Yes, of course, we’ll be at Art Basel. However, there’s so much more to Miami Art Week than the big fairs pushing big name artists and throwing parties. Art Week in Miami also consists of dozens of smaller fairs showcasing emerging, mid-career, and straight-up famous artists from all over the world. We’re looking to take our talents beyond South Beach and explore any and all fairs with New England connections. Yes, it’s an audacious task, but we think we can pull it off. Here’s our plan

UNTITLED, Art
Dec. 6 – 10

“Untitled, Art is an international, curated art fair founded in 2012 that focuses on curatorial balance and integrity across all disciplines of contemporary art. Untitled, Art innovates the standard fair model by selecting a curatorial team to identify, and curate a selection of galleries, artist-run exhibition spaces, and non-profit institutions and organizations, in dialogue with an architecturally designed venue.”

Hot New Englander(s) on-site: Kim Faler & Joseph Wardell, both represented by LaMontagne Gallery.

INK Miami
Dec. 6 – 10

“The Ink Miami Art Fair transforms the historic Suites of Dorchester Hotel into distinctive art galleries, surrounded by a verdant and tranquil courtyard. Visitors are invited to explore our main galleries offering a wide range of works on paper including new and noteworthy editions.”

Hot New Englander(s) on-site: Childs Gallery, which will have its whole booth transformed into an immersive print environment by multimedia artist Sara Zielinski.

Adam’s Nest at Art Gasel 3
Hotel Gathering
Dec 6 – 10

“Adam’s Nest is an idea that has been brewing for ages and the universe provided an opportunity to grab a retail space in Provincetown’s east end. The physical shop opened its doors in June 2016. We are located right next to Wired Puppy coffee and feature art, apparel, jewelry, and whatnot! We select items that appeal to our unique sense of humor, values and our lifestyle. We seek out artists and items through friends, our travels and various social media avenues and are always on the lookout for something interesting to share.”

NADA Miami 2017
Dec. 7 – 10

Mrs. Gallery out of Maspeth, New York, will be presenting varied works from Portland, Maine artist Elizabeth Atterbury.

Tanja Hollander at Art Basel

We’ll be visiting the Maine-born, Facebook-famous photographer Tanja Hollander at the Art Basel Collectors’ Lounge where Hollander will be signing copies of her new book Are Your Really My Friend, which is a collection of photographs that originally appeared in her installation of the same name at MASS MoCA this year.

PULSE Miami
Dec. 7 – 10

“Founded in 2005, PULSE Contemporary Art Fair is an established part of the annual art calendar and is recognized for providing its international community of emerging and established galleries with a dynamic platform for connecting with a global audience. PULSE offers visitors an engaging environment in which to discover and collect the most compelling contemporary art being produced today.”

Hot New Englander(s) on-site: William Baczek Fine Arts from Northampton, Massachusetts

This is just a few of the artists, fairs and galleries we plan to check on over the next week. Come back to our website everyday for more Art Week Miami updates and follow us on social for up-to-the-minute coverage.

Top photo courtesy PULSE Miami

The post Our Miami Art Week Preview, Preview appeared first on Take Magazine.

John Bisbee: Maine sculptor, wannabe songwriter. Photo by Izzy Berdan

When not chopping up and pounding nails into beautiful art, Brunswick, Maine, artist John Bisbee loves to make music. “I write music when I have the chance,” Bisbee says. It’s still my favorite thing to do, to touch that guitar. Music and lyrics. It’s not very good—just what pops into my head. Melancholic, lonesome folk. Sadass white dude. I love it; probably few others do. I don’t really share it. But it is my favorite thing to do, when I’m not doing this. I love to discover chord progressions and try to put poetry to it.”

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While painting a self-portrait as both a monk and a nun in the Middle Ages, Boston-area queer artist Ria Brodell got to thinking, “What would I have done if I had been born in a different era? What did people do? How did they get by?”

That’s how the project Butch Heroes was born. Painted in the style of Catholic holy cards, Butch Heroes tells the true stories of people assigned female at birth who rejected traditional gender roles and—in many cases—assumed a male identity. There’s D. Catalina “Antonio” de Erauso (1592–1650), a military captain and devout Catholic who got permission from the pope to dress as a man; Biawacheeitche or Woman Chief (1800–1854), an adept hunter and warrior known for her bravery; and Jeanne or Jean Bonnet (1849–1876), who was arrested multiple times for wearing men’s clothing and led a shoplifting gang of ex-prostitutes.

