January 14 through February 11, 2011
ART LAB: Work in Progress features artists Bunny Burson, Yosafa Deutsch, Asma Kazmi, Ron Laboray, Alex Lopez, Jerry Monteith, Chinyere E. Oteh, Thomas Sleet, and Mel Watkin at The Nu-Art Series' Metropolitan Gallery.Artist's reception on Friday, January 14, 2011, from 6 to 9 p.m.
EXHIBITION OVERVIEW:
The artists in this exhibition were asked to create a site-specific piece concerning their working process. What would a visitor see if they walk into your studio just as you step out? What work is in-progress? What is on the walls? What is on your computer screen? What are you researching? What are your references? What music is playing? Will they hear the sound of an ink jet printer? A clicking keyboard? Is there tea brewing? Is there a smell of saw dust? Oil paint? Do you want your process to be clear or remain obscure? Is it obvious or would a visitor have to puzzle it out?
ARTIST’S BIOS AND STATEMENTS:
Bunny Burson
Bunny Burson is represented by the Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, where she had a solo exhibition entitled Consequences in 2008. Her recent group shows include exhibitions entitled Overview_08, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, Speak Out, 516 Arts, Albuquerque, NM and Politics of Power, B.A.G. Gallery, Brooklyn, New York. Bunny Burson has worked as an arts administrator, instructor, and artist. During the Clinton-Gore administration she served as executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. She developed arts/health programs at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, DC and at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, TN. Ms. Burson is a member of the National Council of the Sam Fox School for Design and Visual Arts at Washington University, the Advisory Council for the Gephardt Institute and is a Board Member of Anderson Ranch in Colorado. She holds a BA in French, a BFA in Printmaking and an MFA in printmaking and drawing.Artist’s Statement
A wall of silence and years of secrecy inspired this work. My installation is a platform from which to begin knowing the past and connecting it to the present. Piecing together fragments of history and of memory, of known expulsion and imagined exile, I am searching for what was lost. After a long journey both literal and figurative, I am distilling ideas and exploring processes . . . and hopefully finding what I am looking for.--------------
Yosafa Deutsch
Yosafa Deutsch has been working in Atlanta for 2 ½ years since finishing her MFA in Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. She has shown across the midwest and southern United States in group, juried, and solo exhibitions. Her work has been exhibited at the Sheldon Art Galleries and the Indianapolis Museum of Art among other places. Her work is in a variety of private collections including the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy. Also, she has received various awards, grants, and scholarships for her work.The process for this series of works has been extremely organic. Developed through acts of experimentation with materials and media. The cell is where the work stems from. The cell is a basic building block of life and fascinates me because it is a component of all things and at the same time is a self-contained organism. Forms and shapes presented themselves and grew and multiplied organically, mimicking the inspiration itself. The work is constantly evolving; it doesn’t ever seem to be static. Discovering how the work is growing and changing each time I sit down with it is stimulating and drives the process on.
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Asma Kazmi
Asma Kazmi is a performance artist and a sculptor who approaches her practice from a post installation/object centric position, which allows her to create transdisciplinary, relational works where people, media and objects come together. She is the recipient of At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago Award, given by the University of Illinois in Chicago and the Critical Mass Economic Stimulus Award, St. Louis, MO. In 2008, Paul Ha, Director of The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, nominated her as one of St. Louis’ five most promising artists in Alive Magazine, St Louis. Her work has been exhibited and included in collections such as the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis; The Guild Gallery, NYC; Galerie Sans Titre, Brussels, Belgium; Boston Underground Film Festival; Balagan Film and Video Series, Boston; and Women In Film & Video/New England.Asma Kazmi received a B.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art and an M.F.A. from the School of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute. Kazmi was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan.
