art storage

statement:

My work is based on personal experience, convictions, education, and personal taste. My current primary focus is on concepts of identity (in general), the idea of a sponsored identity, consumerism as a creator of identity, and post-colonialism. This subject matter can be very specific and personal at times.

An important aspect the work is its relationship to the audience. While I do exhibit in traditional spaces such as galleries, more often than not I create pieces for community spaces. In this way the work breaches the correlation between art and consumerism and becomes something to talk about rather than remaining simply a “precious art” object.

The end product of most of my work has aesthetic elements that visually engage, inform, educate, or create interest for a viewer on the given subject.

bio:

Pellot was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, and resides in Chicago. He received his BFA from the University of Illinois, at Chicago, and his MFA from Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois. Pellot works in various mediums such as painting, screen-printing, video and sculpture. He is a conceptual artist who engages social critique, politics and humor.

Contact Information
info@josuepellot.com
http://www.josuepellot.com/
Download CV

Bodhisattva #2 Paper, tape, thread, gouache, ink, fabric, 2008

Navajo Rug (a little sex, a little violence) Paper, tape, thread, postcards, fabric 2008

Polly Perez
Currently living and working in El Paso, TX

Print media and packaging from various cultures and eras, political propaganda, historical and scientific drawings, pop art, industrial design, and recycling are my influences. Examining consumption of the visual as a unique commodity is my curiosity. I approach it like a scientific process, with results depending on chains of small experiments.

I favor the use of recycled and found objects, especially old slides, books, advertising, and used fabrics in my current work. The shortened life cycle of goods in the global marketplace begs intervention – after being sold, bought, and used – things can become something different in their afterlife. With a sewing machine, tape, and intuition I test how feasible it is to intervene.

I feel like I straddle an invisible fence between cultures and histories; soaking in what I see in the world at large, mainly through print media, hybridizing it to my specs, and then turning it loose upon itself. It is either adulteration or making with what is at hand when there is lots at hand. Seeing things being thrown away as a byproduct of the current mass digital conversion of libraries, print media, and photographs is the perfect way to have lots at hand.

Education
2003 University of Texas at Dallas (B.A. in Art & Performance)

Contact Information
veggiecat@juno.com

Brave but Doomed Paper, tape, thread, gouache, photographic slides 2008

Mount Everest Paper, tape, thread, gouache, photographic slides 2008

Perlas y Almendras Paper, tape, thread, gouache, photographic slides 2008

.

Artist Statement:

Lauren Feece is motivated by the challenge of being present in the moment. The paintings and drawings she creates are thoughts about the nature of things, musings on the everyday, and studies of the layers of meaning just under the surface. Losing track of the everyday details, life becomes a photo album of decorated daydreams.

Inspired by the connection of the artistic process to ritual, myth, and meditation she layers: brushstroke, line, swirls, drips, explosions and movements of paint, birds, clouds, color, flowers, trees, light, lace, pattern, blooms, webs, waves, vines, twilight, leaves, and sunsets into ornate visions of passing memories.

Lauren has been exhibiting her work since 1998. In 2002 she moved to Chicago to pursue a full time career as an artist. After years of rigorously exhibiting her work, she felt the need to return to a simpler life, more connected to the relaxed flow of the natural world. She and her equally creative partner relocated to a run down farm in Puerto Rico. In this beautiful environment, inspired by the natural world, she continues to explore life through her drawings and paintings.

To see more of Lauren’s work click here: http://laurenfeece.com/

.

Ben Dallas

Significant art surprises and confounds us by escaping conventionalized appearances or identities devised to accomplish some specified purpose; this includes the conventions of art itself. As a result, its quality is directly dependent on its ability to evoke some degree of vagueness and incompleteness that forces us to feel and contemplate the unfamiliar. This experience usually reveals more than it reinforces. Because they do this, good art works are like visions even when they have no aspirations to revelation or prophecy. A vision’s look is unexpected and holds your attention for as long as it remains a vision. To stay alive it must be stronger and more demanding than the satisfaction and assurance felt from believing you understand it or from knowing what it is; this we determine later after the experience. Attributing its appearance to metaphor or symbol or finding the patterns within yourself that remind you of something like it will break the vision’s spell, so it works to deny our ability to do this while it’s in our presence. Without equals, it resists resolution and clarity, as it doesn’t seem to belong to the world as it is. Instead, it partially brings the past to a close and redirects what will be by adding itself to our experience. I work to make objects that function as visions.

To see more of Ben’s work click here: http://www.bendallas.com

.