Katherina Hetzeldorfer (c. 1477), who was convicted of passing as a man (including the use of a phallic “instrument”) and sentenced to drown. By Ria Brodell

Brodell spent countless days combing the queer aisles of libraries, learning to search primary sources for archaic terms such as “female husbands.” Just like the stories found on holy cards, the histories that accompany each image can be funny, sad, grotesque, or inspiring.

Though the first 25 heroes have been immortalized in a book, Brodell continues to search for more—now investigating stories from underrepresented parts of the world, such as the Middle East, China, and India. “I want to find people from these regions that are difficult,” explains Brodell, “and I’m still really excited by all these stories. Each story is new, each process is new—so it keeps you going.”

Ria Brodell – artist
Boston, MA
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Top images by Ria Brodell; courtesy of the artist and Gallery Kayafas, from the Davis Museum at Wellesley College permanent collection
Right: Clara aka “Big Ben” c. 1926 United States | gouache on paper, 11 x 7 inches, 2014
Left: Captain Wright c. 1834 England | gouache on paper, 11 x 7 inches, 2016

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Diana Cherbuliez puts in the work. She can fix anything, from a busted car to a glitchy computer to an infestation of carpenter ants. Labor is her passion and tactile problem solving is her wheelhouse, as evidenced by Diana Cherbuliez works, her new exhibition now on view at the Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine.

The Vinalhaven-based sculptor wanted to find a meaningful way to deal with the impasse she reached after the death of her father, with whom she loved talking about art. “I hit a standstill,” she says. “I got clumsy. I had a complete physical disconnect to everything I was doing. I couldn’t sharpen tools. So I started thinking about that, about how I define myself through work.” That thinking led to pieces like Reclamation and quitting Time, fittingly named and made respectively from wasps and hornets nests, PVA glue, and magnets; her own hair, apple wood, and walnut. (To the latter she laughingly notes she is “desperately allergic.”)

Reclamation, 2017 | wasps and hornets nests, PVA glue, magnets, 6 x 18 ¼ x 9 ¾ in | Photo courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery

None of this art was easy to create, and that’s the point. Cherbuliez enjoys the “torture” some of her work presents, and while she openly admits its persistent diaristic quality, she says she “wanted to not just make work about personal sadness, because it’s always more complex than that.” Multiplicities of meaning and material abound in her art, suffused with accessible wordplay and jokes as it elucidates the strenuous effort required to produce it.

“There’s so much art out there, there’s so much crap out there,” she says. “We all make crap, and I don’t see any need to make it unless it’s unique, unless I alone can make it.” Even though she lightheartedly writes off a lot of her work as “making things out of junk” and a byproduct of “the audacity of an arts education,” it’s hard to imagine anyone else crafting a piece like Cul-de-sac, a scale model of a half-made bed under which lies a naked wooden carving of the sculptor herself.

Cherbuliez speaks with acerbic wit, threading her perspective with humor as freely as she does in her artwork. “This world is so continually troubling,” she laments, describing how the scorched earth policies we’re facing affect her tastes in other kinds of art. “I can listen to some old country, but I’m pretty much unable to listen to anything other than rap and hip hop right now. Someone put on Joni Mitchell the other night, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna strangle that bitch.’”

In light of disturbing world events, Cherbuliez finds comfort in “conversations with strangers who probably have the opposite life experience,” which are doubly special when she has the chance to have such exchanges in galleries. She also likes the “limitless highway and limiting barrier” of the ocean around her. “On Vinalhaven the ferryboat could get canceled. And it gets canceled pretty frequently. It gets taken out of your hands, just like a blizzard will take options out of your hands. And I kind of like that.”