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Ron Laboray
Ron Laboray's work has been exhibited in museums, special project spaces, not for profits and galleries in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Taiwan, Japan, Memphis, and St. Louis. Laboray's art merges abstract painting and drawing with a pseudoscientific method to create a growing visual archive of popular culture. His method appropriates existing laws found in sciences, like the Law of Superposition, to assist in the making process. The materials and forms he uses range from digital animation to poured plastic, auto lacquer sprayed on aluminum, and films made with robots. He sees these mediums tied metaphorically to popular culture. In his work, the visual language of abstraction supports a color-coded archive of data, based on mass culture elements like television, Hollywood, comic books, fast food and advertising. Ron currently lives in Granite City Illinois, where he contributes to his hometown’s revitalization using art as an economic engine.Artist’s Statement
The work in this exhibition is entitled, The Banality of Transformation. Ron Laboray’s art making strategies often revolve around transforming everyday experiences, information, and ideologies into a new visual form. The work includes not only the topic of banality, but also the historical discourse of other visual makers. His current series transform the information within my junk mail into beautiful abstract line drawings. These pastel drawings consist of horizontal stacks of colorful lines, translated from holiday sales mailers received daily in my mailbox. These leaflets of random commercial marketing are targeting consumers who participate in societal celebrations while serving as an inspirational source of information for my abstract fields of chromatic vibrations.--------------
Alex Lopez
Alex Lopez is a transplanted Texan currently residing in Carbondale, Illinois. He received his MFA in 1998 from Alfred University in New York. After graduating, Lopez returned home where he taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio. In 2005 Lopez was awarded the position of Visiting Assistant Professor, Art Fellow of Sculpture at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where presently he is the Assistant Professor of 3D Foundations and Sculpture. His work has been seen in numerous exhibitions, including such spaces as the Hudson Show Room, Artpace, San Antonio, TX; Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX; Cedarhurst Museum Center for the Arts, IL; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Christie’s, New York, NY; Blanton Museum of Art; Austin TX; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, New York, NY; and Soil Art Gallery, Seattle, WA. Lopez work has been featured in several catalogs and reviewed in Art In America, Artlies, Voices of Art, and Art Papers.Artist’s Statement
Lopez has created a small installation that reveals a critical component of his studio practice. The enclosed room houses an aspect of his methodology process in the form of notes, images, clippings, lyrics, and objects collected from various sources. These items are generally found on a wall in the corner of his current and past studios. The viewer can access a selection of this complex system through random cutout throughout the exterior of the room. This is the first time the public has had access to this private and personal process, as well the only time they have been combined into a single space.--------------
Jerry Monteith
Jerry Monteith is currently Professor, Head of Graduate Studies and Head of Sculpture in the School of Art and Design, Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Recent one-person exhibitions include, Splendid Flaws at Metropolitan Gallery in St. Louis and Primary Scars at Fresno City College in Fresno, California. He was commissioned to build Lightspill, a permanent site-specific sculpture for the Cedarhurst Center for the Arts in Mount Vernon, Illinois. He was recently included in Ucross 27, work by Ucross Foundation Fellows at the Nicolaysen Art Museum, Casper, Wyoming and Jumping Off Cliff, artists influenced by H.C. Westerman at the McCutchan Art Center, University of Southern Indiana, Evansville, Indiana. He received an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1978 and was born in Sylva, North Carolina.Artist’s Statement
My approach to working tends to be very physical, whether I am fabricating on a large scale, or carving sections of trees that I have gathered. This relationship to materials and process recalls the term homo faber, which is roughly translated as “Man the Maker.” Bergson used this term in The Creative Evolution, to refer to intelligence, “in its original sense”, as the “faculty to create artificial objects, in particular tools to make tools, and to indefinitely variate its makings.” In a series of interactive pieces I have provided the opportunity to upset the balance of an object and feel one’s relationship to it in a decidedly physical way. Large site-specific works allow one to move physically through a created space and even walk on it. The movement of the piece is “telegraphed” to the body in a way that links the two and acknowledges the significance of the “viewer”. Once engaged in this active role with a piece, another class of humans is recalled, homo ludens, or “Man the Player.”--------------
Chinyere E. Oteh
