Providence musician and graphic artist Brian Chippendale first fell in love with the drums when he was a toddler. No, seriously.

The Philadelphia-raised vocalist for noise rock outfit Lightning Bolt says he vividly remembers using large spoons as a kid to pummel pots and pans in his parents’ kitchen. Later, he’d evolve to markers, which he’d tap against glass bottles of varying size, and play along with the radio.

Today, he is considered one of the world’s most innovative drummers, and was even enlisted by Björk to handle the drums on her 2007 album Volta. He’s also recognized for his cartoons and graphic novels, like Puke Force and Maggots. Doing both requires a subtle balance.

“We’re a loud band,” Chippendale says of Lightning Bolt, which first took shape in 1994. They’ve released six full-lengths, including 2015’s Fantasy Empire. “I am a fairly aggressive physical drummer and I drum for about an hour each day. Then, I have the rest of my time to work on art and chase my 1-year-old around.”

According to Chippendale, he’s been sketching for as long as he can remember, and, if he gets lost in his work, ends up drawing for hours on end. He says he’s been in New England since 1991, when he came to Providence for printmaking classes at the Rhode Island School of Design.

While at school, Chippendale met his wife, Korean-American artist Jungil Hong, who was studying ceramics. “We produced a pretty cute little kid,” Chippendale says. “So far, he’s gotten the best of us.”

The self-proclaimed workaholic admits that living in Providence has helped inspire much of his work, both audio and visual. “For years, I really was shaped by this kind of mill living scene in Providence,” he explains. “I barely left the studio. Providence, specifically, was really abandoned for years, so you get these huge spaces for really cheap. The forgotten industry of Providence provided Lightning Bolt with places where we could create and be loud, and an opportunity to form what we are today.”

Chippendale says that many of his artist friends have, in recent decades, left Providence for the likes of New York and Los Angeles. But that’s not his plan. “Those cities are so difficult to thrive in,” he explains. “Ten years ago, you saw people fleeing but now, they’re returning because they’ve got kids and they just want to mellow out.”

Chippendale says that he has become enchanted by Rhode Island’s beauty, including its glorious beaches, and loves the vibe of the capital city and its dwellers. “The slowness of Providence has really allowed me the chance to do stuff that doesn’t make money,” he jokes. “I get to decorate things and I get lost in that, and forget about not making money — until I look in my wallet.”

Want to know what Chippendale is listening to when he’s not playing? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify Channel to hear. While you’re there, check out what’s on the playlists of other musicians we’ve featured.

Brian Chippendale, graphic artist and drummer for Lightning Bolt
Providence, Rhode Island
Website
Bandcamp
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Artist Ethan Hayes–Chute thinks a lot about the spaces we inhabit and how we experience them. His three-dimensional installations, built from salvaged wood and other materials, reflect his thoughts on self-sufficiency, self-preservation, accumulation, and nature. “I’m enchanted with working in different mediums, at different scales, and offering different entry points for people to encounter my work,” he says. His current work, a photographic series called Beacons, is part of We Might Climb a Tree, at Least, an exhibition celebrating naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau at the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts (MMPA) through January 27th, 2018.

The photos in Beacons, shot in the woods surrounding Hayes-Chute’s family camp on Lake Sebec in central Maine, juxtapose the familiar (ordinary household lamps) with the ominous (a dark forest). Each lamp, pictured hanging from a tree, creates a small, familiar circle of light. “My inspiration for the series happened by accident,” Hayes-Chute says. “I was working outside at the camp with a lamp and was really taken by the light’s interaction with the leaves against the darkness.”

A builder and maker during his childhood in Freeport, Maine, Hayes-Chute became fascinated constructing small sculptures and miniatures as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. His family (his father, James Chute, is an artist who recommended the Beacons series to MMPA Director Denise Froehlich) and experiences growing up in Maine are reflected in his art. “The settings and similarities I create or recreate from imagination and my family history creep in quite often in my work,” says Hayes-Chute. “I’m always happy to have those moments.”

From the series Beacons, 2015, Digital C-Print, 18 x 27 inches. Photo courtesy of Ethan Hayes-Chute. 

Last year, Hayes-Chute used his maker skills to explore familiarity in a space, building a room-size workshop — complete with with workbench, tools, and assorted odds and ends — in an installation at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. More recently, with collaborator and Finnish performance artist Dafna Maimon, he combined large-scale installation with performance art by creating Camp Solong. It’s an immersive three-day summer camp for adults emphasizing play, community, and the universality of saying “goodbye,” whether to others or to one’s emotional baggage.

