To visit the studio of Kim Anno, is to immerse yourself into a fluid environment.  Anno, an internationally exhibited artist and chair of the painting department at the California College of the Arts, works in an interdisciplinary manner, blending painting, video and photography into a seamless body of work. She is also an avid environmental activist, combining science and visual art to investigate issues related to global warming and water risings.  And water, being the eerily poignant signifier that it is, becomes the element that binds her work together. Her videos often feature specific objects immersed underwater, while spools of unfurling pigments wind through the image like expanding mushroom clouds.  There is a meditative quality to the deceptively complex dance of elements that she directs.  Often an accompanying soundtrack, both beautiful and unsettling, heightens this sense.While, Anno’s videos vacillate somewhere between painting and photography, her paintings are no exception.

Fluidly blurring the boundaries between these seemingly disparate mediums, Anno’s latest body of oil on aluminum paintings feels like something between abstract expressionism and a video still.  Her paintings blend photographic images of popular waterside tourist sites with bold and seeping marks of transparent and opaque color.  In this way she both references the representational image while breaking it down into a more elemental level. What she captures in these paintings is a distinct moment.  The photographic images underneath, initially referencing specific locations Anno had visited or wanted to visit, are slowly dissolved by ominously swirling pigments.

The effect is that of a poison slowly and inevitably diffusing and thus destroying the underlying photograph even as it creates a new and disturbingly beautiful image.

“I paint on top of the photographic image of these places in an attempt to love them to death, to adorn them, and ultimately damage them. I see this as a metaphor for human beings acting upon nature in the same way. We have to touch and touch it until it is erased or disappeared, until the very thing we chose for its beauty and sublime qualities is a shadow.” –Kim Anno

While dissecting uncomfortable issues, Anno’s work is anything but didactic.  After all, it is the artist’s hand that lays down the paint, ultimately symbolizing her own participation in the larger picture.

In 2011, Anno attended the United Nations Climate Change Convention in Durban, South Africa.  Over 200 countries were represented, including the G8 along with developed and developing world nations.  During this conference, Anno was invited to participate in the exhibit “Don’t Panic” curated by Gabi Ngcobo and Joyti Mystry, professors at Witerswand University in Johannesburg.  This exhibition marked one of the first times visual arts contributed to the public debate at this climate change summit.

http://www.jacana.co.za/flipping-previews/734-dontpanic-flipping-preview

http://www.boell.org.za/web/cop17-805.html

Anno plans to continue her newest body of video work, “Men and Women in Water Cities”, a multi channel film shot around the world visiting post sea level rise societies, at the next United Nations Climate Change Convention to be held in Qatar in 2012.  Anno will be projecting the Durban chapter of this video series onto a “floating city” installation during a solo exhibition at the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg in June 2012.

Anno, like her visual art, continually works to blur the line between visual art and activism.  She believes art can have a strong impact on the consciousness of global leaders and agents of change.  When asked about her role as an artist concerned with adaptation, Anno responded, “My role is to be a lightening rod. I want to rearrange expectations of the viewer. I want to touch the viewer where they live, or where they might take a second look”.

I visited Sarah in her studio: the spare bedroom of a South Philly row house. Two large windows fill the room with sunlight. In this modest space Sarah churns out a large volume of paintings. One wall displays the many pieces she created in the last two weeks—most are small pieces, around twelve by fourteen inches. She is inspired by this high level of production by Gabriela Vainsencher, who makes a painting every day before doing anything else.  Gabriela’s project and blog is called Morning Drawing.

We talked about her recent enjoyment of Coast-to-Coast, a radio show dealing with UFO’s, strange occurrences, life after death, and other unexplained (or inexplicable) phenomena. I quickly saw connections between her work and the themes of the shows. For example, several of her paintings include faces with colorful lines and dots protruding which is her interpretation of extrasensory perception (ESP).  She was also keen to point out that her work is based on collective life experiences rather than one in particular.

Her cat Buster also seems to be a huge influence on her work. During my visit Buster ran through several times jumping on the desks in the room knocking over paint and mixing bowls. Sarah didn’t mind which seems to make Buster a perfect studio companion.

