Maine artist Stacy Howe is an artistic alchemist. Her drawings meld Surrealistic and Victorian themes, from dreams and dark humor to elements from the natural world and other seemingly random ideas. She calls her largely black and white works “sanguinary assemblages on paper.” No matter how they’re described, they’re compelling and, perhaps, a little menacing.

“I’m inspired by many things,” Howe says. “I’m very interested in nature, our fear of nature, as well as Victorian material culture. I love the Gothic tropes, moody atmosphere and psychology of the era.”

Howe builds three-dimensional models constructed of paper and objects she wants to draw. She then cuts and layers the images to create a finished piece. Her works can combine pencil, charcoal, pen and ink as well as acrylic, iodine, and even blood. “I draw very non-traditionally,” she says. “I’m more like a draftsman. I’m very organized, I make cut-outs and rearrange them. They reflect my own personal lexicon.”

Howe’s lexicon is diverse; history and New England’s natural world figure prominently in her work. Raised in Northborough, Massachusetts, Howe once explored local woods and apple orchards as a child; she now prefers living on the coast, in Portland, Maine. “The ocean is so much part of life here,” she says. “I could never be landlocked.” She studied history before receiving a bachelor’s degree in studio art from University of Massachusetts, Boston (and later a master’s degree in studio art from Maine College of Art). Historic research—eclectic subjects range from London’s Great Smog in 1952 to Boston’s Great Molasses Flood of 1919—is an important part of her process; she’s especially fascinated with Surrealistic themes like death, horror, and the occult. “I have many similarities with them in my subject and practice,” she says.

Stacy Howe, FUSELAGE OF ANTIQUES AND MEMORABILIA 2015, ink, charcoal, graphite, acrylic on paper, 48” X 60”

A fan of Law and Order reruns, Howe employs the same clinically detached observation of death and horror in her work as a television cop. Her fantastical images unexpectedly pair these themes with beautiful or fanciful images like jewels, animals or flowers. “I’ll create a dead body with occult objects arranged around it in a matter-of-fact way,” she says. Her work has evolved according to what she interprets as horror. “I like the idea that horror can be the anticipation of something happening,” she says. “I like creating that bridge for the viewer so they can anticipate and bring their own ideas to what’s happening.”

Howe’s work has been featured in numerous group and individual shows around Maine, including the Portland Museum of Art‘s 2015 Biennal. Her work is included in the ArtPM Challenge exhibition at the Buoy Gallery in Kittery, Maine, through April 30; and in Bared, an exhibition at the Ground Floor Gallery, Nashville, Tennessee, starting in August 2017.

Stacy Howe — artist from Portland, Maine
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Top Image: Piñata Seal 2014, ink, acrylic, charcoal, pencil, 22” X 38”

The post The Artistic Alchemy of Stacy Howe appeared first on Take Magazine.

The digital realm—staring at laptop screens, scrolling through social media feeds, manipulating images with photo-editing software, banal narcissism in the form of selfies, pervasive porn, the searchable history of human culture—it’s all swirling through the paintings, silkscreens, fabric assemblages and drawings of Cambridge, Mass.-based artist Samuel Kontny. Analog media like paints, ink and brushes get expertly deployed in Kontny’s vibrant work as he renders images from Western art filtered through our online universe, complete with pixelation, dinky icons, cursor arrows, layered windows, screengrabs, crude cut-and-paste jobs, or jarring photoshop maneuvers.

Kontny, 32, works in a number of interrelated styles and techniques. He paints. He makes silk screens. He draws. He uses visual editing software and then replicates his creations in other media. Sometimes he uses Kid Pix, the vintage-ish bitmap drawing program for children to generate nostalgic Web 1.0 images. “I like using those tools and in some cases recreating those effects by the human hand, or by my own hand,” he says.

Kontny might riff on a recognizable painting by Picasso or Andy Warhol, taking a selfie in front of a famous canvas, then manipulating the image digitally and then making a painted or silk-screened version of the end result. There are layers and layers of meta. It’s a giddy self-referential hall of mirrors. Kontny, who works full-time as a bartender, also has a sideline working for restaurants and bars making elaborate murals, semi-permanent lists, menus, specials boards and other dense, text-heavy projects. As with his silk screens and paintings, Kontny’s restaurant work sometimes makes playful quotes of art history, with one mural suggesting the coiled graffiti-ish figures of Keith Haring and the playful cartoon zing of Kenny Scharf.