Camp Solong, Dafna Maimon and Ethan Hayes-Chute, 2016 – (ongoing), as seen in the garden of Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, 2016 Photo by Mike Terry

Hayes-Chute and Maimon built the camp, a one-walled cabin with a roof, platform, and eight bunk beds with a table and benches, which pops up each summer in different locations, including Finland and Germany (Hayes-Chute hopes to bring it to Maine). “I always wanted to integrate performance in to my work and activate my own structures,” Hayes-Chute notes. “Dafna and I came up with the idea of summer camp through discussions about how people need to learn how to empathize and communicate with each other.”

Hayes-Chute is also experimenting with video. His “New Domestic Woodshop,” a humorous riff on popular do-it-yourself television shows and YouTube videos, was developed for CONGLOMERATE TV, a collaborative project in Berlin. As the host, Eth, Hayes-Chute uses the many materials he has in his workshop to solve minor problems (for example, in this video, how to create a lap desk that enables him to work from bed). His next project is creating an experience around making customized cooking spices, a theme touched on in his installation at the List.

Whether it’s video, performance art, or large-scale installations, Hayes-Chute is still tinkering. “I want people to see these collections of objects and have the experience of seeing something familiar,” he says.

Ethan Hayes-Chute, Artist
Freeport, Maine/Berlin, Germany
Website
Instagram

Top image: List Projects: Ethan Hayes-Chute, 2016, installation view at MIT LIST Visual Arts Center, wood, found objects. Photo by Peter Harris Studio

The post If You Build It appeared first on Take Magazine.

David Katz has had a couple of chairs in his possession for as long as he can remember. They’re family heirlooms, but after 20 years of constant shuffling between his various residences, they had become worn to the point of disrepair. Still, Katz was not ready to part with them. So he decided he would use them as centerpieces of his art, creating installations that use the chairs and unfired clay to make a statement about the fragility of life.

Katz, a faculty member in the ceramics department at the Rhode Island School of Design, has a new exhibit called Flextime showing at 3S Artspace in New Hampshire and it borrows similar themes. Chairs, Katz says, are particularly unique objects in that their physical form implies the body but shown by themselves they also amplify the absence of the human form. By using old chairs—many of which have been rescued from salvage bins—and clay in its purest form in breathtaking installations, Katz presents the exhibit as a marker of time and change.

Unfired clay is an especially good medium to work with as it starts out wet and slowly cracks over time, Katz says. “I think of it as this living stuff and you can get an immediate, tactile reaction in a very visceral way,” he says. “You give the installation life and then you watch it go through this transition where it starts to get covered with cracks. Every crack is a marker of the passage of time, and that’s built into the art.” The fact that the installations are temporary—from a period of days to months—adds to that temporal feeling.

Liminality of Innocence and Loss. Photo by David Katz.

Katz maintains a studio practice in Providence while teaching full-time. As an instructor he believes it’s important to communicate honestly about the work you’re invested in. “I’m really focused on trying to open up pathways for students to find a voice that’s honest and uniquely them,” he says.

Katz shares his love of the medium of clay with his students reminding them about the incredibly rich history behind the material. “I want them to understand the context of its cultural narrative along with art history and contemporary use, to really know the rules, so they can then break them.”

Interstitial Tension. Photo by Nick Lemoyne

Katz applies the same principles to his own art as he explores the juxtapositions in life through found objects and ceramic principles. When he bounds found objects like chairs with clay, he’s swallowing them up and the chairs are simultaneously breaking free, he says. “It appears that this object has agency in that it is being wrapped and consumed but then it’s also cracking and falling apart.”

Every Which Way (scaled). Photo courtesy of David Katz.

In one sense, Flextime might well be a statement about the histories of families, Katz says. After all, they are bound together by blood ties even as each individual tries to carve his or her own unique identity. “I love these in-between places where there’s that constant push and pull, that constant tension.”

David Katz–sculptor
Providence, Rhode Island
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Top image: Flextime installation. Photo by Nick Lemoyne

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In the thick heat of an afternoon, Suzanne Volmer emerges from her expansive and well loved studio to greet me. As we enter the space, the all-white room unfolds with high ceilings and windows cascading light. Her work floods every corner: wide steel sculptures, paintings, models of outdoor installations, and her vessels—soft bending porcelain structures—all illuminated in afternoon sun.