Sarah’s current color palette is a reaction to her feeling like her past work had every color available. She now restricts the colors in the paintings by only putting a few on the table as she works. Black, greys, and browns dominate with bright colors such as orange, yellow and green for highlights. She also purposefully combines “clashing” colors to introduce contrast in the paintings creating an intriguing effect in the work.

She has also recently started incorporating figuration into her work. Until recently she only painted landscapes, but felt the urge to discover the inhabitants of her mystical worlds.

Although I have seen images of these landscapes online I think a show of the collective works is necessary. Find more of Sarah’s work at www.sarahgamble.com

This piece had editorial assistance from Tiernan Alexander.

Video Edited by Raul Romero of See/Saw Productions.

Sean Naftel (Queens, NY) and Chris Attenborough (Baltimore, MD) are those guys.  They met back in 2008 as graduate students at Burren College of Art in West Clare, Ireland.  Though Sean came in as a painter and Chris as a photographer, the existential crisis that so often plagues graduate students did not spare either of them, and they bonded over their mutual conceptual concerns of understanding space and place through cultural references and community.  Now, some four-plus years later, Sean and Chris have continued to collaborate under the name Peacock Interventions, organizing site specific happenings and interventions that often create a context for people to rethink their understanding of art and its inherent value, and to become personally invested in the experience of cultural exchange.

(E)merge was the third incarnation of The Free Art Booth, the first set-up occurring back in Ireland while Sean and Chris were still students.  At this early version, they realized that something transcendent occurred when people received an original work of art for free, donated by the artists who were eager to have their work seen and to help regular people to start their art collections.  In 2009 they set up the second incarnation, Free Art Stand, at the SEVEN Art Fair in Miami. They told me that through the three versions, they have exhibited and distributed hundreds of original works of art from at least 15 countries, and that pieces have ended up in the hands of notable private collectors as well as in the collections of the MOMA and the Women’s Museum in New York City.  Even more important for Sean and Chris are the relationships that result, among the exhibiting artists (for Emerge many of the works came to them unsolicited as artist learned about the project through word-of-mouth) and between the artists and the collectors.

Sean and Chris and painter Erin Treacy (Queens, NY), have also collaborated to establish Roving Project, an umbrella organization that helps independent curators to organize temporary exhibitions of contemporary art in slack spaces around the world.  So far Roving Project has been associated with exhibitions from Elicott City, MD to Kansas City, MO to Ireland, Scotland, and Italy.  In each instance, whether organized by Sean, Chris and Erin, or any of their international collaborators, they are interested in utilizing spaces that will benefit from an infusion of cultural vitality; they promote projects that are multi-beneficial, creating opportunity for artists to gain exposure, for communities to encounter contemporary art, and for abandoned or underused spaces to experience new life.

Plywood Gallery, in North Baltimore’s Belvedere Square, is the most recent of these projects, and where I met Sean and Chris for our interview.  Plywood is a joint venture between the guys of Peacock and Nelson Carey, the owner of Grand Cru, a wine bar two doors down from the gallery. Chris proposed the idea of a temporary gallery that could also be used by the wine bar for tastings and special events, and Nelson was sold. The storefront that Plywood now occupies had been a jewelry store that fell casualty to the economic downturn, so luckily it was already set up with gallery quality lighting and needed only a good cleaning and a fresh coat of paint to make it a proper exhibition space.  At the time of the interview, the absurdist work of Tennessee artist, and fellow Burren College of Art alum, Hali Matlsberger, was on view.

Maltsberger’s show was the third in the space since its’ opening in October 2011, preceded by solo shows of work by Ian Umlauf and Jim Lucio.  So far the work exhibited at Plywood has reflected Sean and Chris’s interests in the de- and re-construction of cultural associations to place, but they are currently restructuring their program so we’ll have to wait and see what comes next.  On the gallery website, they claim that Plywood will only occupy the space until another tenant is found, but my fingers are crossed that it will be a while before that happens.  Baltimore needs another exhibition venue for smart, relevant work, especially one so committed to community participation.

