Alex C. Artist Statement
I paint large scale contemporary pieces, up to three meters, that combine Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism. I paint land or seascapes and figurative art. The mix of styles creates is a dialogue between interior emotions and the outside environment. I like to think that all my art comes from a place of optimism and a celebration of life. I believe that the art and objects that we surround ourselves with can motivate people and infuse our lives with positive energy. I have always maintained, and tell my art students, that good art requires steady and constant effort and practice, so I make sure I paint every day. I am also constantly looking for ways to add new elements, stylistically and conceptually, to my work.
John B. Artist Statement
Much of my art is intended to bring attention to the more painful and destructive elements of contemporary civilization. My work is generally executed in marble, but I also combine stone with composite or other materials. Part of my stylistic and technical approach is to exploit and uncover the creative and physical possibilities embedded in the different materials.
My work is a response to the unparalleled explosion in the technological, material and economic sophistication and complexity of human life. This transformation has come at a high price. The costs are evident in the economic inequality, environmental destruction and the ongoing tragedy of permanent war, in our global village.
While I realize our situation is precarious, my hope is that by having to confront the difficult issues presented in my work, the viewer will be inspired to think about and act to create a better world.
David V. Artist Statement
For the past three decades I’ve photographed the changing neighborhoods and people of New York City. Because I grew up on the Lower East Side and the East Village, my work often focuses on those parts of the city. I’ve photographed storefronts, people and events since the mid-1980’s. The desire to capture and preserve ephemeral moments of everyday life motivates me as an artist.
Whether it is someone running to beat the light, building facades or serendipitous moments of beauty that usually pass unnoticed, I am lucky enough to be emersed in my subject. Street photography is at its best when it accurately and artfully captures the different cycles and routines of life. My photography has been inspired by the style of photographers Walker Evans, Vivian Maier and Robert Franks. My hope is that my work faithfully, uniquely and compassionately memorializes the shifting landscapes and populations in my part of the world.
Jake G. Artist Statement
I create multimedia digital collages combining original Victorian photographs with animal anatomy (heads, wings, etc.) These Minotaur-like beings are set in anthropomorphized tableaux and activities evoking fundamental questions about humans and animals. The result is an image that is wistful, strange and new.
I use original tintypes because they are unique singular artifacts that are part of both material and social history, as records of a brief moment past. My work is a visual archeology that uncovers and combines previously lost likenesses to create new art. The past is transformed, and a new image and message emerges from my collage.
Elaine C. - Artist Statement
My artistic practice combines genres and materials to explore divergency in representation. The most fundamental description of my work would be that I use traditional and new media to explore the possibilities of digital tools as an extension of artistic creation.
My digital “monoprints” intentionally question what is an original. The ever-increasing ability to sample, manipulate and create myriad visual “objects,” forces the question of who is creating what and is it original? I might argue that artistic and aesthetic creation has always been a process of accretion, reference and innovation.
My practice employs combining physical (real) and digital (virtual) material (images). I start by producing multiple paintings. The paintings are photographed and converted to digital media. Once in this form I merge them as layers, add new elements and print the final image on traditional paper or canvas.
I want my work to question the deeper parameters of the reciprocal relationship between representation and abstraction, amplify marginalized voices, and offer a poetic visual transportation for the viewer.
John R.
Essay
Art in the Age of Alternality
What happens to Art in an age like ours, where there is no truth? How does it function in the current neoliberal global order? Possibilities range from monetization, as a hedge against bad times; to graffiti as political statements.
Life is more often experienced as a series of emotional rather than reason-based events. Existence is not necessarily an intellectual exercise. Art, a form of expression with highly symbolic emotional content, can bypass conscious filters or “reason,” and may be the best route inside peoples’ heads, to their understanding of the world. This is why, perhaps, humans have been drawing for so long.
Significantly, after the development of agrarian society and private property, a great deal of visual and oral cultural production (e.g., monolithic public architecture and epic poetry) was devoted to validating those in power. This pattern has continued in various ways, up to and including the present moment. Along the way, Art also became commentary on and representations of what is and what might be. When the term is used in its broadest sense—encompassing multiple forms of cultural production, including functional, decorative, and ritualistic—Art is a physical manifestation of some abstract principle or imaginary state of being.
The assertion on the part of this author that there is no longer any “truth” per se, is not to imply a lack of recognition of the physical laws science has discovered. Nevertheless, assumptions about the nature of scientific theory and truth are being called back into doubt after years of general acceptance—in most instances for political rather than epistemological reasons (climate change, evolution, vaccines, etc.). These doubts are evident in the actions of large segments of the population and exhibited by the present leadership; politicians can say more or less whatever they want to and overwhelming numbers of people either believe, don’t understand, don’t care, or somehow think they can’t be affected by the hegemonic “truth” of the moment.
Observing those creating policy, it seems that the premises and framework from which they operate change constantly. The goals that are set, and the criteria used to evaluate success, are the by-products of shifting ideas about patterns of consumption, mind control, economics, and biology. Because the administration puts it on a banner or in a tweet and tells us it is so, makes it so. The nation is run (again) by those who made untold millions while the country and the companies they ran fell apart.
After a short period of “recovery,” driven by the neoliberal ideological regime, a lot of people were put to work in the lowest-paid levels of the economy, and the developing world’s population became the workshop for the consuming world. In the end, when the “New Economy” collapsed and recovered, who was left standing? Corporate capitalists.
The modern iteration of Art, artists, and cultural production in general is the result of changed conditions in the creation, distribution, and consumption of words, images, sounds, and later moving images. Starting in the Early Modern era artists were able to earn a living selling their skill in a theretofore nonexistent “open market.” (Poets, writers, and playwrights had been able to earn an independent living without patronage since the Elizabethan Age.) As most art historians would note, “artists” were often seen previously as servants creating cultural product for the ownership class. They worked at the behest and payment of patrons, both public and private—a sometimes blurry distinction in history—they were master craftsmen in an artistic trade. This process of cultural production largely asserted and reified, through representations of meta-cultural ideas and even individual aspirations, goals that upheld the ruling order. Hegemonic cultural production is as old as civilization itself.
The ever-growing variety of distribution methods for mass cultural product changed the way information and entertainment are produced and consumed. This dramatic increase in content delivery, in terms of both diversity and amount, has reshaped social and economic concepts, structures, and goals. The significant amount of time spent consuming various media has had profound social and political consequences. From the perspective of economic security, the worst victims on the production end of this change are probably independent artists, who never had it so great to start with.
For Art to be a crucial, visionary contributor to the human project now, conditions dictate that it must be critical of the ruling order. Art—musical, visual, and written or spoken—needs to imagine new ways of being and seeing.
In the current cultural and political environment, knowledge and understanding are threatened by assertions about the malleability of basic concepts and realities. Contemporary Art, in response to the political landscape of twenty-first-century America, must not flinch.
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