by Jerome du Bois
If you read these recent interviews with Maurizio Cattelan and Fred Wilson, and if you can find any interview with Tom Friedman (e.g., in the Dennis Cooper/Phaidon book), you know that artists can be articulate, deep-thinking, and razor-sharp definers of their work.
But if you read this recent interview with Rachel Feinstein, who doesn’t even know how to build her sculptures and finds the process boring, you also know that artists can be shallow twits, unreflectively deploying tired clichés with a breathtakingly ignorant arrogance.
And given the title of this post, where do you think we come down on some of the more vocal locals? As for why we would put it together in the first place, the answers are in the Why sidebar, and in the category: Elevating the Discourse.
(This list is alphabetical, and exhausting but not exhaustive. It was compiled -- a mild word for an activity much like stuffing marshmallows into one’s head -- by Jerome du Bois from Shade, the Arizona Republic, New Times, Downtown Phoenix, Java magazine, and the Arizona Biennial ‘03 catalog. Thank you all so much. For more examples, see Catherine King’s Biennial Review. And in the comments section.)
Sara Abbott:
In my work as an artist I incorporate imagery of the body and translate this into the concept of object and form.
I have experimented with the idea of using light and layers of printed images separated by space, then placed in found objects.
This process of photography allows me to take a recognizable object and create line, shape, and depths of positive/negative space.
The light boxes have allowed me to create a body of work that holds a strong emotional element.
From the imagery being shot and the labor of building the piece itself, the pieces give me a deep attachment and great satisfaction within the final outcome of the work.
Sergio Aguirre:
I enjoy including the human element in each of the paintings because you can really see emotions through the expressions on their faces . . .
[so that’s how . . .]
I used to paint the figures without eyeballs because I was almost scared to do it -- eyes can tell so much.
[figures without eyeballs are less scary than with?]
But now I see the effect that they can have.
[now I’m scared]
When you can get people reacting to your stuff then I think you should keep painting it.
[skeerd]
I like giving them that older look because it almost makes them timeless. They’ve had their place in time already.
Barbara Bergstrom:
I aim to place my work in the world through a way that flows naturally with the practices of human habit.
Being respectful of time and space, participating in the flow of human practice, and investigating personal life-shaping habits motivate my creative thought.
Susan Bricker:
My paintings document the birth, life, and death of the vivid, authentic, yet dream-like moments that fall between the cracks of real time.
Objects of the everyday relinquish their ordinariness at these instants and escape, quietly and heroically, from the mundane.
Daniel Britton:
My approach to method provides a structure that allows me to define problems and search for solutions that are equally rooted in a conceptual embrace of realism and expressionism.
This structure affords an opportunity for invention and improvisation in keeping with my understanding of the unexpected and unpredictable nature of “seeing” life.
Sue Chenoweth:
How do you put words on a wordless thing? My work is an investigation into the ineffable. Each piece contains a visual language; a language lacking words that exists only in the present.
Several years ago I began to actively investigate the space that is between the artist and the work. I came to understand that this “space between” is the visual language of the immediate.
James Cook:
The processing of these and other questions relies upon experience found in my dreams, meditation, and trance.
When suitable metaphorical lodgings, or relocations of the intuitive, are developed within the material context, they are for me more charged than are ideas born primarily of mental constructing.
Christine Crescenzi:
Upon the photographic moment: Whomever I meet the obstacle of judgment and presumption of separation and difference has to be undone for trust and cooperation to exist.
For those whom I ask permission and for those whom the moment would pass if I imposed speech upon it, each situation improves with choosing to seek and recognize equal value upon whomever I set my eyes.
Bill Dambrova:
At present my work is at a stage where I am incorporating an intuitive vocabulary of contradicting shapes and forms.
Simultaneously I am employing art historical references, both contemporary and arcane as a starting point before bombarding these multi-media works with an investigation of viral mark making.
Mehmet Dogu:[cue sitar]
I live a world of the mechanisms and framework, the timing and interpreted light, of photography.
Moments continue, not freeze. Fragments cluster to form “reality.” Time stretches in this way; events are reinterpreted; an extension of existence.
Space is layered -- from in to out and back, of “powers of ten,” pieces and wholes, figures and grounds, physical or ephemeral.
The space around art belongs to the art and the environment within which it is set.