The week before Christmas they organized a Holiday bizarre and open call for art from around the area.  Artist Mei Mei Chang of DC (featured by TSV on May 20, 2011) was one of the participants, along with artists of all career points from through out the region.  They also organized a bon fire that was set up in the Beleveder Square parking lot and the guys from the wine bar brought carts to vend bratuwurst, oysters, hot cider and wine.

To see more work by Peacock Interventions: http://web.me.com/cjattenborough/PEACOCK/interventions/interventions.html

To learn more about Roving Projects: www.rovingproject.com

And to learn more about Plywood Gallery: www.plywoodsite.org

Annie recently relocated from Washington DC to the Bay Area, and has become quite taken with the architecture, decoration, trees and plants of the Bay Area houses.  The colorful houses and palm trees lined the streets of the walk and Annie made sure to point out her favorites.   The imagery and color palettes of the places in which Annie works have a tendency to end up in her work and I could see the relevance of this new location fitting in nicely with her new work.  We finally arrive at Kala Institute which is housed in an old Heinz Ketchup Factory.  The grounds are green and well manicured.  To get into the print studio which spans the entire top floor of the building, we climb 3 flights of stairs that end in a gigantic red door.  Behind that red door is 8,000 sq feet of etching, lithography, screen printing, and letterpress equipment with tall stacks of wooden flat files everywhere.

Our conversation quickly turns to Annie’s new body of prints and cut paper collages.  The imagery has been recycled, tweaked, and abstracted from her earlier projects.  This transformation of her older work into her newer has become integral to her process.  “Its this huge recycled vocabulary thats growing and changing.”  In a desire to really define a certain personal aesthetic Annie expresses her current interest in working with the same imagery over and over again.   But challenging herself to layer and execute techniques that result in different projects.  It is an artistic practice in patience, self awareness, and commitment.  It reminds me of an artist talk where I heard Leonardo Drew say he worked on a body of work for seven years before he tried to show it.  In a world of immediate gratification and over sharing the idea of retreating into your studio practice to fortify ideas and problem solve sounds very refreshing.  Annie has a prolific work ethic but taking the time to reflect seems to have an equal importance as the production.  Just like our morning walk to the studio, Annie takes frequent walks when see needs to look at something else besides her work.

A piece Annie is currently working on consists of a purple and yellow screen print of bare tree branches.  The imagery is printed repeatedly on the same sheets of paper and slightly off set resulting in an almost blurry image.  The piece is beautiful but hard to look at because your eyes cannot completely focus.  It is clear that Annie is well versed in the technical language of printmaking but is completely uninterested the perfectionism and cleanliness of the medium.  “I kinda think of printmaking as a dance or really art making in general, where you gotta know you steps to be effective.“   Annie explains that she doesn’t print on the vacuum tables that is common practice with screen printers.  She prints on the large drawing tables in order to move around it.  “I use being a print makers as a tool to convey something greater.  I think of these prints more as quilts or paintings even though they are not directly painted because that’s my relationship to the work.”

When I asked Annie how this physical act of making relates to her social practice works, she responds that it is all about the execution of ideas in the manner that best solves the problem. In fact her participatory works parallel her studio practice but incorporate higher stake parameters.  For example, her recent trip to Israel, resulted in her traveling to two different cities in which she knocked on people’s door and asked them if she could create a work of art for them in their house that represented paradise for them.  “For a lot of the project it wasn’t about what I painted, I mean I painted Winnie the Pooh for little kids in some houses.  It was much more about this human interaction and doing something for somebody that you don’t know.  I think its really important to have that experience of this human interaction, this sort of love you can have for people even though you don’t know them.”

What’s next for Annie Albagli?  The DC Arts and Humanities Council just purchased her piece Paradise; Ode to Netzarim to be included in their permanent collection.   She will be teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute in Spring 2012, and is applying for graduate school.

You can see more of Annie’s work on her website www.anniealbagli.com and to read more about the Kala Institute please visit their website http://www.kala.org/.

Alessandra’s work still explores the human body in relation to space and as mark maker.  She frequently incorporates her own bare body, and the work could easily become merely exhibitionist or aggressively confrontational.   However, in the years since our commencement exhibition, both Alessandra and her work have become less self-conscious and more playful and now her childlike curiosity is a driving impetus to her practice.  This permeates all her work with an alluring quality rather than an antagonistic one.