Samuel Kontny, Mom N Pop-Up Mural, acrylic, 2014, photo by Emily Isenberg

You can think of Kontny’s work as a visual version of mash-up culture in music. If a dance DJ might sample snippets of older hits, jamming together two bits from different eras, abruptly dropping out sections, making space with silences, muddying up the texture, Kontny does the same thing. He might appropriate an image from Lichtenstein, say, (already an appropriation of comic book art) and quote it in the context of 21st century digital technologies, referencing the tools he uses (the grids, the palette icons, tabs) within the piece itself. All the component parts are in conversation with each other.

Erasures and deletions are part of the look and feel of these pieces. Look at “Me and Laocoon and Chuck,” a 2015 CMYK silkscreen. It appears to be a picture of someone in front of a Chuck Close portrait, with those signature tangles of color that the eye and brain assemble into a facial close-up, as if broken down to its coloristic molecular structure. But in Kontny’s piece the figure and the portrait behind it are uncovered and erased to reveal an ancient Greek bust of the blind fortune teller Laocoon, sort of like a bass note underneath the whole thing.

The erasures bring the work of Alberto Giacometti to my mind. Giacometti may be more known for his carved-away spindly sculptures of figures, but in his sketch books he routinely made extreme use of his eraser, rubbing away lines and sections from his vigorous pencil markings. Kontny establishes a kind of lineage of portraiture and labor: the work required to create an ancient bust from a block of marble is contrasted with the work of painting a portrait on a canvas, which is in turn contrasted with snapping an image on a cell phone. All of it can be digitally replicated, deleted, or manipulated with a click. The entire set of images is framed within another set of images: the smartphone screenshot, with its icons for battery power, wireless bars, timestamps, signal strength, GPS and bluetooth, all serving as a hieroglyphic of digital decorative banding. “I like taking the idea of portraiture and using what’s available at the current time,” Kontny says.

Samuel Kontny, Installation sketch, CREATE Boston, 2017

As with Kontny’s non-permanent work in restaurants and bars, his digital-centric art confronts the nature of sustaining and archiving images over time, how some things are wiped away and some preserved.

Kontny likes the idea of “layering and comparing” the different modes of portraiture, “contrasting the amount of work that went into ancient marble sculptures—and now it’s so easy to create a portrait of something so meaningless and passe, of yourself just doing whatever.”

Technology and media saturation, web-enabled distraction, the virtual world subsuming the physical world, and ambient narcissism can all be easy targets, but Kontny isn’t necessarily wringing his hands about the state of the world and how we relate to pixels and our digital devices.

“I’m more embracing it than critiquing,” he says.

Sam Kontny–Artist from Cambridge, Massachusetts

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Top Image: By Chuck, CMYK silkscreen print, 22″X 31″, edition of 4, 2015

The post Scratching Beneath the Digital Surface 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.

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.

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.

“My heroes have always been artists who reinvent themselves every few years,” says Brattleboro, Vermont artist Mutsu Crispin. “I love it when an artist goes through a transformation repeatedly. Picasso. Miles Davis. Someone who isn’t afraid to step out of their norm and become something new.“

Mutsu Crispin is also the pseudonym of John DiGeorge, a bouncing, 46-year-old dervish of an artist who is at times a costume designer, puppeteer, oneiric film instructor, filmmaker, choreographer, and, currently, a classic visual artist. Mostly though, Crispin is an explorer interested in transformation.

Mutsu Crispin | Photographed by David Nielsen

Crispin grew up in Marietta, Georgia, and then attended Harvard, where, he says, “they’d just hand you a camera and tell you to go make something.” After Harvard, Crispin moved to New York City, where he learned how to make movies, then to Brattleboro to begin work on Redbelly, a film written with his cousin Justin Allen. Redbelly is a freakishly old-world fairy tale, featuring a princess trapped in a stone tower, bereft of human contact. It also features a prince with an external glass stomach, born unable to use his mouth to speak, cry, or eat, who was captured by an opportunistic moonshiner who uses the glass stomach as a still.

