Photos of Johnny Swing and his work, taken by Paul Specht.

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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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Johnny Swing in his Brookline, Vermont studio. Photo by Paul Specht

Master welder Johnny Swing lived and worked in New York City for 13 years before bringing his curvaceous coin-based furniture to rural southern Vermont. “New York is a hard place for artists,” Swing says. “My mother was a painter. I was always discouraged by her innumerable excuses for not making art. So at a young age I pledged that I was never going to not make art. I had junkies for roommates. I lived in a burned out studio. None of that mattered. I can make art under any circumstances.”

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Softspoken by nature, Chris Plaisted builds sculptures that are anything but quiet. Complex arrangements of steel, copper, wood, and concrete commune together to form sculptures, large and small, that emit a brooding but gentle grace. Originally from New Hampshire, Plaisted graduated from Parson’s New School for Design in New York City, and has maintained a longstanding career as a graphic design artist. However, six years ago he reignited a childhood love for woodwork and metalsmithing that now drives his creative practice.

“My work tends to focus on forms of conflict,” he says. “It may be in the concept—man vs. nature, social vs. emotion—or it may be the tension created by the use of contrasting materials.” Focusing primarily on what he sees as “permanent materials” such as wood, steel, copper, concrete, and other precious metals, Plaisted intensifies his materials by placing them in opposition, highlighting their strengths and vulnerabilities.

With an air of mystery, Plaisted’s sculptures look like stories waiting to unfold. His sculpture Harbinger, impressive in both size and skill, is inspired by religious artifacts at The Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of European medieval art and architecture. “As you walk around it, you will see a cross, a 4 for the [four] horseman of the apocalypse and a 7 for the seven plagues,” he says. Smaller sculptures, such as Rapture, display a secret intimate story between the materials of steel, copper, and wood coming together in an delicate and enduring embrace.

Anabassis, height: 15ft. On display at the Sculpture Now, an exhibition of large outdoor sculpture at The Mount, Lenox, MA., image courtesy of Catherine Plaisted

Tucked away in a quiet neighborhood between Candlewood Lake and the Housatonic River in Connecticut, Plaisted draws inspiration from the nature around him, staying busy across many creative forms that include sculpture, graphic design, and painting. Plaisted hails from a creative family; his father is an acclaimed pastiche artist and his grandmother is an award-winning tinsel folk artist, and both laid the groundwork for his creative childhood. At an early age, he was introduced to metal and woodwork by a neighbor who was a welder.

Scrolls, steel, image courtesy of Chris Plaisted

Plaisted’s work currently resides at The Mount, the Berkshire historic estate of famed novelist Edith Wharton, as well as the Pierce Ball Gallery in Stamford, Connecticut. “As I continue to hopefully create visually appealing art, I don’t want to be constrained by style or medium,” Plaisted says. “Quite the opposite; they should flow to the next piece no matter the form or expression.”

Chris Plaisted–sculptor
New Milford, Connecticut
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Top image, Harbinger, steel, width: 10’, height: 12’, depth: 10’. Image courtesy of Catherine Plaisted.

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For Maine sculptor Lin Lisberger, each sculpture represents “a moment in time and space and the life of a tree.” Born in Connecticut, Lin came to summer camp in Maine as a child and decided to move to the Pine Tree State in 1975. “I’ve lived in the woods of Gorham for over 30 years,” she says. “I am very lucky to have this natural environment as a background and a backdrop.”

Lin Lisberger, BLT, Luc Demers photo

While Lisberger has worked in all mediums, including metal and stone, she prefers wood. “Wood is forgiving but not too forgiving,” she says. “It’s heavy but not too heavy. I can carve, construct, take it apart, and put it back together again.”

It was an injury that led Lisberger to sculpture. While studying English and American Literature at The University of California at Santa Cruz, she hurt her hip taking a modern dance class. The injury forced her to drop the class, so she took sculpture to replace it because she couldn’t see herself taking all academic classes. Her childhood memories of watching her mother, who sculpted and called herself a “sometimes carver,” influenced her decision.

Initially, Lisberger spent a few years as a studio potter in Monmouth, Maine, after receiving her BA, but then decided to go to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania to earn her MFA in sculpture. “I loved making pots,” she says, “but really wanted to make sculpture and to carve.”

Lin Lisberger, See Through, Luc Demers photo

Studying sculpture gave Lisberger an understanding of surface, edge, and form. “I would have learned it on my own,” she says, “but I am in favor of education for interaction.”

Using all local wood, Lisberger says her work is “very specific to Maine.” Her sculptures are carved directly from “whole or laminated healthy native wood.” Maine is a wonderful place to be an artist, she says. “Artists in Maine are allies. They aren’t cutthroat or competitive. You are surrounded with supportive people and camaraderie.”

When she’s not in her studio, Lisberger is an instructor of sculpture, drawing, and 3D design at the University of Southern Maine. Her work has been in exhibits throughout New England.

Lin Lisberger- Sculptor
Portland, Maine
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Photography by Luc Demers

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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.

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.

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.

Matthew Towers did not imagine clay would be his muse. Originally from Poughkeepsie, New York, he studied theater at New York University, where he received his BFA. An ardent lover of the stage and deep history of classical performance, he originally pursued the flooded industry of acting in NYC in the 1990s. Finding more frustration than inspiration in that scene, Towers began taking classes to pique his interest in other creative fields; that’s when he discovered the visceral, malleable, and erotic motions of clay. “For me, when clay and porcelain are very wet, it has this ability to fall, to crumple in unexpected ways like hair or clothing on the floor,” he says. “I was taking these classes and fell in love with how it moved and felt. And later on, when I began to learn more about the science of it, glazing, firing, etcetera, I felt inspired and fascinated.”