I visited Alessandra at her live-in studio at The Creative Alliance as she prepared for a December exhibition at Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, MI.  She was invited to exhibit after leading a body workshop with the high school students there last January.  She was working on a series of interactive drawings that referenced the topics she had covered in the workshop: the body as a mark-making tool, physicality in making, and body memory.  The drawings were made up of cutout outlines of her arms and legs, painted on the back with magnetic paint and placed on a magnetic surface.  In this way the audience will be allowed to manipulate the drawings and choreograph the bodies through out the exhibition.  For this show she also exhibited large-scale photographs that documented a series of performances about hiding, and assembled a maze of armoires and cabinets that viewers were invited to climb into.

In 2009, as a resident at The Vermont Studio Center, Alessandra was struck by the mountains that surrounded the center.  In an effort to incorporate herself into this landscape, she created a gorgeous series of digital photographs that depict an image of her prone and draped with a blanket, superimposed into the stark wintery Vermont landscape; the sharp point of her knees and gentle humps of her hips and shoulders mirror and become part of the hilly background.  Always after a freedom of movement in her work, she also created a version of these images where her body is a magnetized cut out that can be moved around on the photographed landscape.  Creating work in this way allows the pieces to vary each time she exhibits them and to be reinterpreted overtime.

As a new resident at The Creative Alliance (CA) in Baltimore’s Patterson Park neighborhood, Alessandra has a large personal studio and exhibition space, with a lofted living space as well.   Having this expansive workspace is allowing her to create and exhibit pieces at a human scale that actually move, where as much of her recent work has been photographic documentation of site specific performance, or live gallery performances where she was passive rather than actively responding to the audience.

Just after she moved into CA last summer, I saw Alessandra’s performance of Personal Space, Experiment #1 as part of the Exposed exhibition.  For this piece she had fabricated a 30 inch clear plastic sphere to house her folded naked body as she rolled around the floor of the gallery, up to and around individual audience members, leaving a trail of dripped condensation behind her.  She gently rocked toward and away from visitors as they entered the gallery, forcing them to confront her body and their own.  When she rolled towards me, I found myself suddenly and acutely aware of my own physicality and comfort zone, and in awe of her obvious comfort in her own skin.

I asked Alessandra where her lack of inhibition came from and she explained that growing up in Puerto Rico, she and her sister were allowed to run around unclothed.  There was a freedom to the culture. Dance and exaggerated body language were essential to self-expression.  However she was also a “gringa” and strangers would often approach her to pet her long blond hair.  Because she looked different, she was always seeking a more meaningful connection to her surroundings.  These impulses are clearly evident in her work to this day.

For the upcoming show of CA residents’ work, Subterfuge (February 25 – March 10, 2012), Alessandra is thinking about a live dance performance that records movement as she travels through the space- but she was still in the planning stages when we met.  I look forward to seeing this piece and how her work will continue to develop during her next three years as a resident at CA.

To watch a video of Personal Space, Experiment #1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPmgXy4DdIM

For more information about the studio residencies and upcoming exhibitions at The Creative Alliance: http://www.creativealliance.org

I first met Steven through a mutual friend at a party almost a year ago.  I was immediately intrigued by his wit and overall disposition. Through the omnipresence of Facebook in modern day networking, Steven and I became friends.  When I finally clicked the link to his website, I was pleasantly impressed.  Initially taken by the color, Steven’s collages peaked my curiosity and I had to know more.  Ostensibly his works read somewhat like hand made, neon-colored eye spy puzzles, but with further investigation they stand up to the interest of the viewer revealing more with a longer look.

TSV video editor, Emily Biondo, and I made the trek up to Baltimore on a Sunday afternoon.  Luckily, we hit no traffic between the District and Steven’s studio and surprisingly arrived right on time.  Steven met us out front and jovially escorted us up the stairs to his studio toward the back of the building.  Steven’s workspace, as one might expect, is full of color.  Paint and cut outs cover the walls, a box full of paper and a variety of in-process pieces surround his worktable.  The space is clearly active and well used—Steven, admittedly, spends more time in his studio that in his apartment.