“I’d been doing a lot of dream work,” Crispin explains. “I’d been delving deeply and consistently into my dream world. There were a lot of themes and images and interior dramas playing out in my dreams that a fairy tale would be an easy vehicle for. Redbelly (still in production) is very particular to Vermont, but not set in Vermont. It all grew out of the landscape. The stone tower. . .there’s stone walls everywhere. There’s also a monster in the movie. What’s the monster in the woods of Vermont? It’s a bear that carries winter in its belly. The prince gets stuck in his belly, and it’s the harshest winter imaginable. We filmed that sequence in a snowstorm in the White Mountains. The mythology is definitely grown out where we were when we conceived it.”

Redbelly Tower | Photographed by Mutsu Crispin

Crispin’s alternative project, Bouncy Ball Art, seems crafted by an entirely different artist. The series, which can be seen at the A.P.E. Ltd. Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts March 8-April 2, is whimsical, bright, and playful. The constructions feature bouncy rubber balls pressed between plates of heavy plexiglass, then screwed together to hold them in place. The clue that links both pieces is an almost mythic reexamination of the fantastical aspects of childhood, never mind that the finished pieces look like massively constructed Hasbro Lite-Brite screen panels.

“There’s a lot of places these pieces go,” Crispin says. “The grids are pixelated. I grew up playing Atari, playing Nintendo. I was totally into video games—all those early video games like Super Mario Bros. All of these pieces are like the background of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. They’re also used to express the deepest impulses of things I’m exploring in my life.”

So where did the name Mutsu Crispin come from? DiGeorge used to spend summers working on a farm; he saw the words repeatedly on old apple crates, and they caught his imagination. “I’ve always felt a connection with Japanese words and filmmakers,” he explains. “I liked the juxtaposition of the Japanese word Mutsu with the English word Crispin. I came up with these two characters: Mutsu is an alien and Crispin is a monkey. They came together to form Mutsu Crispin, which is an apple, but also the name of my production company.

Sanctuary | Photographed by Mutsu Crispin

“I’ve always been caught by cultures where as an adult you name yourself,” he continues. “You go on a vision quest, and when you come back you name yourself. Sometimes at an art opening, someone will come up to me and ask, ‘Are you Mutsu Crispin?’ I really like that.”

Mutsu Crispin – multimedia artist
Brattleboro, Vermont
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Top photo Bugs, photographed by Mutsu Crispin.

Bouncy Ball Art can be seen at the A.P.E. gallery in Northampton Massachusetts, March 8-April 2, 2017.

The post How Do You Like Them Apples? appeared first on Take Magazine.

Allison Hornak searches for materials suspended between life and death that are scattered throughout Connecticut forests and neighborhoods. Desiccated leaves, preserved nests, discarded plastic, matted clumps of hair and bones are all objects of affection for Hornak, who deftly reimagines their existence through sculpture and performance. “Lately, I have had an immense desire to marry the decaying objects I find with the brightly colored sterile objects of my studio,” she says. “Acrylic paint, neon tape, plastic. . .They come together to inform one another about the contingency of time.”

With Picked Bones Inside, Objection in Blood and Cadmium (from “Small Boxes” series), 2015 | bone, blood, acrylic and aerosol paint, pine, oak, cotton, plastic, 15 ½” x 12 ¾ ” x 10″ | Photo courtesy the artist

Hornak grew up along the southern base of the Paugussett State Forest, next to the soft blue rush of the Housatonic River. The abundant nature of Connecticut’s forests and rivers has profoundly shaped her practice as a maker. “The woods are dark and lonely at first,” she notes. “But then, they are not. Eventually, the woods and the things you find in it (bird sounds, dead things, fungus, unexpected flowers or patches of unique light and color) feel, if you focus, like an extension of your body. Or, the body is an extension of these things, of it all.” An homage to her extensive time exploring the verdant landscape of her childhood home, Hornak’s sculptural series Small Boxes (2012-2015) bathes objects seemingly dead or forgotten—such as animal bones and discarded cement—in candy-colored acrylic hues, giving them new life.