Each individual’s filters and perceptions work with the complexities of the art and its environment to cast multiple possiblilties of interpretation.
Oliver Hibert:
You could call my work retro-futuristic, but I prefer POPPED ART. It is the closest form of Pop Art today. It is Pop Art exploded.
Although based from [sic] Pop Art, it is not exactly created for the same reasons. It has less to do with popular icons or commercialism.
Pop Art and that era of art are very important to me. There was something strong there, and that power can be re-used. New things can be created out of old.
Blake Hines:
It is my assumption that natural beauty reaffirms its existence by its very omission -- much as life reasserts itself in the midst of death.
In the “Nocturne” series, natural beauty is nowhere and everywhere. The juxtaposition of its absence assists in defining the desolate emotional psychological terrain that my photographs explore.
Hans Hoffman: [he’s not local? oh]
To me, creation is metamorphosis . . . incited by reality, imagination bursts into passion the potential inner life of a chosen medium. The final image resulting from it expresses the all of oneself.
Mel Hombre:
These paintings foreground a world in which all the stories we tell are about the words we use.
As current speculations tend towards ever more political, ethnic, religious and related fantasies, I hope to engender enthusiasm for more unassuming and naïve recreation.
Sara Hubbs:
My inspiration flows from Flamenco dancing, neo-soul music, salsa, anything with grit and funk.
I want people to respond emotionally to the work. But, I also need a surface that will stand on its own.
As for the emotions, though, I see painting as a physical release, so what ends up on the canvas is what I’m experiencing at that moment.
To see my passions, angst and joy materialize with feelings and emotion on a blank piece of wood or canvas is truly a spiritual event.
Michael Maglich:
The older I get, the more I ask myself why making art is so important to me.
Each day, I discover a different answer to this question depending on what’s on TV or what book I’m reading or who or what I encounter on a particular day.
Eventually, it comes down to the fact that making art just makes more sense than doing anything else.
Ellen McMahon:
My work is about the minutia [sic] and majesty of my everyday life.
My desire is to express the pleasure as well as the ambivalence, rage, resentment and powerless responsibility that is bonded to the dominant discourse of maternal sacrifice.
Olivier Mossett: See Biennial Review
Vytas Sakalas:
It is my artistic position that my paintings must be judged solely on their own merit, and that any verbiage I may write or speak about them is unfair to the position stated (that they be judged on their own merit).
Randy Slack: [Oh, enough of him.]
Doug Shelton:
What I try to create in my paintings is a sense of mystery. To me, mystery is intriguing and stimulates the imagination, something which is needed in our age of passive entertainment.
For people who take the time, the meaning of my paintings does unfold over time and with reflection, as the visual symbols reappear in different contexts.
Michael Stevenson:
[For Stevenson, abstraction is about the breaking down of forms into their essential elements, thus making them completely non-referential.]
In graduate school, we called it find the bunny. And it means how people think they recognize specific forms in the works, but they are really not specific at all, thus allowing for a wide variety of interpretations.
People want to connect to the paintings, they want to find something recognizable. So they are drawn by forms that look like something they know, but are maybe just a little off.
Judith Walsh:
My work is about that which lies below the surface; the hidden, the unconscious, the transparent, the vaguely remembered dream which is just beyond our ability to give it form.
Like a young child, I discover what I am painting while I paint -- images form and reform, dissolve and resolve in a non-logical way. As ideas [hey! wake up!] and forms are discarded, major destruction takes place. I often flip the . . . [hey! wake up!] I often . . .
My work as an artist is the process I go through to trick and frustrate that part of me that follows rules, uses logic and sees the world “the way it really is.” [In Downtown Phoenix March 2003.]
Katherine Walsh:
Photography, to me, is a means of bearing witness.
Every day there are moments that tell a story; each that I see occurs as a result of everything in my life leading me to a certain point.
A photograph of one of these moments is way for me to record what my life has taught me to see and to think at that point.
Donovan White:
My work finds its focus in the world of the blue collar man [sic].
I strive to capture the desperation and humor of the “average Joe” by pointing out the surreal element of the mundane in “normal everyday life.”
The beauty of the ordinary is discovered in the exploration of the edge between expectation and reality in everyday situations.
Posted by Jerome at June 21, 2003 10:41 PM