As a teenager I would look at past pictures of my childhood and family and start to cry. While in art school I was fascinated in work created by artists in their old age or near death. As a young adult I have moved away from working in isolation within a studio setting and using a specialized medium.

My work is autobiographical with a universal end. We all live, we are all moved, we all die. Through it I capture moments of inspiration that occur at any given time, under any given circumstances. I strive to retain a sense of youthfulness and play in my work, in an effort to slow down my own fleeing youth.

There is an amateur quality that may pervade the work I create using technology that I prefer to view as a human touch. I use digital media to document and record ideas, discoveries and acts in the making, realizing and passing. My work is highly intuitive and although I use chance as a guiding force I believe that it is purposely guided. I put together elements with no apparent relationship and then create meaning through their proximity. It is made directly and clearly without hesitation or questioning its validity as my work.

Through my collaboration with others the art making process becomes a communal endeavor and in turn makes it more meaningful for me. Rather than thinking of my family or students as obstacles for making art or spending time in the studio I incorporate them into my working process.
Although primarily working in sound, video and digital photography I welcome other mediums as well as research veins, which will take my work to new and unexpected terrains.

1) 68’Welch’Subway08’, 2008, 1:48
This piece is a recreation of two television commercials, one from 1968
and the other from 2008. I used my daughter for the main characters in
both recreations as well as the voice of my wife, a student and myself.
I chose the Welch’s commercial for its sentimental and psychological
edge while the Subway commercial was the only one that my daughter knew
by heart in watching Saturday morning cartoons.

2) Failing Memory or Intelligence, 2008, 5:44
In this piece I used excerpts from an article written in 1968 of what
life would be like in 2008. I juxtaposed these with interesting
lesser-known facts of 1968 and arranged them randomly in alternating
turn.

3) 12906088, 2008 2:38
In this piece I sang the words nineteen sixty eight to Otis Redding’s
Sitting at the Dock of the Bay because it was the only song of the top
ten of 68’ that I was able to match to tune. Afterwards I asked my
daughter, who is a drummer to fill in the gaps with the beat of her
choice using the words Two thousand and eight.

Check out Alberto Aguilar’s myspace page: http://myspace.com/albertoaguilarworks

.

In my trans-disciplinary practice I conceptually employ electronics, video, sculpture, installation, painting, photography, and craft to investigate the subtle seductiveness of power facilitated by systems of visual control. I am primarily interested in the artificial means by which we extend our ability to see and the mediating object’s affect on the transmission of images to affirm social and political hierarchies.

Mise-en-Scene appropriates the language of the gallery, video games, scientific experiment, and surveillance to examine how mediation functions both to facilitate acts of violence and to uphold the assertion of boundaries between cultural and political institutions of power. In Mise-en-Scene the viewer is presented with a sealed 8-foot room. Inside the room a woman stands in darkness, surveilled by four closed circuit night vision cameras that feed her real-time infrared image to corresponding monitors imbedded in each of the room’s outer walls. Under each monitor is a large red video game button. When a viewer presses one of the buttons an electric shock is administered to one of the performer’s limbs causing her muscles to seize from the jolt until the button is released. Mise-en-Scene explores the effect of a “social relationship mediated by images” as the desire to see is transformed into a means of painful control over another’s body. The seductive quality of surveillance synthesized with gallery mores and interface transparency makes viewer, institution, and artist equal participants in the creation of the scene.

In LAN Party or “National Take Your Daughter to Work Day” I graft autobiographical narrative onto appropriated images, objects, and contexts in an attempt to negotiate the complexities of power, which reverberate between the interpersonal and institutional. The resulting installation, or local area network (LAN,) implicates the viewer in an act of violence and uses the gallery as a medium to examine the historical precedence that affirms the authority of viewership. In LAN Party a Remington M700 police sniper rifle is poised atop a domestic looking table. A stool and headphone set invite the viewer to position herself behind the rifle, aimed at a small ornately framed monitor across the room. The monitor which, can only be seen and heard when standing in close proximity, shows found footage taken through the lens of an American helicopter sniper as he targets and kills Iraqis on the ground. The video is accompanied by a telephone recording of my father’s voice coolly describing the formal qualities of his own experience with the Remington M700 (weight, material, kickback.) Outfitted with headphones and enabled by the magnifying powers of the rifle’s scope, the viewer across the room receives the sniper footage in concert with the original soundtrack—the voices of gunmen and the booming sound of shots being fired.

