As an artist with considerable skills and extreme dedication to making my art, I am able to work in virtually any artistic style, format or medium.  Allowing me the flexibility to communicate visually in any way that suits the ideas I am trying to portray.  The inspiration for my work comes from many places, experiences I have had, socio-political events and ideas and a long standing search for ways to depict the elusive qualities and feelings of living. In order to convey some raw truth of these elusive elements, it is part of my regular practice to draw memories or visions with my eyes closed. Oftentimes, these drawings become the central component of my work.

My work does not easily fall into any one category commonly used to describe contemporary art. In part from my continued exploration for new invention and ways of communicating through the various media I use. The central thread that weaves through my work is that I strive to maintain the ability to experiment and freely express inner thoughts and feelings, no holds barred. These paintings are made with passion and urgency in an effort to have the viewer not only be invited into my world, but for them to see and feel familiar elements of their own experiences.

BIO:
Born and raised in Chicago’s inner city, Tom Torluemke has always had a powerful impact on his immediate environs, including his current home of Dyer, Indiana, just across the Illinois border, as he continues to advocate for the educational role of the arts and strengthening the social and civic bonds between people and their communities. Through numerous public art projects, he has successfully employed the visual arts as a means to catalyze life-affirming skills in diverse groups of people, allowing them to realize their unique potential to improve society.

While Torluemke’s work in many ways is anchored by a firm sense of place, including the rich cultural diversity of his life-long home, his aesthetic transcends the concrete and allows for a fully developed voice within the context of his concern for truth and expressions of deep emotion, feeling and spirituality.  At the heart of Torluemke’s work is a yearning to understand and improve the human condition while coming to a greater understanding of humanity’s true place in the universe.

Torluemke works prolifically in a variety of media, including mural painting, stage design, mosaics, oil and acrylic painting, watercolor and sculpture. Solo and group exhibition highlights include: “After Glow” at The Chicago Cultural Center; “The Inland See: Contemporary Art Around Lake Michigan,” curated by James Yood; “Critic’s Choice” at Jan Cicero Gallery in Chicago; “Present” at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; “In the Company of Strangers” at the Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso, Indiana; “Bounce” at the South Bend Regional Museum of art in South Bend, Indiana; “Peace in the Arts” Baíhai International Peace Conference in San Francisco; the Alabama Watercolor Society Exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art; and the “In Indiana” series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

In 2007, Torluemke was named a recipient of the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship (Central Indiana Community Foundation) for the period of April 2007 – April 2008 and a winner of the Great Ideas Competition of the Arts Council of Indianapolis. His project “Light The Way” was completed in December 2008. Three large-scale commissions in the city of Indianapolis are testament to the relevance and scope of his ideas, and his ability to present them in a meaningful context within
their communities: In 2006, Torluemke was commissioned to create two 1,000-square- foot terrazzo floor designs for the redesigned Indianapolis International Airport, which opened in 2008. Torluemke’s epic mural at the main branch of the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library, reviving a rich tradition in the spirit of the public works projects of the WPA era, was unveiled in April 2009 in the Nina Mason Pulliam Special Collections Room on the sixth floor of the Central Library.

Looking outward and inward in tandem, Torluemke’s work transcends boundaries of race, class and gender, as he makes art as a collaborator in the diverse communities of Indiana and Chicago’s steel belt, his individual work often directly faces personal or socio-political concerns. “I try not to concern myself with categories, descriptions or rules when viewing or making visual art,” Torluemke says. “I feel this makes the work honest, flexible and hopefully fuller.”

For more info: http://www.tomtorluemke.com/

Hugo Michel Hernandez

Artist Statement

My body of work focuses on the duality of meaning in reclaimed objects and images. The paintings, drawings, and installation work are research oriented-projects informed by various interrelated sources including cultural history, architecture, language, and literature. The work attempts to seduce the viewer into places that are once eerily familiar yet ineluctably foreign. It wants to convey a sense of nostalgia based on memories that bespeak a culture of reinvention and banal planes of reflections. These references are conveyed through the specific and repetitive use of images, objects, textual language, as well as the use of traditional and non-traditional materials.

England, 2007, 24″X30″

ARTIST STATEMENT:

With influences including Gustav Klimt, Joseph Cornell, and Georgia O’Keefe, Kristen’s mixed media paintings and installations are constructed with paint, paper, fabric, and her own photography. Her style is often striking, dealing often with patterns found in nature and geographical maps. Fascinated with the aspect of time, her work explores the past and the future, and their relationship to the present.

BIO:

My work examines the passing of time. Fascinated with both natural and urban environments, I attempt to capture delicate details and cycles of transformation that often occur in overlooked, everyday moments. Buildings are torn down and replaced, flowers fade and bloom, and people come and go. In my art, I’m addressing the fleeting feelings of isolation and comfort that can result in these periods of change and stasis, and the sense of wonder that the world and its movements give me.

