Judith Ornstein

Judith Ornstein describes her work as such:

In the making of art I discover my humanity, which often becomes obscured amid a life that is moving too fast and filled with too much. Making art is a working process, every day, that engulfs my whole being. My work is very much about the process. It itself takes me places, suddenly and without reason and I delight in the things I do not plan.

I’m an abstract artist whose imagery melds poetic impulse with networks of shapes and forms. My current work recycles the detritus materials from the ‘Amazon Generation’. Various kinds of honeycomb, fluted and flat corrugate are the familiar by-products of our throw-away society and my raw materials. For me mundane, everyday objects are tools, shape-shifters for my creative use.

Cardboard imbues my sculptures with the conflict of permanence and impermanence. Humble materials, like corrugate, brings up the issue of ‘what gives art value’. The material lives as a sign of cultural excess and has a strong sustainability message. Viewers may see me as just a rescuer of recyclables but I also have a real love of these materials. They have a raw elegance that keeps these pieces timeless looking.

My work reside in a space between solidity and fragility.  Hovering between 2 and 3 dimensions. The throw away quality of cardboard reflects an almost organic life span from development thru deterioration. Sculpture reveals itself in time and its deterioration adds to the process and mimics biological life. However Picasso’s cardboard guitars are over 120 years old and still looking great.  So the material is more durable than we think.

My sculptures are put together in a tangled space as a kind of  improvisational universe. The process is a living experiment forming a bridge between thinking and doing. It is a process that overwhelms my conscious thoughts and instinctive reasoning. Without a color pallet the simple abstract, irregular shapes in various textures are combined to morph into a language dependent on position, shape and surface.  I am always looking for a structure while moving parts around.

I want the work to be fun and humorous as well. So my shapes are often childish, poking fun at themselves. Shapes without a beginning or an end intrigue me most. The circles and ovals that have overwhelmed my work for years have extensive meaning, representing notions of wholeness, self and infinity. They are cyclic movements relating to women, celestial positioning and emotions. These organic shapes (out of stiff material) refer to our humanity and sensuality.

Lucienne O'Mara

Lucienne O’Mara’s paintings unlock the linear structure of the grid. The freehand geometry attempts to discipline and battle against the emotion and movement brought by the use of colour, and the physicality of the brushwork. The limitless potential of this single compositional method allows Lucienne to explore the boundaries of colour, rhythm, and space. Lucienne’s engagement with the repetition of squares within squares is seeking to break down visual order and imbue it with a kind of chaos and poetry more akin to our experience of life.

Lucienne was born in South London in 1989 where she still lives and works. She received a BA and MA from City & Guilds of London Art School and is currently in the final year of the Turps Banana Studio Programme.

Her work is featured in collections such as Simmons and Simmons, John Jones, and the Currell Collection. She has been the recipient of the Painter Stainer’s Prize, the Tony Carter Award, and a finalist of the Ingram Prize.

Margarita Cabrera

A self-defined social practices artist, Margarita Cabrera’s work is often fueled by collaboration from community engagement in order to get a holistic view of social issues. Materials such as US Border Patrol uniform and cochineal-dye, are used, and transformed, to deliver a multi-tiered conversation on topics such as globalism, populism, and the migrant experience. Often in playful representation, such as a landscape of soft-sculpture potted desert plants with colorful embroidery, or mimicking parrots made from found border patrol uniforms, to collaged works on paper made with cochineal dye, Cabrera implores viewers to confront contentious topics by utilizing materials tied inextricably to the issue.

Margarita Cabrera was born in Monterrey, Mexico, and moved to El Paso, TX at the age of 10. She received her BFA in Sculpture (1997) and her MFA in Combined Media (2007) from Hunter College in New York, NY. Cabrera is an associate professor at the Arizona State University Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Longmont Museum of Art, Longmont, CO; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX; and the Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, NY. Her work has been included exhibitions at the Barbican Centre, London, UK; Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO; the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, OH; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; the Ford Foundation Gallery, New York, NY; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; the Sweeney Art Center for Contemporary Art at the University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA; the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Location; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; and El Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico.

In 2012 she was a Knight Artist in Residence at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, NC. Cabrera was also a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, presenting a community public art sculpture commissioned by Lego at Discovery Green in Houston, Puentes Culturales. In May 2019, Cabrera unveiled her monumental, participatory public sculpture Árbol de la Vida: Memorias y Voces de la Tierra in San Antonio, Texas, and was named Texas Artist of the Year. Cabrera has also been selected as a recipient of the 2023-24 Latinx Artist Fellowship.

