Kristin Beaver, Rocco DePietro, Brent Fogt, Adrian Hatfield, Emily Lynn, Jennifer Locke, Robin Miller, Gloria Pritschet, Mike Richison, Gary Setzer, Lisa Steichmann, Jack Summers, Andrew Thompson, Amanda Thatch, Gregory Tom
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oil painter and painting instructor at Wayne
State University
Detroit based artist Kristin Beaver paints larger than life portraits of friends in cinematic poses inspired by contemporary fashion and music. Dramatic lighting illuminates hip subjects who position themselves for the viewer in photo shoot environments with an air of indifferent panache.
Beaver's paintings expose the self-aware nature of the subject's style choices and in doing so reveal the masquerade of the reigning fashionable elite. However, instead of being an indictment of the contemporary hipster the paintings exist as endearing portraiture by allowing us to embrace the human underneath the façade. Despite the use of contemporary subject matter, the works adept paint handling positions Beaver firmly in the history of traditional oil painting.
Kristin Beaver received her MFA in painting from Wayne State University in 2004. She is currently producing an extensive body of work for a solo exhibition at The Meadow Brook Art Gallery in Rochester, Michigan for March of 2006.
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oil painter, printmaker and mixed media
artist
As a visual artist, I try to notice things from a variety of perspectives.
Observing things at a distance and
also up close changes one's vantage point leading to very different
interpretations. Also, pausing to take a sustained look at something can reveal information unavailable to
casual viewers. I particularly attend to things that evoke strong inner feelings. These things often involve
relationships broadly defined - relationships between people, humans and animals, mountains and sky,
or even shadows on a wall. I ask
myself what I find interesting or entertaining about these images.
Are they exciting, unusual, unexpected,
powerful, symbolic, transcendent, or metaphorical? The answer to
this question shapes the direction of
my work. I also like to add elements such as mystery, tension, and
ambiguity. These elements deepen the
work opening it up to new interpretations and narratives. I want
viewers to pause, examine the work,
and hopefully find something that sustains their interests. In my
recent work, I examine cultural
narratives about human relationships, history and myth, and the reconstruction
of ancient cosmologies.
In American culture, with its diverse values and points of view,
there are many competing narratives for
the same visual imagery. Through my art, I wish to contribute to
this dialogue.
Rocco De Pietro
9/2004
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drawing and installation
I draw extravagant forms that, from a distance, resemble islands, continents or microscopic organisms. Within these forms are waves, explosions and paisleys. Closer still, the drawings contain thousands of circles of varying size and line weight. I use circles because they allow multiple interpretations ranging from the microscopic to the cosmic.
The process of drawing is endlessly fascinating for me. Working with the most basic materials—ink and paper—I follow a series of self-imposed rules. The rules give me a place to start. They limit the universe of possibilities and challenge me to invent new solutions to the problems I have posed. Because of the small size of the marks, the drawings evolve slowly, leaving time for making adjustments and adapting to what is already on the page. My work allows for a great deal of play, improvisation and invention. For me, process is as important as the final product.
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oil painter and art professor at Wayne
State University
The role of contemporary science mirrors the role held by nineteenth-century
Sublime landscape painters in some unexpected ways. Scientists
and the Sublime painters have both chosen to explore amazingly
vast subject matter, whether attempting to map the human genome
or to depict Yosemite on a canvas. Both also take those enormous
subjects and reduce them to a more manageable scale. Although the
stated intent of artists and scientists may be to understand or
represent their subjects thoroughly, the limits of language and
human cognition make such a task impossible. Further, although
humans are fascinated by the vast and mysterious, they also are
terrified by it. The comfort in creating an artificial illusion
of control over overwhelming subjects is a commonly unacknowledged
benefit of both science and art.
In my current work I am dealing with these issues of beauty and
the sublime, and how they relate to the role of science in contemporary
culture. Botanical wallpaper pattern (like science, a simplification
of a more complex, chaotic reality) intertwines cascading flowers,
decorative ribbon and bits of science text in a world inhabited
by bowerbirds, giant squids and other creatures that confound our
accepted notions of the world.
My goal is to create work that operates not only as alluring images
that celebrate the mysterious and unknowable, but also as metaphors
exposing our most trusted systems as simulacra. Through this process
of my art making, itself a way of simplifying ideas and making
them palatable, I hope to explore and communicate my ideas about
science, its limitations, its role in society and what all this
says about human nature.