Since receiving her BFA from Montserrat School of Art in 2010, Hornak has immersed herself in the New England art world; from directing a gallery in Sandy Hook, to an ongoing engagement with performance and sculpture, Hornak pulses with creative electricity. In her recent performance piece Fuck Your Apology (A Composition in Five Movements for Vladimir Umanets), viewers watched Hornak paint the wall of the gallery with a concoction made from raw honey, honeybee bodies, compost, and other found materials while she repeatedly recited W.S. Merwin’s poem “End of Day”.

Fuck Your Apology (a Composition in Five Movements for Vladimir Umanets), 2016 | 20-minute performative action, raw honey, honeybee bodies, compost, glass containers, sunglasses, bandanna, cotton shirt, pants, pumps, acrylic and aerosol paint, finished white wall, “End of a Day” by W.S. Merwin | Photo courtesy the artist

Fuck Your Apology was the opening performance piece of the curated series Colony Collapse at Hygienic Art gallery last April, which was organized loosely around the devastating number of bee deaths occurring nationwide due to colony collapse disorder. Earlier in the year, Hornak was given a jar full of diseased honeybees from artist Silas Finch from a colony that had perished in Connecticut. During her performance, the overwhelming odor of bee decay filled the gallery, causing some onlookers to leave. Hornak feels that the unexpected odor and visceral reaction to her performance made it a success. “I find beauty in the visible vulnerability of performance,” she explains. “As a trained painter, I feel like I have been taught to make highly private and isolated work. When you are performing, in a way you are forced to face yourself.”

Prelude, Poem of Vitamins, 2015 | ceramic, cardboard, paper, bone, wood, shell, potpourri, tape, charcoal, cotton, rope, rubber, glass, cloth, stone, 11 ½”” x 9” x 8 | Photo courtesy the artist

Hornak’s upcoming work, a collaborative project with friend and fellow artist Jessica Gaddis, opens at Hygienic Art gallery on February 16. The show, lovingly entitled Collaborative Economy, is the brainchild of both Gaddis and Hornak, who have found creative and emotional solace in one another over the years—especially in the face of post-election political and social turmoil. “Most people have been talking about feeling frustrated with the economy during this election, and I get it,” notes Gaddis. “I looked up the term ‘economy,’ which I always felt was a deeply patriarchal term; it actually means ‘management of household resources,’ which I find to be incredibly warm and matriarchal.”

Hornak and Gaddis feel that their collaborative work will ignite a sense of partnership for both artists and viewers. “With Collaborative Economy, we are trying to face another person with our highly personal and highly private practices,” says Hornak. “It is a gesture towards the social, and bridging these practices that have such a belief in art, but are searching and wanting for something that is of the moment, that allows for something more.” Gaddis adds that “by coming together, hopefully we can instill a sense that we all need one another, that it is this sort of dependency, not isolation, that will get us through this idea that we are supposed to be independent into a space where we are actually just free.”

Wasp and the Stirring Sea, 2013 | wasp nest, foam, pine, plywood, aerosol paint, paper, acrylic 9 ¼” x 7” x 8 ½ | Photo courtesy the artist

Allison Hornak, performance artist
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Top photo A Struggle (a Painting in Two Acts), 2014 | 12-hour performative action, wood, rope, earth, acrylic, water, brushes, palette knives, cotton shirt, denim pants, glass and plastic containers | Photo courtesy Chris Randall

The post Pulp, Plastic, and Poetry appeared first on Take Magazine.

Recently, it’s been the cultural trend to rope off the beginning of the year to catch up on all the moments, movies, music, and writings we missed last year. So, once you’ve caught up with Moonlight and/or finally get around to listening to the newest And The Kids album (released summer ’16), consider looking ahead to our Artists to Watch for 2017.

Though we do have favorites of our own, we could not adequately survey the region for artists to watch without consulting a few of our many trusted curators and friends: Abigail Ogilvy, Owner of Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston’s South End; Randi Hopkins, Director of Visual Arts at Boston Center for the Arts; and Ian Alden Russell, Curator at Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery.