Steven makes collages, a term he intentionally decided to embrace when referring to his work.  Though, his painting background is apparent in his color construction and also in his compositions.  The pieces range from small still lives, to large abstractions, and soon to be full room installations.  His work comfortably contextualizes itself in the contemporary painting dialogue.  He exclusively uses hand painted paper, original textures, etc.— never using found images or patterns.  Through his material manipulation of cutting and pasting, he also activates a dialogue about material and process based work.

While we were there, Steven gave us a demo of how his process happens.  His pieces start as individual parts and are assembled together to create layered scenes.  These scenes exist in between the space of his reality and his imagination.  Pulling source material from past experiences, to Netflix movies he streams in his studio, the work exudes a somewhat autobiographical feel.  For example, Steven said that the scissor cut outs sometimes acts as a personal signifier.  Using scissors his sister bough him from Christmas, Steven starts a piece by cutting.  Pulling from a stockpile of hand painted paper, old collages, and left overs, he begins laying out the composition—and it grows from there.  He cuts, adds, rearranges and repeats.  He said he could sit for hours without noticing how much time has gone by.  A somewhat meditative process leads to a perfectly assembled piece.  Although sometimes, this perfection flips on itself and Steven decides the work is no good.  In this scenario, he cuts it up and recycles the parts for future use.

It seems apparent that Steven’s process is primarily additive, so I asked if there is a subtractive element in his process.  I was surprised to learn that his process has a strong subtractive component.  He often edits out whole sections or quietly adds a subtractive mark with his Martha Stewart brand hole punch.   As Steven was explaining this part of his process, I realized that he interacts with his 2-dimensional work in a very 3-dimensional way.  Picking pieces up, moving them around, layering on the front and the back, his relationship with the piece is not just head on.  It is all-inclusive– each section, mark and moment completely under his control.  Everything is intentional and thought about, spatially and compositionally.

As the visit continued, we started to discuss the bigger more abstract piece hanging on the wall.  He explained to us why he uses neon colors—which is fascinating (see video) and how each individual aspect of the piece has significance.  Although, he specifically notes that he is not articulating a narrative.  Rather, the work is a physical amalgamation of stimuli from his daily life and imagination providing a visual and physical platform for the viewer to experience.  He does not expect the viewer to dissect the meanings of each mark or object, but he intends for the viewer to decipher their own meaning from the work.

More than two hours after we arrived, we packed up the video gear and headed back toward DC.  What we learned while there was captivating, entertaining, and well articulated.   Steven not only brings an innate talent to his process and work but also piles on literal and conceptual layers.  Steven really is an artist’s artist.

Check out his work at www.steven-riddle.com and nudashank.com

Magnolia Laurie is a painter who works in a variety of mediums that include installation, drawing and sculpture. She currently lives in the Baltimore neighborhood of Hampden, and teaches drawing and painting at Maryland Institute College of Art and American University. Laurie’s professional programming has been hearty to say the least. Concurrent to her continual participation in fellowships and residencies, Laurie’s work was included in selected group exhibitions at New York University and Maryland Art Place. During that time she also had her first two solo shows in Brooklyn, NY, at DRWR Gallery and Causey Contemporary. As a result, two of her paintings are now part of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s permanent collection in Kansas City, MO.
After meeting at the Baltimore Penn Station on a Monday afternoon, following the conclusion of one of Laurie’s morning classes, we went straight to the studio. Emerging from a road flanked by industrial warehouses on each side, our car entered a wide clearing with trees in the distance and nobody in sight. The studio location was filled with the kind of seclusion and quiet that’s often rewarding for studio practice. Once indoors we entered a large room that had piles of Laurie’s paintings all over the place –sixteen on one wall alone. Small works were wrapped in bubble and stacked in boxes. Stacks of larger paintings sat up against the wall with one or two lying on the floor to dry. Views of other buildings came in one window; and views of trees came in through another. Against the wall sat a reclining chair with piles of books surrounding it. We both proceeded to pace around the room. Laurie talked about her process and work rhythm, taking cues from paintings on the wall that were facing us, many of them still in progress. A bit later, we both sat down to discuss the places she’s lived, the content in her work, and that which informs it.