Like her work, Volmer exudes an infectious intensity as she floats between bodies of various work. It is hard to not be enamored by every item; even small scraps of paper from various project models beam with creativity. In the furthest corner, her vessels sit quietly but demand attention. “These vessels are fired in an electric kiln,” she says. “Most people do not want their work to move once it goes to fire. But I specifically formulate the chemicals in the porcelain strips to shift. I want them to look like they are breathing.” She notes that while porcelain may appear fragile, her vessels also demonstrate immense strength in form and movement.

Clouds, captured full installation view, approximately 16’w X 14’H X 34’D

Volmer is vested in the scientific processes of working with steel and porcelain, manipulating chemical formulations to disrupt the ways in which porcelain and metal fuse and come undone. “What is fascinating to me is that porcelain and steel ignite at the same temperature,” she says. “Porcelain becomes glassy whereas the layers of steel that have been layered together begin to spring apart.” Her pieces, Metal Wedges and Tepees, for instance, are steel sculptures that have been heated to spring apart the layers, exposing charged edges and flakes of metal that she likes to “paint with.” Their texture is reminiscent of charred bark, seemingly fragile and haunted by fire.

Teepees, steel, 6’W X 3’H X 1’D

Volmer leans into the “essential qualities of her materials” and creates based on the movement of a location. Using the natural lines of a hill or the wide support beams of a gallery space, Volmer creates a symbiotic relationship between material and environment, “reusing anything intrinsic to the space.” “I want to create experiential work that does not have a directly obvious narrative,” says Volmer. “It is important for me for my work to exist naturally within a space, but to also command its attention while letting the person viewing it to map their own experiences and feelings.”

Since graduating from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn “too long ago,” she laughs, Volmer has been deeply immersed in the world of fine arts. From teaching at Rhode Island School of Design to being a guest artist at Massachusetts College of Art, she continues to mentor other artists and writes art criticism for various publications. She enjoys collaborative projects as well, including with seemingly non-art related collaborators such as engineers, metal fabricating companies, and various other specialty fields. “I love working with these people within my community who would not otherwise be involved in fine art,” she says. “They get a tremendous charge from being able to put their skills to use on something creative.”

“I like working with porcelain and various metals because the processes are not fragile. They are incredibly labor intensive and forceful and yet the outcome can be very soft,” Volmer says. “As a female artist I have been drawn to this because it commands a type of skill that enables me to be both technical and creative.”

Suzanne Volmer–artist
Lincoln, Rhode Island
Website

Top image Floating World, maquette for large installation, mixed media with porcelain. All images courtesy of Suzanne Volmer

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Two years ago, fueled by curiosity, Adam Anderson developed an interest in sunflowers. The landscape architect, owner of the Design Under Sky Studio in Providence, Rhode Island, decided he would plant 1,000 seeds along the river in Providence and see what would happen: “Is the soil good enough? If they do grow, will maintenance crews eventually just mow them down? If they bloom, will people just pluck them out of the ground?”

Happy enough with the initial results, Anderson, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, looked across the street and noticed two vacant lots where Highway 195 used to cut through. He wondered if he could grow a field of sunflowers there and sent an unsolicited proposal to the local highway commission. The commission accepted and he launched a Kickstarter project, “10,000 Suns: Highway to Park Project” to plant 10,000 sunflower seeds over two acres, tend to the plants, and watch them grow over the season.

This year will be the second year for the public installation project, and Anderson’s plans are more ambitious. He is planting wildflowers, in addition to the sunflowers, in another patch for a “river of flowers.” The site is located in two parcels between S. Main Street/South Water Street/Wickenden Street near downtown Providence and the Providence River. Last year, drought and unexpected expenses complicated things a little, but the project saw fruition with the help of a few dedicated volunteers including Anderson’s girlfriend, Sasha Azbel. The Kickstarter project is in place again and the installation is fueled by more volunteers and donations of material such as compost from Smithfield Peat and also from the city of Providence.

Why sunflowers? In terms of botanical performance, not many other plants can go from a seed to eight feet tall in two months, given the right conditions, Anderson says. Their growth makes for a dramatic transformation. “They are this striking symbol, great pollinators, and provide a lot of food for different species,” Anderson says. “They are also bioaccumulators so they can actually suck up and process organic toxins from the ground,” which is a big deal for city lots.