All of these artists sculpt, paint, record, and perform works worth following, especially considering our current social and political climate. Since we’ve recently been reminded that we cannot rely on the centralized leadership of our democracy to defend our integrity as human beings, or the integrity of thought through the defense of facts and mutual respect, we look to artists like these as our true cultural gatekeepers. The artists on our list are people we can trust to use bold expression, tenderness, and knowing imagery to question the status quo. Sometimes they hold up a mirror to our culture. Other times, they hold up a loudspeaker or a puppet mask, a paintbrush, a bouncy ball, or a digital camera.

These cathartic, sarcastic, pointed, paradoxical, and, most of all, inimitable artists are who we’re watching in 2017.

Nabeela Vega, Visiting Thahab (series, ongoing) | Photo courtesy Robin Allen LaPlante

Nabeela Vega | Boston, MA

Using photography, performance, and video, Boston-based artist Nabeela Vega creates immersive works that examine elements of our individual experiences of the social world as it intersects with identity, personal politics, and queerness. Oftentimes, the work calls into question our taken-for-granted notions about bodies, media, and gender. As Hopkins points out, “Vega’s rich exploration of the contemporary presence and experience of the Muslim femme takes forms that are performative, collaborative, generous, vulnerable, and exquisitely beautiful. The artist takes risks with their own body to think about our greater body as citizens and humans, work that feels vital and particularly brave today.”

Tanja Hollander | Auburn, ME

“This month sees the premiere of the entirety of Tanja Hollander‘s Are you really my friend? at MASS MoCA, the Maine-based photographer’s epic endeavor to photograph all 626 of her Facebook friends,” says Russell. “Bringing her across the nation and around the globe, the work probes the issue of friendship and connection in our digitally mediated age. Questioning the boundaries between personal, public, and online life, the project presents us with intimate portraits she took of the personal spaces and environments of the people she is connected to via social media.”

Teatime, 2016, Acrylic and mixed media on steel 18 x 12 in. | Photo courtesy Abigail Ogilvy

Katie Wild | Pawtucket, RI

“Wild’s striking, cinematic paintings transform the tradition of figure and portraiture to achieve a contemporary understanding of the human condition,” says Ogilvy. “In her most recent series, Steampunk, Wild references photographs she took of real people at a steampunk festivals. In 2016 she was a recipient of the Fay Chandler Emerging Artist Award in Boston, MA.”

Kai Franz | Providence, RI

“Originally from Cologne, Germany, Kai Franz makes sculptures and drawings that confront and complicate the relationships between process and artifact,” says Russell. “Testing and questioning the potential of computer-aided design while appearing as formal aesthetic statements in their own rights, Franz’s works and projects are strong examples of the tradition of critically and technologically-engaged art making in Providence.”

Mutsu Crispin, Mapping the Day, 2015, bouncy balls, plexiglass, stainless steel, 41″h x 41″w x 2.25″d | Photo courtesy Mitchell Giddings Fine Arts

Mutsu Crispin | Brattleboro, VT

Atlanta, Georgia transplant turned Southern Vermonter mutsu crispin (aka John DiGeorge) is a performance artist, filmmaker and. . .bouncy-ball sculptor? Last year, DiGeorge found a way to make those familiar, seemingly childish forms simultaneously fun and subversive. We’re sure we can find some comfort in these delightfully bright pieces as the year turns potentially darker. “. . . the balls float forward and back within their designs or wanderings, rhyming with their cast shadows, ghostly glows, nearby hardware and reflections,” says the artist. “These dear objects from our childhood are animated and transmogrified, speaking in a chorus at once lighthearted, humorous, mysterious, and ecstatic.

Matt Neckers, Crash Site, 2015, 72 H x 24 W x 24 in | Photo courtesy the artist

Matt Neckers | Eden, VT

“Neckers’ Portals hidden in forests, a rocket in a tree, a parachute caught in branches—Matt Neckers’ installations interrupt the serenity of the woods,” says Russell. “Fascinated by the impact of mechanization on our imagination, Neckers opens up earnest, generous, and sustained conversations about the world we inhabit, the others that may exist, and the precarious journeys between.”