In addition to her relatively nomadic experience in the US, moving from city to city, the artist has lived in several other countries. Much of the thought put into her work’s content is sparked by her experiences abroad. During a visit to Italy, she was reacquainted with a cultural sense that she said she hadn’t felt since her time growing up in Puerto Rico. She referred to this sense as ‘a casualness with history’. Things like a walking tour on top of the centuries-old cathedral roof, or the sight of a city dweller’s small shack touching the back of an ancient amphitheater, were some of her examples.

Laurie noted while living in Zurich, the distinct  and often socially minded intentionality that permeates the way things are designed there. ”It is so contrary to what we’ve been accustomed to in the United States, in terms of safety guidelines, codes and precautions,” she says. A parallel influence came to Laurie during a more recent stint in Turkey, when she saw temporary, makeshift structures that people had assembled out of recycled materials and various scraps. Laurie’s imagery includes environments–sometimes arctic, sometimes desert, and structures which, in the paintings, occasionally appear to be wrapped in coded flags (at times the same ones historically used by ships in distress). They convincingly stem from her perspective on the environment and cyclical nature of our habitat. These representations are imbued with a sense of impermanence.

During the visit, I mentioned to Laurie what I am most taken with. Her paintings appear to be quite aware of dialogue occurring in contemporary art, yet at the same time detached from our own times with an existentialist mood. I was most impressed with her compositions that mesh together abstraction (marks “for marks’ sake”) with marks that represent concrete symbols or rudimentary forms/objects. Each work seems to be a different image, a different moment, despite the fact that she starts and builds up numerous pieces simultaneously. They are demonstrative of a well developed sensitivity to painting.

She also reads a lot, and creates titles for her works that are starkly poetic. In answer to the question of what she is most content with at this point, she said she was happy that pieces of her work could have themselves singled out by a curator for museum acquisition. After all, and due to her continuing practice of balancing teaching with artist production and networking, I am confident there is much more to look forward to, by way of Laurie’s poignant voice.

www.magnolialaurie.com

Reaching the gallery is like stepping back in time to the lower East side of the 1980s New York.  In fact I almost walked by the gallery, located in the H&H Arts Building on a nondescript, warehouse-filled street just west of downtown Baltimore.  When I found the building, I was kindly buzzed in through an unmarked door and boarded a graffiti-filled elevator (“SIX PEOPLE MAX!!” warned a sign) that, at the risk of dating myself, reminded me of the mens’ room of the old CBGBs.  The elevator opened onto the communal space and kitchen area for artists whose live/work studios dot the building’s third floor, and I located the gallery space just to the left.  After the raw edginess of the building, I was unprepared for the cool, white space and the entire wall of windows on the street.  Alex Ebstein and Seth Adelsberger, the gallery’s co-directors, welcomed me into the space and gave me a quick overview of their current solo exhibition Bed Bath and Beyond featuring the work of Ryan Lauderdale before we sat down to talk.

Accomplished artists themselves, Alex and Seth realized several years ago that there was a lack of exhibition opportunities in their city specifically for emerging artists seeking to establish a career in the art world.  Nudashank (itself an invented, dada-ish word coined during an online brainstorming session) fills that niche by providing both a curated environment for emerging artists as well as needed mentoring in the business aspects of working in the art market.  The two directors take their mission seriously, and run their space as a for-profit business venture.  That said, their primary goal is to nurture new talent.  Rather than develop a stable roster of represented artists like a traditional gallery, they prefer to act as a “stepping stone” for artists wishing to reach a regional or national audience.

Knowing that they specifically seek out emerging talent, I asked them how they choose their artists and to elaborate on the mentoring that takes place.  Alex and Seth generally mount group shows, both to accommodate more artists and to work around a unified context.  Most of their “homework” comes from online research, studio visits and watching particular artists over time.  While they receive a steady stream of unsolicited submissions, they tend to favor doing their own networking.  They also consider recommendations from artists with whom they currently work.  While there is no “typical” candidate, they do seem to work often with artists recently out of school who are “serious” about developing an art career.