Sunflowers, Anderson says, act as a symbol of possibility in landscape. The seasonal aspect of the project is also a major part in landscape architecture, he says. They give us a chance to look at open spaces as not just something waiting for development, but as public space that could be critical to a city’s infrastructure. In addition to the sunflowers, of course, Anderson has been delighted by the community involvement and the people he has met through the project. “People come by and they engage with each other,” he says. “This has been a great platform to educate people about landscape architecture, and it’s good fun.”

Adam Anderson–founder, 10,000 Suns: Highway to Park Project
Providence, Rhode Island
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Photos courtesy of Adam Anderson

The post Sunny Side Up appeared first on Take Magazine.

A nondescript warehouse on a side alley in Cranston, Rhode Island, serves as studio for Frank Poor, an alumnus of the Rhode Island School of Design, whose Southern roots serve as inspiration for his sculptural art. The artist, with numerous honors and exhibits to his name, currently has his work on exhibit at Boston’s Barbara Krakow Gallery.

The multimedia artist creates striking architectural forms with photographs of abandoned buildings from the South and wooden frames that serve as scaffolding. While Poor started out using found photographs as inspiration, these days he travels to the South, including to his home state of Georgia, to take pictures that will serve as the base for his art. He loves working with abandoned buildings because they allow him to project his own story onto them. It helps that many of them awaken memories from his childhood in the small town of Woodstock, Georgia. “I don’t specifically have a history with these buildings,” he says, “but they rhyme with the buildings I do have a history with.”

Frank Poor, work in his studio, Poornima Apte photo

Architecture, Poor says, has always served as a powerful visual metaphor. “I guess these abandoned buildings are like cicadas that leave their husks on trees. It is this sort of shell, this evidence of a life that just happened inside.”

Poor moved to Rhode Island in the ’90s for school and after graduating from RISD, decided to set up roots in the Ocean State. The distance from his hometown helped his art. Growing up in a small town of 500-700 people, he had never read the great Southern writers such as Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor, but he did so after settling in Rhode Island. “These are real people. I know these characters and the environments they lived in,” Poor says after reading their work. “I came back to that part of my heritage once I got away.” That same sentiment colors his art. “As I’ve grown as an artist, it’s been important for me to play with that distance–to do the listening there and the telling here.”

Frank Poor at his studio in Cranston, Rhode Island, Poornima Apte photo

His work has been shown in the South as well and the reactions there, as expected, are usually different from the ones he receives here in New England. Typically someone in the South will tell him the houses remind them of their uncle’s or aunt’s houses or that they trigger specific memories, whereas in New England the art is much more of an architectural abstraction, he says. He certainly appreciates both points of view.

Rhode Island has not yet served as muse, but Poor has been teaching at area schools, including as adjunct at his alma mater, RISD. Poor says that the South will continue to fuel his art for a while. “It has culturally been, in some ways, a marginalized part of a larger nation. It remains that way, and for a lot of artists it’s easier to see that if you can hold it out there at a distance.”

Frank Poor–Artist
Cranston, Rhode Island
Website

Photos credit Poornima Apte and Krakow Gallery

The post Southern Comfort appeared first on Take Magazine.

Michelle Holzapfel acknowledges that she has some talent for whittling wood, but she credits as much of her artistic success to sheer chance. “You go along almost following your nose, following some feeling that you can’t even put words to,” she says in the latest episode of the PBS series Craft in America. “And that aspect of things cannot be overlooked. It’s very important to take your chances.”

The new “Nature” episode of the series, which celebrates handcrafted creativity across the country, included Holzapfel among five artists who pull their inspiration, materials, and medium from the natural world. Holzapfel embraces every knot in the pine, every twist of burlwood, every fissure that she works into a design.

Her work is technically astute yet thematically whimsical. Her trompe l’oeil pieces include a remarkable rendition of a knitting basket, detailed down to every wrap of yarn, and book ends that themselves look like stacks of books, one with a Raggedy Ann doll seated atop. Some of her vases and bowls hold intricate carvings of leaves, faces, coiled snakes, and even a “knitted” wooden sweater. In other sculptures, such as an apple with its stem still attached to a branch with leaves, the wood appears as sleek and impenetrable as marble.