Homemaker (3), 2017 | worn-out Carhartt work pants, thread | 10 x 11 ¾ in | photo courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery

Living on an island requires resourcefulness, a trait the artist can also attribute in part to environmentalist parents and to grandparents who weathered the Great Depression. Worn-down Carhartt pants are one among many salvaged materials Cherbuliez fashions into her work, which inspires frugality and patience in the face of excess. She thinks America’s lust for “prurient thrills” erodes the value placed on intellectual and physical craft. Her work could be considered a reaffirmation of both. “When you slow down your making of something, you invite the slowing down, I hope, of the visual investigation.”

She’s deeply unpretentious already, but New England’s immensely historical landscape gives Cherbuliez further motivation to stay modest. The old buildings, the trees, and the time-straddling isolation of Vinalhaven all inspire a particular humility. “It’s one of those places where I can relish my absolute momentary existence and complete irrelevance. It’s actually freeing. I am not important. I never will be.” Embracing life’s impermanence, Cherbuliez rejects the notion of honing celebrity over craft. “It’s not worth the space, or the materials, or the electricity, or filling up museums.”

As the title of her exhibition clearly underlines, Diana Cherbuliez will always value good work more than ego. “I’m here for a moment. The only thing I feel I really have a right to waste is my own time.”

Diana Cherbuliez—Sculptor
Vinalhaven, Maine
Website

Top image: Cul-de-sac, 2017 (detail) | spruce, scrap walnut, Masonite, tung oil, foam, broadcloth, chicken down, cotton | 10 ½ x 5 ¾ x 16 in.

All images courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery

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Sense of place is key to understanding Hannah Phelps. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and raised north of Portland, Maine, New England roots dig deep into her life and art. “I’m a classic New Englander,” she says. “I’m really attached to this geographic place.”

Phelps’ work represents, as she describes it, “the world outside her window and the forces at work there.” Her award-winning plein air oil paintings and relief prints often depict the crashing waves and jagged rocks of the northern New England coast, where she spent summers as a child combing the rugged shore and nearby woods. “I think that’s what really inspired me to become an artist,” she says.

Initially, Phelps explored the natural world through science, studying physics at Mount Holyoke College. But that felt incomplete. “Drawing and painting from nature are not just like scientific study,” she says. “In some fields, drawing is the primary method of recording scientific discoveries.” Her knowledge of physics—for example, understanding the dynamics of water movement—informs her kinetic depictions of the ocean and waves crashing against rocks. “I know how water has to move because of physical laws,” Phelps says. “I think about my subject matter—water, rocks, snow, sand, trees, clouds—in scientific terms.”

Cutts Island Marsh | jigsaw reduction woodblock print

While living in Baltimore after college (and plotting a move back to New England), Phelps took painting classes at the Maryland Institute of Art. By the time she moved to New Boston, a small town in central New Hampshire, she was painting regularly.

Phelps considers herself a painter first, painting primarily in plein air. Printmaking evolved naturally. She employs different techniques, including jigsaw woodcuts and white-line woodcuts, a technique popularized by Provincetown artists in the early 20th century and characterized by a white outline surrounding each shape of color. “I love printmaking,” Phelps says. “You have to think about how to apply color and layer your work. You can work on an oil painting for years, but in printmaking there’s a finality to the process that I enjoy.”

Calm Day at Fort Stark | white-line woodcut print

Aspiring printmakers can take classes from Phelps, including a summer workshop on Appledore Island, off the coast of Portsmouth. Her work is also available through League of New Hampshire Craftsmen stores in Nashua, Meredith, and Littleton, New Hampshire, and she also has booths at the League’s annual fair and the December Button Factory Open Studios in Portsmouth.

Hannah Phelps – artist
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
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Appledore Evening | jigsaw reduction woodblock print
All images courtesy the artist

The post Hannah Phelps Paints or Prints Her Natural World appeared first on Take Magazine.

Ben Giguere discovered—and fell in love with—the art of glassblowing all in one day in 1997. He had taken a temporary position at Simon Pearce, the eponymous glass-blowing factory started by the legendary Pearce near the falls of the Ottauquechee River in Quechee, Vermont. “The first day I was there, I knew this is what I wanted to do with my life,” Giguere says. “Immediately it clicked, and there was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to learn everything I could. The factory is this gorgeous 300-year-old space with artists from all over the world making beautiful art. I got to work with master makers from the Czech Republic, from Ireland, Sweden, England. I didn’t know anything about glassblowing, but eventually I was given an amazing opportunity to train with them and it changed my life.”

After 11 years of intensive training, Giguere moved to Providence, Rhode Island, to continue to learn glassblowing techniques. He sought his education through masters in the field. In 2008, this led him to Steven Weinberg, a famed student of Dale Chihuly, one of the most well-known glassblowers in the world. Through Weinberg, Giguere learned casting and molding techniques that became the framework for his own stylization as a glassblower. In 2011, Giguere helped found Gather Glass, a project that brings together the fruits of his 15 years of understudy with a foundation for teaching others.

“Gather is the actual process of putting the blow pipe in the furnace and you are spinning glass onto the pipes. That is gathering,” says Giguere. “But it is also the act of bringing people together. So it is just a perfect fit. When we decided on that name, we knew that it was exactly what we were trying to accomplish—to bring together our community through art and food and farming.”

Gather Glass is a multifaceted project that is still evolving. Currently, it is a community space for learning the art of glassblowing, as well as an art studio. In the works is a cafe next door, as well as a farm in the near future. Giguere wants to create a sustainable community of farm-to-table food served on beautiful glassware made in the studio. He hopes to bring in a group of makers—potters, farmers, and artists—to complete the Gather Glass community.

Along with teaching people the fundamentals of glassblowing, Gather is also invested in community work. “It is our goal to be in the community, to see how we can invest ourselves back,” Giguere says. “If we don’t have that, we have nothing.”

Gather Glass is gearing up for summertime festivals that include Water Fire (to be announced) and PVD Fest (June 1-4). At the festivals, the company brings its mobile furnace to offer glassblowing demonstrations in downtown Providence. In the meantime, Gather Glass has live demos and art displays open to the public every third Thursday.

Along with teaching people the fundamentals of glassblowing, Gather is also invested in community work. “It is our goal to be in the community, to see how we can invest ourselves back,” Giguere says. “If we don’t have that, we have nothing.”

Gather Glass is gearing up for summertime festivals that include Water Fire (to be announced) and PVD Fest (June 1-4). At the festivals, the company brings its mobile furnace to offer glassblowing demonstrations in downtown Providence. In the meantime, Gather Glass has live demos and art displays open to the public every third Thursday.

Gather Glass – community space for learning glassblowing and an art studio
Providence, Rhode Island
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In a former lifetime in which the person inhabiting the Oval Office had an actual vision based on facts, the arts were recognized as an integral measure of our society. President John F. Kennedy, for instance, said this about the arts: “We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda. It is a form of truth.”

Truth, of course, has taken a hit since 45 took office. That whole “alternative facts” bit. But numbers, or so the saying goes, don’t lie. So with that in mind, we took a quick look at the potential math implications of 45’s federal budget.

First the overview:

• Number of programs and agencies due for elimination: 62
• Number of programs within the Environmental Protection Agency alone: 50

Other programs due for funding cuts—or outright elimination—focus on everything from literacy to low-income home energy improvements to investigating chemical accidents. The enormous breadth and scope of impact on those least able to manage without these programs is breathtaking.

But since we’re an arts and culture magazine, we’re going to focus our hyperventilation on the potential impact of these devastating cuts to art and culture in New England. The proposed budget calls for eliminating all funding for the National Endowment for the Arts ($152 million) and the National Endowment for the Humanities ($155 million).

What NEA funding means to New England:

For fiscal year 2017, New England states received $2.591 million in NEA grants overall, according to the NEA website. Here’s who got what:

• Connecticut: 15 organizations, $310,000
• Massachusetts: 62 organizations, $1,672,000
• Maine: 11 organizations, $242,000
• New Hampshire: 6 organizations, $120,000
• Rhode Island: 9 organizations, $152,500
• Vermont: 4 organizations, $95,000

But the math adds up even less when you look beyond straight grants. Ann Wicks, communications manager for the New England Foundation on the Arts (NEFA)—one of six regional arts organizations funded by the NEA and private donations—explains. Arts organizations can potentially receive NEA dollars in three ways:

• an outright allocation of a grant the organization applies for itself
• an allocation from NEFA through NEA dollars provided to NEFA
• from NEA dollars given to state arts organizations, such as the Massachusetts Cultural Council

Wicks says about 15 percent of NEFA’s annual budget comes from NEA dollars. Beyond grants, NEFA uses those dollars to support artists in other, less direct ways, Wicks says. The Creative Ground Directory, for instance, is a free resource that lists artists and other creators around New England so that it’s easier to find appropriate collaborators for projects. In FY2016, NEFA made a total of 462 grants equaling $3.4 million. New England states received $829,947 of those NEFA grants.

In other words, the loss of funding to New England arts and humanities organizations could be even larger. “NEA support is very important to New England and the creative sector,” she says.

It’s a point that is echoed nationally. The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA), a national nonprofit that assists state arts agencies, offers this math about how NEA dollars improve the economy at large:

• The arts return $22.3 billion in tax revenue to federal, state, county, and municipal governments.
• Rural areas, low-income communities, and schools would feel the effects of this funding loss disproportionately from reductions. State arts agencies (using state and federal funds) award more than 25% of their grants to rural areas, 54% to low-income communities, and 45% to arts education projects.
• Every NEA dollar leverages more than $9 in matching funds, meaning that the impact of the NEA loss is just the beginning of the potential financial loss for arts organizations.

Cutting the NEA and NEH seem especially confusing given this math offered by NASAA: The NEA receives 0.004% of the total Federal budget, which is less than ½ of one hundredth of a percent.

That math also doesn’t add up when you consider the numbers presented by The Guardian. The British paper reports the following expenses incurred by taxpayers less than 50 days into 45’s residency:

• $56.6 million (or a cool $500,000 a day) to protect Trump Tower. That was through March 1. Assuming that Mrs. 45 stays until June for Mini-45 to finish school, that dollar amount could add another $46 million, bringing the total to $102 million.
• $3+million estimated cost for EACH weekend jaunt to golf work at his Mar-a-Lago Resort (a place where he doubled entry fees from $100,000 to $200,000 the day after he was elected).
• $97,380 for hotels for Secret Service to protect Eric Trump (that would be his son on those business interests 45 still hasn’t divested himself of) while he visited a condominium development in Uruguay. This is just one trip.

And finally this statistic: 45’s proposed military spending increase in his federal budget? $54 billion.

Something definitely doesn’t add up.

Does this irritate you as much as it does us? Here are a few links if you want to #TakeAction. See you on the streets.

Pen.org
artsactionfund.org
Change.org
The Official White House Petition to Save Arts Funding
Contact Your Representative
Arts Advocacy Day – Washington, DC
#SaveTheNEA

Top image courtesy Royal Talens

The post #TakeAction: Doing the NEA Defunding Math appeared first on Take Magazine.

Created on the Bay of Fundy in the tiny town of Eastport, Maine, the Tides Institute and Museum of Art (TIMA) established a wet-foot dry-foot policy early in its inception. All artists would be welcome to show their work and do residencies whether they came from the U.S., from over the border in Canada, from across the mile-wide strait from New Brunswick, or from across the Atlantic Ocean.

That was 15 years ago. Today TIMA and the town of Eastport—population 1,200—are riding high on art and innovation due to the imperative of their locale.

“We developed a Maine and New Brunswick [Canada] task force in 2010 so cultural leaders on both sides of the border could talk and meet. It’s the reason we started the institute,” says Executive Director Hugh French, who is one of TIMA’s founders. “There is too much of a tendency of stopping at the border in the U.S. and Canada while artists are crossing the border. It’s silly not to follow them.”

Interior of TIMA’s 1819 Free Will North Church Project Space with large-scale installation, “Undertow,” by artist, Anna Hepler. Project space has 23-foot high vaulted ceiling and exceptional acoustics. | Photo by Allison Osberg.

Eastport is located on Moose Island and connected to the mainland by a causeway. It sits at the entrance of Passamaquoddy Bay on the border of Canada and is at the most eastern part of the US. It’s a place you might expect to be a little sleepy, at least when it comes to the arts and innovation. But you’d be wrong.

TIMA, whose studio, museum and housing for artist residencies overlook the U.S./Canada boundary, is a beehive of artistic activity. Community renewal, an active residency program, and an aggressively diverse permanent collection are just a few of the parts that make up the institute’s game plan. That diversity is also one reason funding and artists are drawn to the space, French says.