Arien Wilkerson | Hartford, CT

“I am Arien aka TNMOT AZTRO aka ARI AZTRO.”

Wilkerson is one of Hartford’s many young Renaissance Men. His list of current projects is too long to add here; suffice it to say that Wilkerson, at age 25, is an uber-accomplished dancer, film artist, activist, artistic director, and overall creative mastermind. In the words of our dear friends at Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner, “He’s too black, too vocal, and too flagrant. He’s also one of the few indispensable figures in Hartford’s ever-continuous push to art and cultural prominence. Say hello to the city’s new brash monarch.”

Toby Sisson, 2015 Black Tears, Ink and beeswax on paper 7″x5.5″ each, approx. 6.5’x16′ overall | Photo courtesy the artist

Toby Sisson | Providence, RI

“Toby Sisson‘s encaustic paintings and drawings rigorously explore the metaphoric potential of abstract form,” points out Russell. “Often contrasting shades of black with shades of white, Sisson’s works are informed by personal narrative and her mixed race heritage. Her images and forms offer open-ended prompts for poetic reflection on the assumed oppositions and conflicts with which we struggle—personally, emotionally, and socially.”

Michael Stasiuk, Marco the Magician, 2012, 25″ x 24″ x 10″ metal crumber pan, darning egg, rhythm stick fragments, assorted wood fragments | Photo courtesy Abigail Ogilvy

Michael Stasiuk | Portsmouth, NH

“His multimedia sculptures assemble found objects into playfully illustrated characters,” says Ogilvy, “each with a unique personality. His choice of material imparts a sense of nostalgia and memory, imaginatively re-purposing everyday objects that accompany us throughout our lives.”

J.R. Uretsky and Scott the cat | Photo courtesy the artist

J.R. Uretsky | Providence, RI

If you read Take, you already know we’ve had a crush on J.R.’s awkwardly signature brand of brave, big-feeling, truth-telling performance for a long time. Yet it’s not only her magically strange, emo-queer performances to watch out for in 2017. Specifically, it’s J.R.’s puppets that will lend you space to emote and bring us all solace as 2017’s social and political climate sags and twists. “The characters that emerge through her performances are relatable yet also alien and non-specific,” says Hopkins, “forging an ambiguous space where emotion is the remaining constant.”

Titus Kaphar, Space to Forget, 2014, oil on canvas, 64 x 64 x 2 3/4 inches | Photo courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery

Titus Kaphar | New Haven, CT

Kaphar creates new histories with each work he paints and sculpts. It’s through his careful reinterpretation of the past, mixed with artful exclusion and deconstruction of specific images that makes his work powerful, “In my work I explore the materiality of reconstructive history. I paint and I sculpt, often borrowing from the historical canon, and then alter the work in some way.” says Kaphar “I cut, crumple, shroud, shred, stitch, tar, twist, bind, erase, break, tear, and turn the paintings and sculptures I create, reconfiguring them into works that nod to hidden narratives and begin to reveal unspoken truths about the nature of history.”

Inside shot of Love Shack instillation featuring video loop of “Waking Up And Getting Up Has Never Been Easy”, instillation and video by Coe Lapossy | Photo courtesy the artist’s website

Coe Lapossy | Boston, MA

Ever wonder what it’d be like to wake up in a super-cozy, literally endless bed? Well, Lapossy has theorized it, and has many more other immersive, speculative works ready for the upcoming year. “Lapossy brings feminist sass and romantic charm to smart sculptural and installation work,” says Hopkins. “Pop culture seeps into her artistic vocabulary with ease, for example weaving 20th-century art history together with early 90s romantic-fantasy film in a setting that evokes the vaudeville vibe of the magician’s trick.”