Michelle Holzapfel, Vermont Spoons

Holzapfel grew up in rural North Smithfield, Rhode Island, learning to make things by hand—from a fort of branches in the woods to clothing stitched with needle and thread. Her mother made dresses. Her father was a machinist who did carpentry and metal work. “As a kid, as long as I can remember being alive, I loved to manipulate my world,” Holzapfel says. “I just grew up sort of immersed in a culture of fixing things, making things.”

In high school, she tried printmaking, using tools to cut wood for block prints. “I discovered that I really liked the carving part better than the printing part.” For her first commissioned work, she whittled name plaques for neighbors to hang at their front doors.

Her family took regular trips to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence to see shows and the museum. Today, the RISD museum collection includes her work, as does the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut; the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; and the Currier Museum in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Michelle Holzapfel, Rage Correctly

Holzapfel came to Vermont to attend Marlboro College, where she met her husband, fellow woodworker David Holzapfel. They started selling their creations at craft shows and to travelers passing on Route 9 in the summer.

After their two sons were born, the Holzapfels realized that sending them to college and providing them health insurance required the financial anchor of a full-time job. David set aside woodworking and became an elementary school art teacher in Marlboro.

By the 1990s, galleries in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Philadelphia had picked up Michelle’s work, fetching her prices upwards of $12,000 for a piece. After 30 years of relentless paring, her pace has slowed now, but she still sells to patrons and picks up commissions.

Yale University recently asked her to create the mace—a ceremonial staff representing each of its colleges—for a new residential college named for civil and women’s rights activist Pauli Murray. And this month, a show of Holzapfel’s work opens at The Gallery at Rhodes Arts Center at Northfield Mount Hermon prep school in Massachusetts.

Michelle Holzaphel–woodworker
Applewood Studio and Gallery
Marlboro, Vermont
Website
Craft in America “Nature” episode featuring Michelle Holzapfel

The post Going With The Grain appeared first on Take Magazine.

Every kid dreams of being a race car driver. But not every kid dreams of fabricating their roll-cages. For Isaac Juodvalkis, co-founder of Whetstone Workshop in East Providence, Rhode Island, a combination of creativity and circumstance led him to his current career in metal fabrication.

Silver #brazing #lesson with #brass footrests for the Architect's Stool from @studiodunn #furnituredesign #architect

A video posted by Whetstone Workshop (@whetstone_workshop) on May 27, 2016 at 9:19am PDT

“I was looking for a summer job,” explains Juodvalkis, who, at the time, was 17 and living in Davis, California. “I got hired at an Audi shop, and quickly found out that I’m not a very good mechanic. So I started teaching myself how to use the metal shop equipment, and slowly became their fabricator.”

While working there, one of the shop’s owners got into a BMX bike accident and was paralyzed. “He was very much into race cars,” Juodvalkis says, “and wanted a race car built for himself. He had a car that was front-end crashed, and nobody else in the shop wanted to work on it; but I didn’t have anything better to do, so I spent all of my time working with him to figure out how to build a race car.”

Brass pedestal bases rolled from sheet metal.

After a few years at Audi, Juodvalkis became an architectural metal fabricator at Metropolis Metal Works in Alameda, California, before making the leap to the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006. It was there that he met his wife Maria Martinez; in 2010, the couple founded Whetstone Workshop, a metal fabrication shop whose work is all handcrafted in-house. Whetstone’s reputation quickly developed with clients as diverse as Google and the United Arab Emirates, collaborating on projects as straightforward as lamps and chairs to building sculptures and structures for interactive exhibitions.

Whetstone Workshop is located in an old mill in East Providence, a trend that shapes the revitalization of the entire New England countryside. Developing their workshop in East Providence was also essential to the physical development of Whetstone. “Building out in New England was a critical factor because there’s a heavy industrial aspect to the area,” he says. “I had the ability to inexpensively purchase machine tools and all of the equipment required because there’s been a history of making things here for over 200 years. In California, they don’t have the same kind of 1940s equipment tucked away in garages and abandoned warehouses.

Solid brass hexagon side table for Refine Limited

“Rhode Island is also also a pretty good middle ground for us,” he continues. “Providence is a hip community, and we’re close to Boston and New York, which is where most of our work right now ends up. Culturally and geographically, it’s a very, very good mid-point.”