Combining multiple artistic mediums in the process of constructing my layered collages and paintings, I collect and experiment with photography, paint, watercolor pencils, and found materials.

After growing up in Iowa, and graduating from the University of Iowa, I lived in Chicago for 13 years. I moved to Los Angeles in 2007 with my husband Brett, a writer, and my daughter, Lia Pearl.

Contact Information
http://www.kristenneveu.com

Another Day, 2009, 24″X30″	Nest, 2008 – 60″X36″	Starry, 2008, 30″X24″

Following one of the most cliché definitions of the art as a self expression method, I am trying to open each area of my life to it. Everything that I perceive combines with the imagination and becomes a reflection of the human being. Even though that I have attempted to do this in different ways, academic music has been dominant. But unfortunately, in some certain cases music can not be sufficient to express myself. Everything related to the human being, exists in the handwork; in the objects, cities, buildings, societies. I am also a part of this circle. To understand it better, in someway I am trying to reflect everything that I see, hear, taste and feel. Till now, apart from music, photography guided me. I searched in my mind and humour when I took photos. I have experimented to show people and cities from this point of view. But the variety of the expression types is still there and I want to take this diversity into my life.

I am looking for an interdisciplinary approach. Until this time I tried to learn more about semiology. I also wanted to reflect this diversity, the experience that was collected and created by my perceptions.

Contact Information
Gökçen Dilek Acay
Born in Istanbul 19.11.1983
gokcendilek@gmail.com
myspace.com/gokcendilek

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/
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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

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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/

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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

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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.

The Smell of Painting by Any Other Name: Candace M. Briceño
by Jeff M. Ward

“White head & Sod” felt, thread on wire hoop, 2005.

The act of painting is one of illusion. Particularly before the late 1900’s, painting in the West was largely about making pigmented goop look like something in the real, three-dimensional world. Modernist, especially abstract, painting of the last one hundred years points away from this essential fallacy of painting. Rather than picturing reality, these works sought to emphasize the surface, plane and objecthood of paintings. Here, the painting is an object. Candace M. Briceño makes objects, too; moreover, Briceño’s objects are perhaps best understood as the direct progeny of such Modernist painting logic. This connection to painting might be hard to notice as Briceño’s artwork is rooted in a number of techniques, none of which uses the application of colored adhesive on stretched fabric all that often. These artworks are too physical to create the illusion associated with the preponderance of painting. Rather, Candace Briceño stresses the physicality of painting’s surfaces, even using those surfaces as sculptural building materials, to underscore art’s inherent limitations in mediating visual experiences through her plucky and ultimately self-sufficient objects.

Though it is true that there is little paint per se in Briceño’s work, there is the physical surface on which paint is applied, the support. Paintings’ support is most typically linen or canvas stretched across a square, wooden frame, but Briceño also uses paper and felt. When creating an illusionistic painting, the canvas or other material is coated with a priming material that obliterates much of the physical, object-giving information of the support’s material self. Successive layers of paint are built atop this foundation to create an illusion of a fruit bowl, field of flowers or some other objects in space. Briceño, however, employs techniques that highlight that the support is a piece of fabric. Ultimately, this concentration on the fabric becomes the conduit for moving into

“Connected Landscape” acrylic, felt,pencil on paper, 2003.

entirely threedimensiona objects, but it is easier to trace Briceño’s connection to painting by first investigating her work that conforms to comparatively recognizable painting conventions.

Specifically, those works on stretched canvas look the most like paintings. These paintings usually have a minimal pictorial design with much blank canvas. In many of these paintings, a dominate, stuffed fabric element is sewn directly onto the canvas while paint, if used at all, is spread thinly. In an abstract painter’s terminology, this thin layer of paint is a stain. Like a grass stain on a pair of trousers, this kind of paint seeps into the fabric support thereby emphasizing the physical existence of the support rather than covering it up. The sewn elements of these works emphasize the physical support by employing a tailor’s technique to affix these blistered surfaces onto it. Furthermore, the raised elements bring the whole image into a low sculptural relief. Here, the canvas is treated like a piece of physical, malleable fabric rather than a stiff blank page, but Briceño draws out plain paper’s physicality, too.

Using paper and another process that approximates sewing, Briceño’s drawings made entirely of needle pricks also demonstrate the objecthood of the support. In this body of work, Briceño uses a needle as a drawing tool by perforating a design into large sheets of paper. Punched from both the front and back sides of the paper, pricks made form the front of the paper catch the light differently than the ones poked back-to-front. This technique calls attention to the many-sided sculptural reality of the paper whereas a blank sheet of paper, like a painting’s support, is usually an empty space for illusory design. This paper is not illusionistic but sculptural.