Nabeela Vega – Boston, Massachusetts
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Tanja Hollander – Auburn, Maine
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Katie Wild – Pawtucket, Rhode Island
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Kai Franz – Providence, Rhode Island
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Mutsu Crispin – Brattleboro, Vermont
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Matt Neckers – Eden, Vermont
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Arien Wilkerson – Hartford, Connecticut
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Toby Sisson – Providence, Rhode Island
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Michael Stasiuk – Portsmouth, New Hampshire
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J.R. Uretsky – Providence, Rhode Island
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Titus Kaphar – New Haven, Connecticut
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Coe Lapossy – Boston, Massachusetts
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VISITING THAHAB AT SUPERNOVA PERFORMANCE ART FESTIVAL | PHOTO COURTESY THE ARTIST

The post Artists to Watch 2017 appeared first on Take Magazine.

As this past summer began to shed the last layers of New England cold, Rhode Island artist John C. Gonzalez presented his first mini-retrospective at Brown University, in the David Winton Bell Gallery. Curated by Ian Alden Russell, the exhibition was a quiet and beautiful collection of Gonzalez’s work, tied by a common thread of collaboration, the visibility of labor, and the capacity to create in unexpected places. The show, titled Works Well With Others featured multiple interdisciplinary works across the mediums of painting, sculpture, and performance. Most notably, Gonzalez worked collectively with a group of employees from Bel Terra Landscaping, a landscaping company contracted by Brown for maintenance of the campus grounds, as well as Verde Design + Horticulture, to build a lush indoor garden in the heart of the exhibition. Created by John C. Gonzalez along with Juan Reyes, Pamela Rodgers, Julin Sanchez, Philip Taylor, and Julin Vasquez, the garden produced a shared space for personal reflection and self-healing.

Home Depot House, 2013 | Designed and installed in collaboration with store employees inside Home Depot store in Providence, RI | Photo by Shane Godfrey

The Brown retrospective captured Gonzalez’s passion as an artist, his constant conversation with art and institutions of labor, the daily exchange of human interaction, and the ways in which creativity is promoted or stifled in a flourishing era of capitalism. “Works Well With Others was about embedding myself into spaces where self-expression is not always encouraged or productive,” says Gonzalez, whose interest in working collectively with laborers stems from his own experience as a tradesman and retail worker. “In these spaces, I wanted to create moments for creativity and exploration.”

In 2013, Gonzalez was commissioned by the deCordova Biennial to create his project, Home Depot House (2013-14). Employed in Providence by the giant home improvement retailer at the time, he worked with his fellow co-workers to build a house. “In a place like Home Depot, you do not really have an opportunity to be super creative,” he acknowledges. “It is not really designed for that space because it is a retail environment. So for me, to work with management to be able to make something that was ours was subversive, because the power structure didn’t initially allow for it. And for me, art is a powerful thing.” From building a home to building a garden, Gonzalez stretches the space between formal art and craftsmanship, enabling art to have a broader sphere and wider accessibility to those who may not consider themselves artists.

Several works from Painting Library, 2017. Part of an installation where visitors may borrow paintings from the collection for the duration of the exhibition at Essex Art Center in Lawrence, MA | Photo courtesy the artist.

Outside of his collaborative sculpture and performance work, Gonzalez is a painter at heart; along with being a full-time father of two, he works at a paint shop by day. Finding collectivity in the seemingly mundane is central to Gonzalez’s artistic approach. “As artists, anytime we buy supplies for our work, like paint, someone had to make that, which leads to a transaction. Every time we find things or buy things, there is always a collaborative relationship, no matter what you do—like buying gas or buying clothing. For me, it is something that shouldn’t be overlooked, but instead be put at the forefront. It makes us reexamine all of these relationships we have every day with people, because we are all creating and doing.”

In June, Gonzalez will be presenting Painting Library, a solo exhibition at the Essex Art Center in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where visitors will be able to borrow paintings from the show for the duration of the exhibition. That same month, he’ll also be featured in a group show curated by John Finnerty and Francisco Gonzalez at The Wurks in Providence.

Portrait of John C. Gonzalez in studio | Photo courtesy the artist

John C. Gonzalez – interdisciplinary artist
Providence, Rhode Island
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Top photo Collaborative Garden, 2016 | Designed and installed in collaboration with Bel Terra employees inside David Winton Bell Gallery in Providence, RI | Photograhy by Jesse Banks III

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The post Let’s Build a House Together appeared first on Take Magazine.