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photographer
I am interested in the idea that marginlands lie at the interface
between the familiar and the unknown. I
use magnifying lenses or a macro-lens with my manual Nikon FM 10
to get a close look.
For me, there is excitement in each moment of discovery, each glimpse
through the lens, into the
infrastructure and ornament that expresses in every layer of my reality.
These images feel somehow
encrypted. They seem as both familial and transcendent.
I do not alter the photographs in any way. Each image for me is a
document of the moment when I
peeked in and saw something that stopped me in my tracks.
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Joshua Ray Smith
To act upon a material is to better understand that material and simultaneously understand oneself acting. Exploring the tectonics of any material is to better understand my own temporal existence. I am a materialist. Sculptural form is action contained in the stillness of material, made active again by time. Action exists only against resistance, and knowledge is discovered through the pressure of opposition.
Material form can only be known in relationship to non-material form: space, void, light, shadow, mirrored reflection and wind. Perception exists in contrasts; understanding one is to know of the other. Human perception is contained in a balance between material and non-material, between tension and rest, between the physical known and the spiritual.
An understanding of my own existence is realized when perception of time and place is challenged or questioned. I realize myself seeing, sensing, and perceiving; I believe this is the purpose of art. My task is to become aware of what already exists, in a new way, using a material language tacitly independent from symbol and representation. The work is an aesthetic gesture about the presence, time, and process of earth and location rather than an imitation. I work with fabricated materials and industrial processes that contrast with nature, evoking a new perception of material and site.
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Lisa Steichmann
One of the many ways photography impacts the viewer is to create an intersection of experience between the viewer and the image. When that relationship occurs, an opening can develop that allows for a collective connection of the tissue that binds us: the surreal world of childhood, our dreams and longings, and the secret places we can unite. These are places where our experiences are layered and overlap. Though a memory may be hazy or not clearly defined, we may find the meaning of it changes through the effects of time, as we reinvent ourselves through memory.
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Amanda Thatch
Surroundings speak their own language; they have established their own relationships, their own level of comfort with their neighbors. As inhabitants of cities and buildings, we can sense some of this communication among inanimate structures. We can pick up on the tensions; the patina of age and the plastic sparkle of the new both have their own subtext, influencing the environmental energies that surround us. These interactions affect our relationships, our thoughts, and our actions. We are capable of communicating effectively with our environments, and are more than capable of willfully ignoring the messages they send, just as we are capable of doing both with people.
Buildings have become a metaphor for people in my mind and in my art. Deciphering what they tell us about age, love, relationships, and neglect has become the core of my work. I focus on the modes of access and connectivity in the forms of buildings. I am attracted to doors and windows as the initial objects around which we have formed linguistic metaphors relating to our own bodies: window into the soul, door to the heart, etc. These are the access points to a building, which we have appropriated in language as the access points to ourselves. My particular interest is in the variations of transparency and solidity (largely determined by doors and windows) that different structures have, and the “personality” that emotes from the arrangement of a structure.
In my work, there is not a one-to-one correlation between form and meaning. I am guided primarily by intuition in my interpretations of the world around me. A lifetime of looking as specific buildings has distilled into a visual vocabulary of simple, archetypal forms, and it is according to rearrangements of basic elements, and the resulting relationships that I find the hints of non-verbal communication that I sense taking place all around me. I play scribe to that conversation.
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Andrew Thompson
Andrew Thompson’s artwork focuses the spotlight on the seemingly mundane aspects of daily life: eating, bathing, cleaning house etc. Trash and waste are no longer thrown out but thrown into the discussion of art and meaning. Memories and narratives hold these discarded pieces together. Our personal stories develop from memories of pain or the feeling of joy from one’s triumphs. Thompson likes to find the joy in little victories such as becoming more energy efficient, or the heartbreak of getting rid of the things he never used or needed in the first place.
Andrew Thompson is originally from Kansas City, Missouri where he received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in Sculpture. Thompson moved to the Detroit Area to receive his MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Since graduating, Andrew has signed on as a collaborator with Gallery Project in Ann Arbor where he will be curating the show “Turning Points” in August 2007. He now currently teaches at Oakland Community College and International Academy of Art.
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