Chinyere E. Oteh is a mother, educator, artist and activist. A 2007 Fellow of RAC’s Community Arts Training Institute, she is involved in several community art endeavors including teaching photography and creative writing for the PPRC Photography Project and Springboard and membership in Yeyo Arts Collective which operates Gya, a community gallery and fine craft shop. She also currently works as an Education Assistant at the Saint Louis Art Museum. In 2007 she studied the photographic arts full-time for a year at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She received her BA from Washington University in 2002 where she wrote an honors thesis “Mixed Race Identity: A Challenge to or an Affirmation of Racial Categorization.” Oteh strongly believes in the power of art to communicate that which we are often too afraid to speak about.Artist’s Statement
The work that I have chosen to exhibit is part of a growing series titled, 41, for Amadou Diallo, a victim of one of the more notorious cases of murder of an innocent, unarmed person by police officers in New York in 1999. The images serve as a sort of series of artistic mug shots representing a Black man in a way that is less clinical than he is usually depicted via news media yet still probing. The text that I include highlights that numerical data and statistics are often assigned to Black men while their true nature or personality is concealed when dismissive stereotyping and racism are imposed by others in their everyday interactions with strangers, friends and law enforcement officials. With 41, I aim for the viewer to examine their own role as being stereotyped or in assigning stereotypes to others and to gain an awareness of the significance that our thoughts centered in bias can play in shaping ‘the others’ quality of life, life experiences and life outcome. The mind-body connection takes on a poignant meaning if you consider that fear of ‘the other’ in a police officer’s mind, for example, can result in the physical action of a finger pulling a trigger and ending a life. I see 41 as representing that space between the trigger being pulled, the bullet being released and the body falling to the ground. A man can become more a man and less a monster and this shift can all start in our mind’s eye.--------------
Thomas Sleet
Thomas Sleet attended Columbus College of Art and Design and Washington University in St. Louis’s Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, where he received his B.F.A. He is represented by Bruno David Gallery in St. Louis where his one-person exhibitions include Recession Rejuvenations and Traces. He has also had a solo exhibition entitled Thomas Sleet: Art, Architecture, Energy at the Mitchell Museum at Cedar Hurst, Mt. Vernon Illinois. His group shows include Habitat, Regional Arts Commission, St. Louis, Everything you Wanted to Know About Art Show, Elliot Smith Contemporary Art, St. Louis and exhibitions at Emerson Electric, World Headquarters, St. Louis and the Margaret Harwell Museum of Art, Poplar Bluff, Missouri. Sleet lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri.Artist’s Statement
Topographic shrine
Pseudo geometric figures
An explorative inception of macro and micro vessels
Internal and external envelops--------------
Mel Watkin
Mel Watkin’s recent solo exhibitions include shows at Illinois State Museum-Chicago, the Philip Slein Gallery, St. Louis, and the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. Her drawing installations, works-on-paper and artists’ books have been exhibited nationally in recent group exhibitions at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Sedalia, Missouri, the Jewish Institute of Religion Museum in New York and the Anne Loeb Bronfman DCJCC Gallery in Washington, D.C. Articles about her artwork have appeared in Art in America, The Washington Post, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Atlanta Journal and The New Art Examiner. She was recently selected for New American Paintings #83 (August/September 2009). Her work is included in the flat files at Pierogi in Brooklyn, New York and her works-on-paper can be found in the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas and a number of private collections nationally. Her artists’ books are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art/Franklin Furnace Archive in New York, Harvard University’s Fogg Museum, the New York Public Library and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mel Watkin was one of nine artists selected to create a public work for Lambert-St. Louis Airport in 2011.Artist’s Statement
Working towards an exhibition for Phillip Slein Gallery in January 2011, entitled Trunk Show, I have created over 150 small, detailed drawings of trees and tree trunks and a few life-sized, (actual tree trunk sized) images. My drawn trees are based on the trees that surround my old farmhouse in rural southern Illinois. The drawings look realistic, but the images are actually compilations that often combine two or three different species with their usual characteristics modified, exaggerated or made more complex. I try to imbue the trees with innate power by giving them slightly menacing qualities, because as recent events show, nature can be beautiful, but dangerous. For example, on May 8, 2009 my area was hit by what is now called El Derecho (a storm that has been described as “an inland hurricane,” a hurr-nado or a torni-can–with winds reaching 106 miles per hour). It downed over 3000 trees in the city of Carbondale alone. Because of blocked roads much of the area was without water, gasoline or electricity for a week. While, luckily no one was killed, damage to homes, businesses and cars was extensive. For an area known for its lovely rolling hills and dense hardwood forests, the storm was visually and emotionally distressing.
The Nu-Art Series is a Not-for-Profit Arts Organization.
