bodies (2012). She’s currently working on a book of Fruitless/Fallen/Woven with Radius Press. Her work is represented by the Julie Saul Gallery in New York City. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley and teaches Photography at Bard College.

Dozier Bell

Posted on by

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Dozier Bell is a Maine native who still lives and works in the state. She is the recipient of several awards, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship as artist-in-residence at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, and the Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Residencies include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. She is represented by the Danese – Corey Gallery in New York City.

Jerry Siegel

Posted on by

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

I am a strong believer in place, and how a region, community and a home will shape who you are. The place I know, where I was raised, is the Black Belt region of the American South. It is how I was raised, as a Southerner and as a Jew in a small southern town, instilled with belief in family and tradition that motivates me to document the place I call home.

Born in Selma, AL, Jerry Siegel is a photographer living in Atlanta, GA, and working throughout the Southeast. Siegel focuses his work in the traditions of documentary and portrait photography. His work in the Black Belt region of Alabama was recently published by the Georgia Museum of Art. This monograph, Black Belt Color, focuses on the unique, cultural landscape of the Black Belt region. His first monograph, Facing South, Portraits of Southern Artists, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2011, and features portraits of 100 Southern artists.

P. Elaine Sharpe

Posted on by

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

Paint as material belongs to the sense realm, a phantom limn of touch. As a process painting might become a brush with pleasure, a stroke that rubs the wrong way, a sideways glance, a covert encounter. I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. Paint pushes me but I push back.

Hug-distributing elder, orphan, brave woman since birth, shit-disturber, badass, artist, raised by a sociopath, OCD by nurture, pleasure-bot, married for contrast, mother of one.

Jennie Ottinger

Posted on by

—click on any image to enlarge—

positInkSpash131210.small

Artist’s Statement

My current work is about women. Although it’s becoming more recognized in this current moment, it has always been clear that clubs, books, movies, etc. that are about, for, or by women are thought of in a lesser subcategory. It’s popular in certain circles to dismiss groups such as cheerleaders and sorority members and, though I understand the criticisms, both institutions were created by women who just wanted the same opportunities as men. This tension between what looks frivolous and what in another light is actually feminism is why I’m so interested in these groups. They are also a microcosm of power dynamics. I use the positioning of figures and their poses, colors, uniforms, and scale as well as the baggage of stereotypes to explore the nuances of the hierarchies within and between groups. What are the unwritten rules, and do we claim power or willingly give it away to be polite?

Jennie Ottinger was raised in Massachusetts and currently lives in San Francisco, CA. She got her BFA from California College of the Arts and earned an MFA from Mills College. She has exhibited extensively in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as in New York, Miami, Dallas, Los Angeles and London. She is currently an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts.