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
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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

The post All In A Day’s Work appeared first on Take Magazine.

Looking deeper is mandatory with the artwork of Toby Sisson. Her painting, prints, and drawings span abstraction’s capacity for metaphor. Black, white, and gray collide in patches, loops, and other elusive forms. Crafted variably on wood and paper with ink, oil, graphite, beeswax, and charcoal, these raw, pure images exude ineffable depth. Her signature could be a dagger, teardrop, or wound—“I look at it as a stand-in for all kinds of things,” Sisson says. The mark recurs in her work like “automatic writing.”

It’s no accident that Sisson’s visual art seems as if it were written rather than wrought. She anchored both her 2015 solo exhibition, . . . and other poems, and her artist statement with insights from lauded writer and social critic James Baldwin: “The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.”

Toby Sisson, grow inward like a root I, 2017, encaustic monotype on paper mounted on wood, 12 x 9 in.. Photo courtesy of the artist

In their achromatic poetic grace, Sisson’s images reflect a spectrum of psychological and social forces. Her use of black and white speaks by turns to her biracial heritage, to America’s ongoing racial inequity, and to more elemental ideas of melding and pulling apart, opposition, and coalescence. She’s particularly invested in agency, and the interplay between a given material’s natural inclinations and her own will. “You can exert a lot of control…you can master these materials,” Sisson says, “but at the same time there’s a lot of opportunities for them to exert their own personalities.”

Right now Sisson is on sabbatical from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is immersed in her Providence, Rhode Island, studio with a series of collages. She says the chaos in the world is permeating her current project, and she considers her work “an opportunity to explore these existential questions that we’re perhaps all asking.” But she sees this uncertain moment as a catalyst for something greater.

Toby Sisson, Totems # 1-4 (installation view), 2015, encaustic and graphite on wood, 30 x 30 in. each. Photo courtesy of the artist

She recently saw Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro at Providence’s Cable Car Cinema, and reflected on its sampled interview footage in which Baldwin asserts, “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive.”

“I’m still taking cues from Baldwin,” Sisson says. “I’m just using different tools. He used language. But I think that painting is a language as well. . . So I’m optimistic. I don’t see this as a challenge in the negative sense. I see these questions as a challenge in the very best sense of the word.”

Toby Sisson – Artist
Providence, Rhode Island
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Top photo The Darkest Hour, Chant, Cadence (installation view), 2014, Encaustic and graphite on wood, Dimensions: 24” x 12” each | Photo courtesy the artist

The post Exploring the Gray Area appeared first on Take Magazine.

Adam Niklewicz does not believe in the illusion of the ordinary, but rather seeks to enliven the seemingly banal in his art. From dancing shoes to a fully functional sausage recorder, Nicklewicz provides everyday objects with lives of their own. As a Polish immigrant, Nicklewicz creates art that art critic Patricia Rosoff once described as a “world of in-betweens”—a kaleidoscope of work suspended between the nostalgia of his native home, his ardent love for American pop-culture, and his playful disbelief in the seemingly mundane.

Two Tape Measures and a Piece of Dali, (from The End of Enlightenment series), 2017 | two wooden tape measures | 60” x 44” x 1”

Niklewicz immigrated from Poland to the U.S. in the early ‘80s with his wife and young daughter. He received his BFA from Washington University School of Fine Arts in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1989. That degree was the culmination of an interest in art that Adam Niklewicz says began when he was seven years old, after seeing a poor reproduction of Salvador Dali’s 1935 painting, “The Burning Giraffe,” in a single-volume encyclopedia. “The moment has burned into my memory,” he says.

An unexpected life-changing encounter with the artists Christo and Jean-Claude in 2000 changed Niklewicz’s art forever. “I attended a lecture given by Christo and Jeanne Claude,” he says. “I was but mildly interested in the event on my way there, and left with my mind shattered.” The encounter, he says, influenced his own capacity to create sculptural work, and to approach art as a multifaceted medium of both tragedy and comedy. “Society would rather make you believe that reality can be sanitized, streamlined and predictable,” he says. “I make art to poke holes in that illusion.”

Niklewicz was one of Take‘s “Artists to Watch 2016.” In addition to performance and installation work that spans from New York to the Ukraine, he has two performances occurring at Artspace in New Haven. Niklewicz performs in the exhibition Laughing Skulls Motorcycle Club until April 29th as a part of a collective project founded by artist Robert Brush, and is currently creating a two-day performance, The Best Things to Hold in Your Hand, that will be curated by Sarah Fritchey.

Adam Niklewicz – multimedia artist
New Haven, Connecticut
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Top Image How The Wheel Was Discovered, 2017 | Adam Niklewicz

The post Objects In-Between 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

The post Mechanical Worlds appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally appeared in our September 2015 print issue.

Don’t be fooled by her colorful costumes and “anyone can do it” attitude—Abby is a serious artist. An adjunct professor at Columbia University who frequently spends time in her hometown of Burlington, Vermont, Manock takes complicated concepts and boils them down into publicly digestible but very personal archetypes.

In the Deitch Projects gallery’s 2006 Art Parade, Manock’s production Annie vs. Grease Soundtrack War had volunteers dress as either Annie from the musical or Danny from the film Grease. This wasn’t bio-sex-specific—people were just asked to identify as either character, dress accordingly, and then parade down the streets of Manhattan dancing to their respective soundtrack.

Annie vs. Grease Soundtrack War | Photo by Josh Tonsfeldt

“This whole project started because I would blast the Annie and Grease soundtracks in my studio,” Manock says. “People would just stop in to talk. They were so excited to tell me their stories surrounding these songs!

“When the volunteers—friends and acquaintances from every phase of my life—showed up [the day of the Art Parade], I asked them all to wear a bag on their head. At first I think people were like, ‘I have to wear bag on my head?’ But then something amazing happened. We took all of our individual experiences with these songs and became a collective. Annie and Danny’s worlds fused. It was almost surreal. It was like we created our own musical—something bigger than its parts.”

In another public artwork, Volley of the Nuts, performers dressed as either Wingnuts (more techy) or Acorns (more woodsy) and performed a set of tasks specific to their persona. The Wingnuts were like crows. Their job was to be fascinated by shiny things, hang out and taunt people, and basically mess things up. The Acorns’ job was to clean up after the Wingnuts. They would tidy and hide the shiny things by digging holes and burying them. The Wingnuts would then scratch at the dirt and dig the shiny things up, completing the circle. It became like a spectator sport. Onlookers would pick sides, mostly rooting for the Acorns. These two “sides” were essentially of the same coin. Through play, the teams demonstrated this symbiotic relationship.

“Ernie and Bert” from What Ever It Takes | Photo by Sam Simon

“I love the way things that are black and white play off each other,” Manock says.

In addition to teaching, she works as an artist’s assistant, a scenic painter, a muralist, a prop maker, and a visual designer. I met her in 2004 while she was conceiving Mastodon Cometh. The underlying goal of this work was to explore the idea of sustenance and how dramatically it has changed over time. It was commissioned as part of an on-site project for the band Phish’s “final” concert in Coventry, Vermont.

Performers dressed as cavemen dragged an enormous steel-framed mastodon out into the throngs of concertgoers. They then decapitated and split open the elephant-like creature, transforming it into a Quickie Mart. Instead of chomping on prehistoric mammal meat, the performers, now dressed in convenience-store uniforms, snacked on and dispensed packets filled with jelly beans, Cheetos, Life Savers, and all sorts of other highly processed “foods.” Ahhhh, progress!

“The Noodle Family Traveling Circus” | Photo by Abby Manock

Manock’s art is in a constant state of evolution, and she feels she is moving into a new creative phase. In August of last year, for example, she brought the Mastodon project to its knees. In a short film starring some of the original cast dressed in both caveman and Quickie Mart costumes, the mastodon was burned to the ground. Her next “mammoth” undertaking is a project involving good-luck charms and a string of glow-in-the-dark jellyfish.

“Most recently,” she adds, “I’ve been doing some murals. I’ve always used black lines to more clearly define my patterns. But I’m going for something more subtle now. I’m having the colors go right up against each other. It’s like I’m letting up on ‘total control.’ I’m not coloring between the lines. I’m just letting the colors speak for themselves.”

Abby Manock – Visual Artist
Burlington, Vermont
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Top photo of Abby Manock by Tim Ireland

The post Black, White, and Abby All Over appeared first on Take Magazine.