Currently my work is informed by the unique socio-political climate of the Southern California border with Mexico and the imaging technologies used to uphold it. Ground Control is a wool Gobelin rug made in Guadalajara, Mexico by José Antonio Flores and Jonathan Samaniego in exchange for the amount of money it would cost a family of four to illegally immigrate to the United States. Ground Control reconstructs an image of the US/Mexico border at Mexicali/Calexico taken by the Terra satellite’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER.) ASTER is made possible by collateral exertions of energy, economy, research and labor between NASA, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) and Japan’s Earth Remote Sensing Data Analysis Center (ERSDAC). Ground Control is an exercise in free monetary/commodity exchange across the U.S./Mexico border in contradistinction to the growing restrictions on human migration. The trans-national means of image collection and production of the work displaces the distinctions of national margins the ASTER photograph depicts, while the electromagnetic abstraction of the border obscures the image’s coded political content.

Check out more on Noelle Mason: http://www.noellemason.com

.

Irene Perez

My work is the product of combining preconceived ideas and materials through the use of a variety of creative processes. The resulting imagery and materiality takes many forms – objects, works on paper, fiber pieces, and installations, each one adapting to both content and concept.

Being an artist is a combination of being a thinker and an explorer. I am intrigued by the world as a physical space and as an experiential place. I make art to explore, analyze, and ultimately reconstruct and understand the world. Place, perception, cultural identity, and language are some of the ideas at the core of my artistic investigations. I am not looking for an ultimate truth about the world, rather, through art making, I am hoping to shine light on new perspectives to appreciate and be captivated by it. I find beauty in things like an ice cube melting and I ponder about space and memory. Through my work I explore these notions of inherent beauty and human existence.

When something interests me – be it an idea, a place, and/or a material, I observe it, deconstruct it, try to comprehend it both intellectually and formally, and finally I create an artwork that presents itself subtly as the result of such process. Most of my work contains an element of minimalism, simplicity, and attention to detail, which is not only an aesthetic choice, but also a strategy to persuade the acute viewer into further examining the work.

In the last two years I have been concentrating in creating works that examine the idea of landscape as a structure through form, color and materials (Topographic Landscapes), other works that investigate ideas about immigration and cultural identity (Home (a history) and Ideal Homeland), and works that have been produced as an outcome from the search for solutions to improve and preserve the environment as it relates to consumption (Bread and Topographic Piles.)

Check out more on Irene Perez: http://ireneperez.net/

.

Art class understood as a nebulous ameliatory shadow-zone has a lot to do with fine art, and its recent historical trajectory. Collecting fine art remains a duty for a dwindling aristocracy, and a trophy hunt for the money-laundering nouveau-riche, but its larger purpose in the culture has come to be formed in an arena fenced in by the professional discourses of academia, the taste-crafting marketing elite, and the reputation economics of semi-public cultural cathedrals—where bits of art trickle down into the assessment machines and mission statements of nonprofits and educational institutions. These competing agendas have drowned out any clear extrinsic purpose for fine art, much like the cacophony of social engineers and population managers that have for so long made of education such a murky affair. Fine art has, in turn, acknowledged and responded to its crisis with a certain amount of vigor, changing from a specialized tradition with a stable patron base to a massive cultural space in which innumerable unseen performers partake of the shared magic of erudite transcendence.

For a long time, I have been fascinated with “obsolete spaces”, or places that have fallen into disuse or been destroyed for the same reason. This includes the Hulett Ore Loaders near Cleveland, the Adak Naval base in Alaska, and now the recently dismantled Berwyn Spire. These represent the loss of certain parts of American identity in a society that is obsessed with the “new”.

For thsi series, I documented the piece in the last year of its existence, and also made an interpretation of it in the 3D online world, Second Life. I did this as I feel that the Spire only exists in memory and our cultural databanks now, and I felt that by having a virtual version to contrast with the actual one was a fitting tribute to this iconic piece of Americana.

bio
Patrick Lichty (b. 1962, Akron, Ohio) was born into a family with a long involvement in and support of the arts. His mother, a exhibiting artist of numerous art and craft media, immersed him in textiles, painting, ceramics, print and other techniques during his upbringing. Simultaneously he was also exposed to technology in the form of the emerging genres of electronics, video games, and later personal computing when his parents bought him an Atari 800 computer in 1978. Instead of following the desires of many adolescents of the late 70′s in wanting to program the next Pac-Man or Space Invaders, he was interested in drawing and creating music with his personal computer.

Upon graduation from high school, family convinced him that computers and electronics was a field with great potential. Lichty then followed this advice to complete two degrees in electronic engineering at the University of Akron (Ohio, US), but also followed studies in Art and Asian Studies. In addition, free time was devoted to continuing interests in design, painting and digital imaging.