Juodvalkis and Martinez’s vision for Whetstone Workshop was to build a fabrication studio that melds exquisite craftsmanship with the ability to translate a client’s design ideas into fully realized projects. “It’s a constantly evolving and developing process, but the core work is to support a group of interesting and passionate people in a decent lifestyle. It isn’t just about money, but producing work you care about. I’ve turned down work I didn’t feel passionate about. The main goal is to provide a place that we can make anything we want however we want, and I think we’ve done that.”

Isaac Juodvalkis -co-founder of Whetstone Workshop
East Providence, Rhode Island
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Top photo: machined brass counterweights | All photos courtesy Maria Martinez

The post Masters of Metal appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally ran in our April/May 2016 print issue. 

Curators and working artists Lindsey Stapleton and Corey Oberlander—neither of whom is yet 30—have an ambitious remit to “exhibit the work that we feel deserves the spotlight,” particularly by artists just starting their careers.

Since opening in 2013, the duo have staged more than 30 shows at a breakneck pace, including the first Rhode Island edition of Bring Your Own Beamer, a worldwide series of pop-up exhibitions where groups of artists project their work on bare walls. In addition to attending annual art fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach and the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York City, they recently curated GROUND RULES at the University of Arkansas’s sUgAR Gallery.

The inspiration to start an unjuried, democratic space has its origins in Stapleton and Oberlander’s student days at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where they grew frustrated by how difficult it was to show “in a real space that wasn’t a café or a basement.”

That challenge stayed with them. After graduating in 2009 and 2010, respectively, the two lived on opposite coasts (Stapleton in San Francisco and Oberlander in the greater Boston area) until escalating rents forced them to look for a more affordable, art-friendly city. A Google search for “live/work/Providence” landed them squarely in The Plant, a sprawling mixed-use complex in the heart of Olneyville, a working-class neighborhood often called Providence’s “second downtown.”

Starting a gallery wasn’t their plan—at least not at first. “We knew we wanted it to be a studio space,” says Stapleton. “But we didn’t really figure out what we were going to do until we moved in and realized what Providence could handle.”

It took the duo a couple of months to realize that the city was hardly oversaturated with galleries showing emerging contemporary art. Researching Olneyville, they saw an opportunity to contribute to the growth of an up-and-coming arts community that includes feminist collective Dirt Palace (which celebrated its 15th anniversary in 2015) and neighboring art space Yellow Peril, which opened in 2011. “It was the perfect place for us to be,” explains Stapleton. “Not overly gentrified, still close to downtown Providence. And in the larger art-world scale, still close to Boston and New York City.”

The Transplantable, 2014 | Sarah Tortora | wood, wood composites, paint | 60×96×24 inches

GRIN’s inaugural exhibit was a group show titled Some Place Here that asked artists to riff on the prompt “home.”

“We try to do one group show to three-to-four solo shows,” says Stapleton. “We like solo shows. We like working with people who have the ability to put together a really solid body of work that can make a whole collection.”

Defining the GRIN aesthetic is a tricky business, because the work is so wide-ranging. Whether big or small, two-dimensional or three-, the guiding philosophy is playfulness and sly humor. (“Expect anti-jokes and anti-art,” reads the one-sheet for the recent group show, Besides.) Rough edges are welcome, self-importance is not.

Materials are frequently abused or subverted, as with Leah Piepgras’ day-glo clouds made of quartz, resin, or Styrofoam, or Charlie Smith’s punctured, cut, and drilled wooden assemblages that bend, snake, and contort.

Exploiting the tension between fantasy and domesticity is another frequent theme. Allison Baker’s mordantly funny video Party Girl crops tightly on two sharp-taloned hands as they carefully rip layer after layer of garish wrapping paper off a succession of gifts. The clichéd femininity of the trappings (long pink nails; hyper-saturated pink and polka-dotted paper; explosions of glitter) serve to underscore the Sisyphean punch at the end: the gifts are never revealed. The viewer remains stuck in a purgatory- loop of almost psychotic expectation.

Eddie Villanueva’s witty Guitar Ride reengineers a staple of American childhood, the kiddie ride, swapping in a classic symbol of American manhood, the electric guitar, in place of the pony. Drop 50 cents in the slot, and the guitar shimmies out the famous droning chord from “Tomorrow Never Knows” on the Beatles’ Revolver. Both curators work closely with the artists on the installation, which often becomes part of the art-making process itself. One of Smith’s early GRIN pieces, Strips, was actually created on site. “He came one day when we were de-installing the previous show,” explains Oberlander. “We were taking down a partition wall, and he asked if he could have it. ‘Sure, but it’s broken into pieces already.’ He was installing the next day, and I left for lunch. When I came back, the wall had been tipped on its side so it was a big diamond, and there’s a big 2 × 4 that’s been drilled into it. It turned into an additional piece—his reaction to the space—and it served perfectly for his show.”