“Early on we felt we had to operate on different interests. Architecture and history, for example,” says French. “Our collection includes painting, photography, architectural elements, a historical collection and a strong interest in contemporary work. We foster new work. That is the reason for our residency program—so contemporary work can be created here.”

Tides Institute and Museum of Art| Image courtesy TIMA

Last year’s TIMA’s residency program had nine artists—six from the U.S. and three from abroad. This year the program will host 10-12 artists. This summer a two-year collaboration between Portland, Maine photographer Shoshannah White and Halifax interdisciplinary artist Charley Young will have its premiere in an exhibition in the 1819 church now known as the Free Will North Church Project Space.

TIMA’s main building was the organization’s first regional revitalization effort, a strategy of cross disciplines that began 15 years ago when the organization began. “The long-term effort started with tackling a threatened crippled building in the center of downtown,” says French. “We put $1.2 million to bring the building back. Now we have six buildings.”

Tides Institute and Museum of Art New Year’s Eve sardine drop | Image courtesy TIMA

Although Eastport is physically isolated, TIMA and the community are not. The populace comes together every year for “Artsipelago,” an event that includes galleries, chefs, and ferries. To celebrate yet another year of tides, TIMA annually organizes the New Year’s Eve Maple Leaf and Sardine Drop. During that popular event, a giant red maple leaf is lowered at midnight Atlantic time (11pm EST) to commemorate the Canadian new year while a brass band plays “O Canada.” An hour later, when the New Year reaches the States, an 8-foot sardine is lowered as the band plays “Auld Lang Syne.”

Tides Institute and Museum of Art – museum
Eastport, Maine
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Top image: View from the top of TIMA’s main building with a view of Eastport’s downtown and waterfront – all of the islands in the distance are in Canada. | Image courtesy TIMA

The post Building Bridges, Crossing Borders Through Art appeared first on Take Magazine.

Michael Madore is a naturalist—fascinated by details, taxonomies, and science—but one who can hardly bear to go out into the world.

Michael Madore, KONTAKT!!!, 2016 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

His work is filled with nerve bundles, climbing tendrils, meticulously cross-hatched fortresses, densely rendered surfaces of swelling water, floral bursts, crystalline structures, careful lettering, birds, and systems of coils and whorls that link and blanket everything. His pieces are jam-packed, teeming, in a way, but with plenty of space and breathing room.

Seemingly conflicting signals and storylines get balanced out in Madore’s work and life. A bit of both outsider and insider, he has Asperger’s Syndrome. His work has an obsessive aspect to it; his artistic practice, he says, is a means of coping with the overload of distractions and information that bombard us, imposing order on a world that’s always unspooling. With an MFA from Yale, Madore also can talk about his work from a critical-historical perspective and make all kinds of connections to theory.

“It’s almost biological, just the need to make work,” says Madore. “It is my way of coping.”

Madore was born in Hartford, to a French-Canadian family. French—Quebecois French—was his first language. As a kid, he was embarrassed about his background and his mother tongue. The family moved to Maine and Quebec for a time, eventually settling back in Hartford. With an unpleasant home life and undiagnosed mental-health issues, Madore took to drawing schematics, using diagrams from household appliances and other sources as a means of creating coherence. “As a kid I always drew, but very secretly. I drew maps,” he says. “I grew up in a really chaotic household. My father was a really bad alcoholic. We were relatively poor.”

Michael Madore, Misfits 246-358 2016 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

Madore got a scholarship to Trinity College. He majored in English and minored in Art History before heading to New York City in 1977, where he worked in bookstores and as a proofreader for a time. With a day job in SoHo, he visited some galleries that featured outsider art and work by the Chicago Imagists, and Madore took an interest in it. “I was attracted because this was not the kind of art history and mainstream narrative that I learned at Trinity and kind of dismissed,” he says. He liked the fact that this was non-New York, non-minimalist art that didn’t have an overt meta-art quality. “It lit a light bulb in me,” says Madore. “I said, You don’t have to do art about art.”