Towers did not compromise his love for classical theater for pottery and sculpture—he fused them. His current body of work, Catastasis, is named after the third act of a Greek play, in which the climax of the play surrenders itself into a series of complications that set up the fourth act, the catastrophe. “I like that pottery and sculpture have this sort of long, mediated history like the theater,” he says. “During the Sung Dynasty, considered the golden era of ceramics, the Chinese were the only ones who knew how to fire and glaze porcelain. It took Europeans hundreds of years to figure it out.”

Catastasis Vase, Porcelain, 24 inches, 2015 | Photo by Nathan Carnes

The Catastasis series consists of sculptures that fold and bend in lines that are visually textural, but unexpectedly smooth to the touch. Towers sees them as the expressions of carefully manicured wigs, discarded clothing, and the body in motion. His sculptures reflect his interest in male sexuality, especially the ways that hair has historically represented changes in culture. In early European culture, for example, long hair represented male virility; later, men began wearing flamboyant wigs as an expression of wealth and fashion. For Towers, these shifts in hairstyle mark a subversive and historically relevant change in cultural perspectives about gender and sexuality. His use of soft pastel glazes, countering bold red, and rusty oranges, coalesce into something beautifully erotic, bold yet somehow fragile.

Outside of his sculptures, Towers also creates beautifully ornate and functional pottery such as bowls, cups, and plates that reflect his stylization that is both contemporary and classical. “I view making functional pottery as an extension of my need to decorate and ornament my surroundings—as a testimonial about who I am, who I want to be, and how I view the world,” he explains. His work stretches away from pottery as a traditional craft and highlights its capacity as functional fine art, believing that pottery has the capacity to be subversive, to reflect culture, and to challenge it via humor and hyperbolic expression. “I employ decadence, sensuality, humor, and flamboyance to toy with identity as well as the meaning of function.”

Catastasis Vase Form, Porcelain, 2016 | Photo by Matthew Towers

Matthew Towers is currently an Associate Professor of Ceramics at the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford, where he teaches a range of classes including traditional pottery, abstract sculpture, and clay and glaze chemistry. His upcoming show, Reaction Bubble, opens at Real Art Ways in Hartford beginning March 4th, and is a collaborative project between Towers, interdisciplinary duo LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus), and choreographer Deborah Goffe.

Matthew Towers, sculptor
Hartford, CT
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Top photo Crush Bowl, porcelain, 15-inch diameter, 2015 | Photo by Roger Castonguay

The post From Clay to Catastasis appeared first on Take Magazine.

Soo Sunny Park’s studio in Lebanon, New Hampshire, is a literal hive of activity. Along with her assistants, she is bending and snapping together the last pieces of BioLath, an installation piece which opens at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, on February 25th. The diamond-cut metal lath is being twisted into a series of organic, cloud-like shapes whose sensual curvature isn’t just an exercise in aesthetics. The edges of the mesh are sharp, the modular sections are intentionally transparent, and the finished work, unlike classic sculpture whose form is meant to viewed at a respectable distance, is built to be walked through, seen through, the completed installation physically fragmented by both the viewer’s perspective and the light that moves through it.

Soo Sunny Park, concept model for BioLath, installation at the Currier Museum, 2017 | photo courtesy the artist

Displacement, perception, and self-awareness are central themes that move through Park’s installation art. Park emigrated to the United States at age 11, and had already begun to grapple with the central questions that would later take physical form in her adult work. “I went through an existential crisis when I was six,” she says. “I began to wonder about existence and why I can’t see my own face, my own eyes, and why I always feel like I’m looking out from the inside. How others see me, the body, is not how I’m aware of it. Then you start to ask about consciousness. Is there life after this? You question if there’s a soul. I try to think about that kind of duality when making art, and what happens in the middle.”

Soo Sunny Park, concept drawing for BioLath (detail). Installation at the Currier Museum, 2017 | Photo courtesy the artist

Park, a graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, began her career as a painter. Struggling to understand the role of painting, she grew increasingly interested in sculpture, a form whose physical possibilities drew her attention. Debating the inherent differences between the two, Park took on a new project. “I poured paint on the floor and cut it to form a body,” she explains. “It was a clothing piece, but was it also a painting—or did I just create a sculpture? Now you’re inside the artwork. Now you see the world from inside of a painting, inside the sculpture. I tried to flip the kind of space that the viewer would experience so that they’re wearing the piece and looking out from a reverse perspective.”

Soo Sunny Park, Silver Linings, 2015 | Photo courtesy the artist

Park came to Hanover in 2005, having taken a professorship at Dartmouth College with the idea of making New England her home. As an installation artist used to a much more aggressive urban landscape, she was once again faced with issues of displacement. “I moved around a lot as a kid and was a bit afraid of being in a rural area. A lot of artists feel they have to be in New York, obligated to show up at certain events and see certain people. There’s not that kind of pressure here. It’s a different speed of life, and I feel focused. So being in a quieter place, especially as an installation artist, has been great.”

Soo Sunny Park | Photo by David Nielsen

Soo Sunny Park, sculptor
Lebanon, New Hampshire
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Top photo Unwoven Light, 2013 | Photo courtesy the artist

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