While those artists may demonstrate great skill in their pieces, they often have limited experience in working within the gallery system or interacting with collectors.  To that end, Alex and Seth mentor artists on topics like the pricing of pieces, arranging installations, documenting the exhibitions for posterity and speaking with potential collectors about their work.  On the topic of collectors, Alex and Seth acknowledge that Baltimore does not have a well-developed collector base of emerging art like New York or Los Angeles.  They have been very ambitious in taking their gallery on the road to art fairs, such as Aqua in Miami, showcasing not only new American talent, but also putting Baltimore on the national art map.  They also have a thriving on-line presence and a significant portion of their business is conducted entirely online and shipped throughout the US.

Developing and broadening that collector base is one of the challenges they face in growing their burgeoning business.  “Art as a luxury good”, according to Seth, is not part of Baltimore’s ethos.  Along with taking their wares to art shows, they co-curate shows with galleries in other cities (such as Chicago’s Western Exhibitions) as well as work to place their artists in other group shows around the country.  I was impressed with how robustly they fill their exhibition calendar, given that both of them have their own artistic pursuits to schedule around.  This unfortunately has limited their abilities to staff the gallery full-time (Nudashank is open by appointment).  Ironically though, most galleries (Nudashank included) do not have the foot traffic to justify full-time staff — hence the reliance on dedicated collectors.

This space is obviously a labor of love for these two entrepreneurs, and so I wanted to know what facets of the business bring them joy every day.  They both immediately answered that the interaction with artists is what keeps them going.  They love studio visits, especially at art schools, and watching artists grow and develop their ideas over time.  Opening the gallery space has also strengthened artist networks within their own community, allowing local artists who may not have previously known each other to interact and exchange ideas.  This networking has also had a spill-over effect into their own artistic practices, challenging them to incorporate more conceptual ideas into their own painted works.

I asked Alex and Seth if they had any parting words of advice. Their advice, which they follow themselves, is to network, network, network!  The internet is the new marketplace for exchanging ideas, and working with social media is now a crucial (and inexpensive) way to develop a following for emerging artists.  Follow the programs at galleries that show works that might be in the same vein as your work.  Chat with other artists, and consider organizing your own pop-up shows with other artists in your social network.  Finally, they state it is vital that your own website has as high-quality images as you can afford and make sure that all your contact information is on the website and easy to find.  You never know when you might receive an email from an interested collector or curator.

Chris Samuels in an artist raised in metropolitan Detroit mixed with a brief stint in the deep south of Florida. In 2009 he co-founded the artist-run gallery Org Contemporary. In its brief existence from March 2009 through June 2010 Org Gallery offered a glimpse of some of Detroit’s most cutting edge and critical art. Art being made by emerging practitioners from around the country including the New York based collective, Corn Row Rider. Org also showcased Detroit’s own next generation of innovators. Such local talents include Kevin Beasley, Co-founder of the artist run CAVE Gallery, who is now in his second year at Yale School of Art. This is how I first met Chris. In November of 2009 I curated, CONSTRUCTS, at Org Gallery.

Since that time I have closely followed Chris’s career. In 2010 he attended Skowhegan School Of Painting & Sculpture, his only formal art education. His work has since been exhibited in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and throughout Michigan including a solo exhibition at the Museum Of New Art Detroit. In 2012 Chris will exhibit new work at the Austin Museum of Art’s Arthouse at the Jones Center in Austin, TX.

On this April evening I met Chris at his sprawling loft apartment and studio in Detroit’s Eastern Market District. Chris’s loft is indicative of many such artist spaces throughout Detroit; spacious, beautiful and affordable. Chris has walled off the front portion of his loft to serve as the base of operation for a practice that eschews the isolation of conventional studio production.

Chris’s studio thus functions more as a place to test out ideas and new arrangements. The real work is always fully realized on site.

We simply began our conversation at the studio so I could get some shots of Chris in his own space and to get a glimpse of some of his tools, so to speak. Once I was shown where the ideas gestate, we headed a few miles north to the North End Studios Gallery to view and discus his practice in the context of his current show, Self-Titled.