In 1990, while studying postgraduate Glass and Art History at Kent State University, Lichty met theatre historian Leigh Clemons and Sociologist Jonathon Epstein. Clemons would later become Lichty’s scholarly collaborator (and spouse), and Epstein became partner in the media group, Haymarket Riot. During the first half of the 1990′s, Lichty and Epstein created a number of works on media and culture, including Americans Have No Identity, but they do have Wonderful Teeth, The Sociology of Jean Baudrillard, and Haymarket Riot’s MACHINE.

By the mid 1990′s, the World Wide Web burst upon American culture, and advances in personal media production allowed the individual to create media art available only to institutions. From this, early web artworks following his love of art and theory, such as (re)cursor and video like Haymarket Riot’s WEB were created, which caught the attention of corporate activists cum art group RTMark. From the mid 90′s to the early 00′s, the critical work started with Haymarket Riot continued in collaboration with RTMark in creating visuals and animation for exhibitions and video, culminating in 1999′s Bringing It to YOU!, which was featured in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.

Solo work continued as well, exploring the nature of narrative structure in online spaces. These include 1998′s Metaphor and Terrain, a ‘sculptural’ essay examining interface as art object, 1999′s Grasping @ Bits, another hyperessay looking at issues of art and intellectual property rights, and 2000 Smithsonian American Art Museum commission SPRAWL: The American Landscape in Transition. This last piece consisted of a hyperdocumentary consisting of over 190 minutes of interviews, various texts, and 32 panoramic vistas of areas in his home town of North Canton, Ohio that were in the midst of rapid change due to the housing boom of the late 90′s.

After 2000, Lichty’s artistic and scholarly practice would further expand from solo and collaborative works to include numerous curatorial projects, including (re)distributions: Mobile Device and PDA Art, columnist for ArtByte Magazine, and the assumption of the Executive Editor position at Intelligent Agent Magazine (NYC), in partnership with Whitney Museum of American Art digital arts curator, Christiane Paul. In addition, his service to the New Media community also expanded by becoming Chair of the Inter-Society of Electronic Art’s (ISEA’s) Cultural Diversity Committee, and Executive Curator of Microcinema International’s Mobile Exposure cellphone video festival.

In 2001, the RTMark visual collaborations would catch the attention of another activist group, The Yes Men. This group’s comical stunts, calling for humane treatment of global populations by organizations such as Dow Chemical, EXXON, the US Government, and the WTO, were featured internationally from ArtNews to the BBC. Lichty’s slapstick animations from bizarre management schemes to fast-food waste reclamation projects were core illustrative components of the group’s presentations, and featured in Bluemark’s documentary, The Yes Men, which showed at the Sundance, Berlin, and Sydney film festivals.

After over a decade in the New Media art world, a desire share his experience through teaching required that Lichty seek a terminal (MFA) degree. In 2004, he entered Bowling Green State University’s Digital Arts program under advisor Gregory Little. While planning to graduate in 2006, Lichty has served as Representative-at-Large for BGSU Graduate Student Senate, the BGSU Public Arts Committee, and is member of Phi Kappa Phi with a 4.0 GPA. He remains in his former duties, and is most recently featured in the exhibition, Dreaming of a More Better Future, at the Cleveland Institute of Art with Kevin and Jennifer McCoy and Vito Acconci. http://www.voyd.com/voyd/

Lindsay Grace

About the Artist
Lindsay is a multitalented artist working in photography and electronic art.  He holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Science from Northwestern University.  He is also a candidate for the Masters of Fine Arts in Electronic Visualization at the University of Illinois, Chicago.  He is a professor of Interactive Media at the Illinois institute of Art, Chicago.

From the Artist: Photography
My photography celebrates the continuity of play and work in multicultural island communities. Many of my photographs are taken in West Africa, South Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean using 35mm film or digital photography. All of the photographs are displayed as they were originally taken from the moment; no subjects are posed, no alterations are made after the shutter closes.

As a Cape Verdean American artist, I am distinctly familiar with the affect of island living, whether it is the physical microcosm of land between sea, or the micro-social distance between socio-economics.

From the Artist: Digital Media
My digital art seeks to highlight specific aspects of the social relationship between human and machine. These relationships are like most relationships, wonderful but full of distinct challenges that require attention.  I address these challenges by exploiting the scale and processes that makes computer applications so powerful.

My years of experience programming and designing software systems combines with my innate appreciation of language and the visual to fabricate hybrid experiences of the arts and sciences.

See more of Lindsay’s work here: http://www.lgrace.com/