“Blue Landscape” felt, thread, pencil, and acrylic on canvas, 2004

However, the rigid surface of the paper permits a sculptural experience mostly limited to rectilinear planes, but actual fabric such as a canvas support possess a floppy physicality that Briceño explores sculpturally, too. Like her other square paintings, Briceño has also made works of sewing dyed, cut felt allover a stretched canvas. Besides their higher relief than the other square paintings, these works become more even sculptural when Briceño displays them horizontally. Laying the works on a shelf perpendicular to the wall undercuts the potential illusion that the painting is some window onto a real space. It also exposes height, or depth off the wall, of the support that is the third dimension usually hidden by illusionistic painting.

The techniques Briceño employs to emphasize the physical support in those artworks that closely resemble two-dimensional practices such as painting and drawing carry her into more radically three-dimensional artmaking. A large portion of Briceño work are wall-mounted, hand-sewn felt sculptures. In these pieces, green discs jut out of the wall while linear elements sprout out their tops. Like the square pieces, the felt is sewn via a paint stain. Displayed one-by-one or sown in a group across an acreage of wall, the works are constructed and hung with enough of an eye to sculptural concerns that they almost entirely outgrow their immediate painting references. Still other plush works have been plucked from the wall altogether. For instance, Briceño’s fabric banana peels exemplify her wholly sculptural work.

The felt fruit also points to the central motif that binds all of Briceño work together. That the works posses a painting pedigree although they are clearly not paintings has been discussed discretely heretofore without any mention of Briceño’s works’ other contents. The exclusion of grappling with the breath of the work’s subject matter has not been to soft-petal the symbolic potential of their subject, but rather to highlight the deep connection between Briceño’s practice’s moves in and out of painting proper and that content. For the artist, these works are a response to the desire to capture her experiences with the natural world. For instance, the square paintings typically picture landscapes: the paint stains are shadows; the puffy appliqués are abstractions of flowers and trees. Pom-pom flower tops bloom from pipe cleaner stems that spring forth from wire-rimmed pillows of earth in the wall-mounted works. Piles of banana peels are somewhat less abstract variations on their real-world counterparts.

“Peel” felt, beads, and thread, 2002

The discarded banana peel, the font of the slapstick pratfall, is also the keenest signifier of humor in the work. Attentive hand sewing might make the work feel precious, fussy or fragile, but their tangible, handmade levity dominates and is key to Briceño’s translation of her experiences with nature. Humor can be also seen in the artwork’s palette: bright in hue with a highly saturated intensity. The use of brightly colored felt gives the work a plush familiarity. It is amicable as a puppet. The work is whimsical, almost cartoony. It is not without melancholy, however. Even the charming banana peels exhibit a distinct pathos.

A sense of loss can be noted in all of Briceño’s work. In the banana peels, the bananas are missing. The wall-mounted pieces, while looking like abstracted flora, fauna and fungi, also resemble finely handcrafted display devices from which a precious stone has been removed. The square paintings lack, by and large, paint. Overall, Briceño’s practice is missing the look of painting even through they are steeped in that tradition. This sense of loss is integral to the work’s content and the artist’s intent. Just as loss permeates the work, the project of representing the natural world is as unobtainable for Briceño as it is for
painting itself.

Trying to represent one’s experience of the natural world is always filled with pathos. It is a task doomed to failure. Art is, by definition, not the thing it represents but a mediation of it. Modernist painters’ fixation on painting’s selfaware objecthood exemplified their attempt to privilege artworks’ form, and not their illusionistic capacities, as the appropriate territory for art. Briceño’s hopscotch among Modernist painterly impulses and more dimensional objects dramatizes the conflict between her desire to capture the experienced world and her awareness that such an illusion is flatly inadequate. Consequently, Briceño has to move away from painting even if she cannot abandon it altogether. Disconnect between real nature and Briceño’s art mirrors the disappointment in our awareness of art’s inability to adequately match-up with reality. Together, these sorrows give Briceño’s work its depth, literally, as sculpture, and figuratively as well.

Briceño’s use of the seemingly world-wide awareness of mediated forms’ limits upon which to pivot her work is what saves the project from the doom of trying to represent nature. Conceptually, Briceño’s work becomes the shared experience of this awareness. Art, at its best, does not so much seek to emulate the real as elucidate it. Briceño’s work makes the disappointment of art’s fakery not nearly so stinging. With a puffy and vibrant craft, Briceño’s work suggests that the inability to fully render experience is a friendlier situation than a vexing one. By spreading their roots in a tradition of physicalizing painting’s illusory conceit, the artwork of Candace Briceño is able to transform Modernist self-awareness into an affable and welcoming flowering of a self-assured art.

See more of Candace’s work: http://candacebriceno.com/

- Jeff M. Ward recently served as one of the Directors of Programming for ThreeWalls, a not-for-profit residency program and exhibition space in Chicago, Illinois. Prior to that, he was one of the founding members of Chicago’s nolonger- extant artist-run space The Pond, and is presently a critic-in-residence at the Core Program of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Glassell School of Art in Texas as well as the executive assistant for ArtLies Texas-focus quarterly journal.