That ability to “take risks and try weird ideas,” as well as collaborate outside the glare of the mainstream art world, gives the tight-knit Olneyville community its big advantage.

“As neighbors, we’ve developed what I call a ‘Spirit of Coopetition,’” notes Yellow Peril director Vanphouthon Souvannasane. “Besides aligning our opening nights, we share competitive intelligence on the international art market, specifically art fairs and other opportunities to extend the reach of our represented artists.”

Now that Stapleton and Oberlander are more enmeshed in the greater Providence arts community—including the Rhode Island School of Design, where the curators regularly sit in on portfolio reviews—they have come to appreciate the city’s long-term value for artists, particularly how it can help support more organic artistic growth. They’ve seen far too many students jump directly from graduation to a big city like New York or Boston without realizing that they may be leaving opportunity—and affordable incubator space—behind.

“When [such migration] comes to our attention, it’s like, Could you think about this?’” says Oberlander. “[Providence is] really close, and you can still access that New York scene or Boston—especially with the way that social media works.”

He and Stapleton say they have “a million different ideas” about how they can grow GRIN in the near future using the momentum they’ve built. Oberlander smiles: “It feels like we’re building a team.”

GRIN

Top image from the installation Gibberish: Sapient Fool’s Gold, 2015 | artist Jeannie Lynn Hulen | Image courtesy of GRIN Gallery

The post GRIN Reapers appeared first on Take Magazine.

Ready-to-wear clothing is drearily ubiquitous. Google “Dior T-shirt” and see for yourself. It is, therefore, an immensely pleasant treat to find an RTW label that is so special that you are, in fact, ready to wear it. And you’ve got to do so right this very second. Truly, Internet shipping methods are not fast enough to get the latest Pretty Snake apparel from Rhode Island designer Joseph Aaron Segal into your hands.

Clothing by Joseph Aaron Segal

“I would say my stuff is fun and exotic and adventurous,” Segal tells me one rainy Providence morning. “I try to keep everything fresh. The way I make patterns is something I can’t control.” And lo, bright tongue-in-cheek prints crisscross on sleek spandex silhouettes and dare you to try them on. Chuckling, Segal says, “I’m competing with big stores that are selling things for way less money, [though] I don’t think my fans will spend more than $100.”

Fans are truly what they are. Segal’s designs are so popular that he continually receives offers for collaborations, and even said big stores like Urban Outfitters can’t order enough of his merchandise. Young shoppers care about local fashion, and Segal’s pieces offer more character, ingenuity, and frank sophistication than the marginally cheaper options.

Clothing by Joseph Aaron Segal

Segal’s story is as enticing as his brilliant pieces. After seeing some glass eyes sewn onto a cat sweater at a thrift shop, Segal took a cat design from his days at the Rhode Island School of Design, knitted it onto a smart pullover, and then finished the kitties off with a handful of plastic eyes. Within a year, the sweaters were so popular on Etsy that Segal was selling them as fast as he could produce them out of his basement. Beyond cat sweaters, Segal impressed as one of the final four designers on season 11 of Project Runway in 2013. Pretty Snake has since expanded into menswear, womenswear, and accessories. Now Segal has the finances to not only continue Pretty Snake but also grow his high-end line, World of JAS.

Clothing by Joseph Aaron Segal

“With the high-end stuff is where I get to play more with materials and fibers and construction,” Segal says of World of JAS. Indeed, metallic prints, experimental knits, and crisp structure make World of JAS a real powerhouse for innovative design. “That market is more in New York—half the battle is just being in New York. But I feel like for what I’m doing, being in New England is actually perfect.”

Clothing by Joseph Aaron Segal

All of the fabric, printing, and production for Pretty Snake happens here in New England. Segal sources local textiles, and he says it’s easier than in New York. “With the Internet, you really don’t need to live anywhere specific, you just need to time production right!”

Top photo ready-to-wear clothing by Joseph Aaron Segal | All photos by Izzy Berdan

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