His path to the academy led through the clinic. He moved back to Connecticut, this time to New Haven, in 1983. It was a psychiatrist at Yale—Madore says he’s had “an on-and-off relationship with psychiatry”—who encouraged him to apply to grad school after he was concluding time as a patient there. He got his MFA in painting in 1990.

Madore’s work is more engaged with the natural world, despite the fact that he says going outside is too much for him. He thinks about, reads about, and studies nature, but mostly from books, illustrated guides, movies, and online. “I’m not a nature person,” says Madore. “It’s just overwhelming, the detail. The idea of going into a forest is a nightmare.”

Michael Madore, Asset compromised!, 2016 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

Travel, in general, is something Madore avoids. “I’m a horrible traveler,” he says. “I can’t stand arriving or departing.” But his work is a kind of time and space travel. It takes him to remote regions and imagines distant futures, when people and their peculiarities and depredation are maybe no longer a factor.

Madore is working on a series based on Labrador in the future. Labrador is the remote peninsular region in northeastern Canada, with forests and mountains, stretches of exposed bedrock, and plenty of mostly undisturbed wildlife. Envisioning the coming decades, a piece like Labrador 2088 imagines plant and animal species displaced by climate change and man-made environmental flux. “I hesitate to call it a metaphor for global warming, but it is a way for me to project what are some of the changes that will affect boreal forests. Birds begin to migrate, and plants as well,” says Madore. “For me, it’s just a kind of way to pursue my interests in flora and fauna and mutations.”

Michael Madore, Labrador 2088, 2017 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

Michael Madore – Artist
Hartford, CT
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Top photo Madore in his studio | All photos courtesy the artist

The post The Insider Outsider appeared first on Take Magazine.

Some artists work in front of a computer screen all day. Others prefer the more tactile setting of a wood shop or a painting studio. Rhode Island sculptor Krzysztof Mathews likes it all. The result is two very different bodies of work that merge sculpture with virtual environments through hundreds of mechanical figures.

Krzysztof Mathews, Sole Dominion | Illustrator Vector Graphics

First the backstory: the figures are a race of cybernetic beings called Endomeq. These competing tribes and communities spar and fight over scarce resources in a world that Mathews conceived himself. His process begins with sculptural figures, assemblages of harvested plastic that he turns into robotic-looking creatures. He works on several at once, waiting until he finds just the right component to finish a figure.

“I let the pieces tell me what they want to be,” Mathews says, noting that he doesn’t have a specific vision for any figure. He tinkers with discarded electronics and electrical items—a vacuum, a hair dryer, an inkjet printer—distilling each machine until it’s an unrecognizable pile of little plastic pieces spread out over Mathews’ basement work station.

“They very much hearken back to my childhood,” Mathew says of the Endomeq. A Rhode Island native who got his MFA at the University of Wisconsin before moving back to New England, he played with lots of Legos and erector sets, as well as the 1980s Capsela robotics kits, as a child.

Krzysztof Mathews, Breakout | Illustrator Vector Graphics

After he finishes the sculptures, Mathews leaps into the digital realm. He measures each sculptural piece and then rebuilds it from scratch using a 3D graphics program called Rhinoceros. Then he paints the sculptures, first with an epoxy resin followed by a layer of primer to smooth them out. Once the real objects are painted, he recreates the colors in the graphics program.

Mathews constructs environments for the figures, determines lighting configurations that best show off the Endomeq parts, and then pulls them into Adobe Illustrator, where he makes the pieces as large (or as small) as he wants. He then exhibits the printed pieces.

The multi-faceted practice has a distinct advantage. “If something isn’t working, I change gears,” Mathews says. If the computer acts up, he retreats to the basement. If the weather is nice, he’ll head outside with cans of spray paint. “I’d rather not force the issue.”

When asked whether he regards either the sculptures or the prints as “final,” Mathews is happy to leave that up to the viewer. “People tend to respond more to one or the other. There aren’t too many people who like them both.”

Mathews currently has two prints in the Art League of Rhode Island members exhibit at the Vets Gallery, which is up through April 1.

Krzysztof Mathews, Hard Reboot | Illustrator Vector Graphics

Krzysztof Mathews – Sculptor
Warwick, RI
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Top photo Krzysztof Mathews, Not Gonna Take It, made using Illustrator Vector Graphics | All photos courtesy the artist

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