Karen Bennicke

Karen Bennicke (b. 1943, Denmark) is known for her sculptures composed of complex geometric figures, which superimpose cartographic overviews of city life, constructed landscapes, and architectural diagrams onto three-dimensional ceramic forms. Her systematic process translates data points describing urban and architectural space into a complex network of carvings, excavations, and crisscrossing topographies. City streets, urban parks, traffic routes, and subway lines are layered on top of one another, compressed into an afterimage of the forces that formed them. Ultimately, Bennicke’s slab-formed sculptures develop a quality of artifacts or fossils. While each work arises from the implementation of a set of rules, the end result is enigmatic and magnetic, charged with arcane symbolism. The earth-toned terracotta and monochrome geometries prompt philosophical rumination on the city as a set of contested relations; her sculptures suggest that, obscured by time, traffic, and constant dynamism, our environment is ultimately unknowable, constantly in a process of formation and sedimentation.

Bennicke's work is featured in many museum public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Ceramic Art in Gifu, the Nationalmuseum of Stockholm, and the Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen. She is the recipient of the Thorvald Bindesboll Medal from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and a Lifelong Achievement Award from the Danish Arts Foundation.

Dorie Gutherie

Dorie Gutherie is a glass artist that uses the medium in a variety  of interesting and successful ways. From her standalone sculptures to intricate boxes to portrait "Nocturnal Veils", her work transfixes the viewer and creates a new world.

Born in 1982 in Moline, Illinois, Dorie was first exposed to the medium when she stumbled upon a small glass studio in her hometown. Since graduating from Illinois State University in 2008, Guthrie has continued her studies, being awarded scholarships, at Corning Museum of Glass, Penland School of Craft, and Pittsburgh Glass Center where she furthered her technique.

Over the last five years Dorie worked on staff at the Pilchuck Glass School, and also has been a teacher’s assistant at Corning Museum of Glass, Pilchuck, Haystack Mountain School of Craft and Pittsburgh Glass Center. Ms. Guthrie was selected to demonstrate flameworking at the 2013 Glass Art Society Conference in Toledo, Ohio.

Before uprooting to Brooklyn, Dorie taught kilncasting, flameworking, fusing, and imagery techniques at Brazee Street Studio, a Bullseye KGRC in Cincinnati, Ohio. Bullseye Glass Co. Resource Center has given her a solo show in NY, opening June 1, 2019. She is currently teaching, fabricating and working with visiting artists at UrbanGlass downtown Brooklyn.

George Ohr

Known as The Mad Potter of Biloxi, George Ohr was a genius of clay. Not only does his work in porcelain defy shapes and forms, they hold a certain grace and unique beauty. Wikipedia describes Ohr and his work as follows: George Ohr (July 12, 1857 – April 7, 1918) was an American ceramic artist. In recognition of his innovative experimentation with modern clay forms from 1880–1910, some consider him a precursor to the American Abstract-Expressionism movement.

He is considered one of the first art potters in the United States, a precurser to other art pottery designers and creators such as Rookwood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes him as "arguably America’s quintessential art potter. He built his own kiln, dug his clay, threw his vessels with extreme proficiency on the potter’s wheel to wafer thinness, altered those shapes, and then covered them with his own novel glazes. In form and decoration they are essentially Abstract Expressionist objects—almost 50 years before that movement was founded. In fact, deemed ultimately very modern in this century, they had great appeal to such modern artists as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, who formed collections of them. Ohr’s work is extraordinarily idiosyncratic and he practiced his own mantra of "no two alike," as exemplified by these works.

Ohr was a colorful character, and his quirky pottery became one of the added tourist attractions on Mississippi’s gulf coast. Self-proclaimed the "Greatest Art Potter on Earth," he was well ahead of his time, and the vases that he deemed "worth their weight in gold" would not command such prices until a few decades ago. Barely ten years after he began making such vases, Ohr closed his pottery, and packed up his pots, literally not to be discovered for another 50 years. Both of these vases came virtually straight from the artist’s cache, and were purchased by Martin Eidelberg, the donor, when the rediscovery of art pottery was in its infancy in the early 1970s."

 

 

 

 

Larry Silver

Larry Silver is a New York based artist whose paintings and drawings evoke an energetic intensity. For his paintings, he uses ceramic-sprayed masonary board which allows the colors to emanate light giving his work a transcendent vibrancy.