Artist Silvia Lopez Chavez has been collecting packing protectors and nailing them up on her studio wall. A combination of corner protectors and various holders for retail items, all made of paper pulp, the assortment looks a bit like a 3D, topographical map. But this isn’t an installation, or a new project that she’s working on: Chavez is simply storing them until she can figure out what to do next. “Paper is one of my most beloved mediums,” she says. “I have seen piles of these paper pulp packing items out in the dumpster behind my studio, and they are just beautiful. I am trying to figure out how I can utilize them rather than letting them go to waste, so they have been slowly building up on my wall.”

Fresh Air explored the environmental and political aspects within air quality issues in Chelsea, MA, inviting the community to participate by sharing their story and serving as models for mixed-media portraits. The one-year project was partly funded by a LCC, Massachusetts Cultural Council grant | Photo courtesy the artist

Chavez breathes art in her daily life. On any given day, she can be found fervently working away in her studio at the Boston Center for the Arts, where she is also a board member, or collaborating on brightly colored projects with children at the Boston Children’s Hospital, where she is an artist-in-residence two days a week. While in her studio, Chavez concentrates on making her signature layered multimedia works that utilize a mix of monoprint, illustration, watercolor, and collage. “I love color,” Chavez says, “and illustration is something I always go back to. I am an illustrator at heart.” In her series, Fresh Air: Portrait of Chelsea Project, Chavez focused her talents on the residents of Chelsea, her home court in Boston. The series of portraits addresses the growing health problems in her neighborhood, due to the high density of diesel trucks commuting through it to service greater Boston. As she notes on her website, “Chelsea is the third most environmentally overburdened community in Massachusetts.”

Chavez’s passion for her community is also deeply interwoven with her love for working with children. Her current artist residency at the BCH has opened her eyes to the capacity of art to heal. “It is hard in some ways,” she says, “but also very beautiful, because you are able to really see the power of the creative process, which is something I greatly believe in. The power of the creative process to heal, to connect, as a way to engage in something different and connect with yourself and with others.” Chavez teaches the kids at BCH how to do collaging and printmaking, much of what she does in her studio. “They get into that mode of making and completely forget they are at a hospital in a room full of cables and machines,” she says. “Instead, they imagine this world of color and characters; all of the sudden, they are not in the hospital, they are in their imagination.”

A series of collaborative pop-up art installations throughout Boston with artist Elisa Hamilton. The artists invite the public to identify their “lemonade.” Project was funded by the New England Foundation for the Arts Creative City Grant. | Photo courtesy the artist.

In the summertime, Chavez focuses her energy on public art. Last summer, in collaboration with artist Elisa Hamilton and with funding by the New England Foundation for the Art’s Creative City Program, she completed a pop-up series of “lemonade stands” in association with the Eliot School in different neighborhoods around Boston. Lemonade Stand was used as a project to bring children and their families together, to “identify their ‘lemonade’—that positive motivator that helps each of us rise above challenges, turning the sour to sweet in our day-to-day lives.” Other projects include creating public art and murals with teenage girls through a free program at Raw Art Works, as well as her own commissioned murals and public art projects.

Silvia Lopez Chavez might very well be the wonder woman of the Boston art scene. Her practice and artistry can be found on city walls as well as in galleries, public schools, and hospital corridors, lighting up the lives of children and adults alike. Unsurprisingly, she has many things in store for 2017, including two murals that are currently in the drafting process, as well as a series of mixed-media illustrations called Imaginary Islands that will debut in the spring. “I always have a hundred things brewing in my head because I get bored so easily,” she says. “I find myself constantly coming up with projects because I need to create for myself.” Details for these shows are still in the works, so we’ll keep you updated on dates and showings.

Chavez at the studio. The project behind is a work in progress, using found recycled pulp paper packaging | Photo courtesy the artist.

Silvia Chavez Lopez – multimedia artist and educator
Boston, Massachusetts
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Top photo North Shore Community Development Coalition in Salem, MA | Photo by Dominic Chavez

The post From Lemons to Lemonade appeared first on Take Magazine.