A little back-story is necessary at this point. North End Studios is a once vacant building that has been re-occupied by a group of recent graduates of the College for Creative Studies in Detroit’s North End on Grand Boulevard east of Woodward Avenue. This group of young artists share studio space in the huge building for minimal rent. The third floor of North End is an expansive open gallery space with concrete floors and no windows. It is completely open save for the concrete pillars that support the next floor above.  North End is yet another example in Detroit of a collective space, run by a group of young artists seeking to bring cutting edge ideas and projects to view.

In Self-Titled I noticed familiar elements from previous projects of Chris’s. I say projects because Samuels’s work seems to require the context of multiple pieces, but also, Chris always responds to the space he is occupying with his works. It is in this regard that he isn’t interested in a traditional studio practice. Chris’s work is in the same vein as many young artists interested in a cerebral art that engages in placing, arranging, altering and exposing. In his artist statement Chris says that he “creates works that expose the mythologies of comfort and class in the 21st century while utilizing handmade & every day objects as symbolic cues.” Unlike many such young artists however, Chris’s work transcended my expectations of such pursuits and exposed a quiet and extremely subtle beauty below the surface.

His choice of materials was inescapable; rubber stress mats, metal construction studs, and medium density fiber-board. Industrial materials, each placed, arranged and altered throughout the gallery floor. There is no question this work has a minimal aesthetic on the surface yet for me Samuels work is incredibly formal in its construction, a term I use to reference its source material rather than actual fabrication. A monochromatic palette of black, grey and khaki pervade the entire show, giving each piece a visual continuity creating strong spatial relationships between the works. The more time I spent in the space the more it became clear to me that part of Samuels true genius lies in his composition and spatial engagement. This is where the work most effectively transcended my expectations.

On the wall are hung unassuming scanner prints of objects placed, arranged and altered on a scanner bed, each hanging from a single black clip. On the far left wall as you enter the gallery is a video projection which upon closer observation reveals itself to be a looped projection of the very electrical closet it is installed next to. This piece was one I found to be particularly engaging. Again it was something you might want to glance at and walk away from, but encountering it in this space I could not. I have seen other exhibitions at North End, many of which have been very good, but always this electrical closet has exposed itself as a problem of the space to be ignored. Here Samuels is not simply acknowledging this spatial flaw, he is probing it and deconstructing it in order to create what I found to be an image of duplicitous beauty.

You can see more of Chris’s work at: christophersamuels.com

She participated in DCAC’s Sparkplug program and later took residency at Pyramid Atlantic for two months where she learned screenprinting and helped redesign and build their live, work, exhibition space.  I visited Deborah at her apartment in Adams Morgan on a warm windswept day this past November, excited to continue our conversation that began while installing work together for a show in October. Her home is a place where creative energy runs rampant.  Stepping into the large open interior, paintings, drawings, doodles, and wall sculptures lurk around every corner. Some are made by Deborah, some by her young daughter Zoey, and some by her husband.  It is a positive force to experience first hand.  A pentagonal shape drawn on the floor with faded white tape quarantines her studio, located in the back corner of her apartment.   “The rules of the house are a trying attempt by all,” she exclaimed with a smile.  “Indoor soccer games between Josh and Zoey will occasionally send a soccer ball cascading into a wet painting.” But this doesn’t bother Deborah.  The frenetic ambience of her home sets the tone for the breadth of living that she distills on her painted surfaces.Her daily practice is rooted in an interdisciplinary approach that weds her tactile sensibilities with her academic aptitude.

Combining her background in the medical sciences with her affinity for collecting things, Deborah incorporates the vast array of stimuli that surrounds her in a cosmic soup of art production.Gazing at the multitude of work that Deborah had organized for my visit, I decided to discuss her paintings first.  I asked her about “My sister had a pogo stick,” a large painting bisected diagonally with a minimal, pink upper portion and figurative, earth tone bottom segment.  Deborah explained the juxtaposition of forms in her work as a recurrent theme, representing “a fragmented past and riffs in reality.”  The hard-edged pink portion of the painting signifies her love of the aesthetics of graphs and charts while the expressionistic underbelly of the painting references her memory of friends and family back home.  This dichotomy of empirical evidence continued around the studio in different forms.