He writes, "My paintings are predominantly constituted of oil paint mixtures, graphite and charcoal interlocking atop the surface of clay panels. It can be perceived as though the multitude of exposed layers are a diagrammatic suggestion of notation, juxtaposing the faces of neural pathways and emotive reactions to memory. The practice of pouring and sanding facades is to deliberately unveil the chronology of a painting's emotional thesis. The work is to suggest a simultaneity of time via an exploration of visual systems, self contained logic, and internalized iconography. In preserving the faint suggestions of what was erased, constructed and removed, I intend to hint at forms of psychological graffiti. It imbues something which is essentially abstract via a historical and narrative framework that communicates without being literal.

My series of drawings 'Mapping of a House/Structure and Incidence' started in the mid-2010's ascertain a similar logic in employing marks made initially through a cartographic blind contour process intended to realize structures which house childhood memories. I feel my way around the page as to explore the architecture and furnishings of the house in which I grew up utilizing charcoal- a barometer for my recollections of rooms, stairs, closets and doorways. In returning to the blind contour, more deliberate decisions are made to enhance the visual power of this trance-like exploration. My recent vision has been to interlock the drawing and painting processes in unison."

Erro

The acclaimed artist Erró (b. 1932) is considered one of the leading figures in European Pop-Art. During his long and successful career he has delved into diverse subjects in his paintings, often using an overflow of images to reflect on contemporary society of consumption, in addition to references to various political current issues.

From early on Erró was inspired by technology and science, creating works where the human and the mechanic are combined. In particular he examined how technology invades the body and how the human body adapts to the machine. The images offer questions concerning the borderlines between human beings and technology. Are these borderlines perhaps no longer there when human existence is tied to the mechanic and the very identity a collage of various technological creations, an hyperreal presence in social media, drugs cooked up in laboratories, smart-gadgets assembled in factories, the trace of chips in credit cards. The human being has become a cyborg, whether we like it or not.

The exhibition Cyborg gathers together artworks that reflect these ideas in various ways. The word is a combination, a collage of the words ‘cybernetics’ and ‘organism’. In 1960, when scientist were thinking up a new type of astronaut, the phrase ‘cybernetic organism’ was considered cumbersome. As a result it was shortened, cut and pasted into one handy word, ‘cy-borg’. At the same time these scientist where working on the technology behind the cyborg, Erró was working on art works focusing on the interaction between machines and people, often by creating a collage with people – usually women – and various machines.

The collage is very well suited to the cyborg, as the cyborgs very existence is dependent on compositions and excess. The cyborg is always a collage of some kind, de-formed and a combination of diverse images from art and toys. Even though it is already here, it is still being created and is continually changing. Many of the pieces are already here, but they keep being arranged in new ways – in addition new pieces are continually made.

Erró is an artist of the collage. Combinations characterize his work, and collages are the raw materials behind his paintings. The collages bring together different and similar objects and are always marked by an excess of some kind. Excess is also a symptom of the cyborg, it is always too much, something added, de-formed, integrated and transformed. The cyborg‘s collage shows us the familiar in a new light and makes it unfamiliar, until we grow used to it – or not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nancy Callahan

Nancy Callahan is a visual artist who works in a variety of mediums. She is known for her screen prints, drawings, and installations as well as her work in the field of artist’s books.

She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and has taught well-over a hundred workshops on innovative book structures. Her work is housed in many permanent collections throughout the United States and Europe including Yale University, Vassar College, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, University of Indiana at Bloomington, University of Michigan University of Delaware, Library of Congress, Rochester Institute of Technology, Wesleyan University Virginia Commonwealth University, Women’s Studio Workshop Saint Stephen Museum, Hungary, Bucknell University, SUNY Albany, and Harvard University.

Jim Bachor

Jim Bachor is best known for his pothole mosaics. His artist statement says it all:

Trying to leave your mark in this world fascinates me. Ancient history fascinates me. 

Volunteering to work on an archaeological dig in Pompeii helped merge these two interests into my art. In the ancient world, mosaics were used to capture images of everyday life. These

Inquiries?
jim@bachor.com
312-498-5287

colorful pieces of stone or glass set in mortar were the photographs of empires long past. Marble and glass do not fade. Mortar is mortar. An ancient mosaic looks exactly as intended by the artist who produced it over two millennia ago. What else can claim that kind of staying power? I find this idea simply amazing.

Using the same materials, tools and methods of the archaic craftsmen, I create mosaics that speak of modern things in an ancient voice. My work locks into mortar unexpected concepts drawn from the present.

By harnessing and exploiting the limitations of this indestructible technique, my work surprises the viewer while challenging long-held notions of what a mosaic should be. Like low-tech pixels,hundreds if not thousands of tiny, hand-cut pieces of italian glass and marble comprise my work.

This work is my mark.

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