Practice Closes Today

This is a simple entry without much text but many many photos. Check out earlier posts about that outline the theme and the artists and storytellers.  It's been an absolute delight working with everyone involved with this show. Caleb, Julie, Stephanie, Amanda, Hannah and Zsuzsi, the Nave, Massmouth, the visitors. I have enjoyed every second of it. Thanks everyone!

I'm sitting for the last shift at the Nave Gallery Annex tonight 6-8 pm. We're having a pizza party... come join us for one last look before it comes down!

Participants at Massmouth's story slam workshop

Hannah explaining her work at the Artists Talk

Zsuzsi talking about her video and process

Julie Kumar - Practice

 

 For Mnemonic/Periodic, Julie created two hundred sculptures in a month and then locked her studio door. After four days, she tried to remember as many of those sculptures as she could, keeping track of her recollection with sketches and annotations. When she had exhausted her memory, she returned and installed the sculptures in a grid on the floor according to the order in which they were recalled. The forgotten sculptures were in another part of the room. She noticed that the relationship between the fury of creation and the torture of remembering was lost in the field she had created, reducing something ineffable to a mathematical and statistical visualization. This absurdist gesture is a playful, intricate microcosm of her artistic practice, which requires self-imposed rules in order to surprise and challenge preconceived notions.

A poster of the Periodic Table along with a sampling of these sculptures will be on exhibit in Practice at the Nave Gallery Annex this March/April. They are compelling explorations of form, material and space.

Julie Kamlesh Kumar was born in Anchorage, Alaska. She received her BA in Honors Visual Art from Brown University in 2007, where she was awarded the Anne Belsky Moranis Award for Excellence in Art. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Oregon College of Art and was one of six chosen by an international jury to be an Emerging Artist in Residence at the Pilchuck Glass School. In 2013 she graduated with an MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was supported by the prestigious Presidential Scholarship and a juried Graduate Studies Grant. She has shown in numerous locations nationally, from the Rhode Island School of Design Museum to the Warwick Museum of Art. In November 2013 she was featured in Artscope magazine for her work in the show The Order of the Universe at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

Kumar lives and works in Brooklyn. She is currently and Artist in Residence at SOHO20 Gallery in Chelsea, and is planning her solo show at This Friday or Next Friday Gallery, There are No People.

PRACTICE

 Nave Gallery Annex

March 12 - April 5, 2014

reception: Wednesday March 12, 6-8 pm

artist talk: Friday March 21, 7 pm

story slam: Monday March 31, 7 pm

Click here and here to learn more about Practice.

I will be introducing each of the six invited artists of Practice over the next couple of weeks leading up to the opening on March 12. Visit earlier posts about Caleb, Zsuzsanna, Stephanie and Hannah.

The Order of the Universe

INDEX installed at Beard & Weil Galleries, Wheaton College

Installations evolve each time they exhibit and INDEX is no exception. This iteration includes 25 more objects for a total of 198 with 35 of them being new for this show. They are hung closer together and tower feet over the heads of viewers. This arrangement creates an immersive environment that wraps around the viewer's space when they are standing in front of it. I like it, and will push the size and number even more in the future. 

  

This version's additions include a Betta fish, microscope, baby doll head, balloon, pez container, embroidery hoop, monarch butterfly, bubblewrap etc etc. The tags aren't always within reading distance but the point is made with those that are. The students seem to be having fun playing with order/disorder and the powers of association.

Just down the hall from INDEX sits YARNS in its celestial glow... video running on tablet to the left to give context: 

Yarns is made from skeins of yarn that were forgotten about for decades and found in an attic. Winding from the core out with color on color, almost as performance art until as large as a celestial body. A tribute to the life work of Colella’s mother, Yarns records a shared visual language and serves as an icon for disclosure, loss and consolidation.

And 3 more additions to the IMPOSTERS, an asian spoon, clothespin and flat head screwdriver (not shown).

I'm honored to be in the company of Marina Zurkow, Andi Sutton and Julie Kumar. Here's a sample of their work in this exhibit:

Crossing multiple disciplines with her practice, Marina Zurkow (NY) builds animations and participatory environments that are centered on humans and their relationship to animals, plants and the weather. Engaging audiences using film and video, sculpture, print graphics and public interventions, Zurkow’s work is by turns humorous and contemplative.

Andi Sutton is a Boston-based artist whose practice explores the ways that performance art methodology can create new models for community development and social engagement.  Sutton’s Gardens of the Future: Conversation in Memorial is a room-size installation that invites visitors to enter and contemplate questions about extinction, human impact on the environment, categorization, and more.

Julie Kumar’s (NY) work explores systems, rule structures, and self-organization. She creates compositions in time with computer programs, builds immersive environments that are activated by projected light, and intervenes on materials that erode, drip, melt, evaporate, break apart, or float away. She continuously structures and re-structures systems to allow unforeseen experiences to reveal complex underpinnings behind phenomena and new perceptions of the material world.

October 16-December 13, 2013

Beard & Weil Galleries

Watson Fine Arts, Wheaton College

Artist Talk by Andi Sutton - Nov. 5, 6:30 pm

Artist Talk by Marina Zurkow - Nov. 18, 6:30 pm