fragmented

Adjective

reduced to fragments.
existing or functioning as though broken into separate parts; disorganized; disunified:

a fragmented personality; a fragmented society.

Utilizing disrupted signal flow, cheap consumer technologies, and discarded obsolete devices, my work largely deals with fragmented time. Collecting existing objects and processing the physical and metaphorical weight those objects carry, I piece together these disparate elements in an attempt to make things whole. This process results in objects and environments that require activation; work that is incomplete until the viewer is present and engaging in the moment.

Emily is a sculptress utilizing disrupted signal flow, cheap consumer technologies, and discarded obsolete devices. Her work largely deals with fragmented time. Born in Honolulu, raised in Missouri's lead belt, educated in St. Louis and the District of Columbia–her exhibition record includes Rhizome DC, Transformer, Area 405, GlogauAIR Project Space, Vilnius Academy of Arts, The John F. Kennedy Center, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Her work has been reviewed in The Washington Post and Hyperallergic, and she has discussed her work at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. Emily currently maintains a studio at STABLE Arts and works as the AV administrator for a massive federal art institution to support her kid and their furry friends. Emily is also an adjunct professorial lecturer at American University.

We humans are a part of one heaving organism, entangled and tumbling over one another. I aim to create visual experiences of our interconnectedness to each other and the Earth, disrupting the fantasy of a sovereign self, separate from and in control of the Other. My sculptures, installations, and mark-making demonstrate the power of the small when gathered into intricate ecosystems. An on-going meditation on our interdependence on the Earth drives continued reference to landscape both in the materials I choose and the way I compose them. 

Existing along a spectrum of becoming and undoing, my installations reflect on the transience of our collective existence, full of the potential for continual transformation. I often compose my works using unfired clay accompanied by supporting materials, imparting them with precarity while reflecting on our dependence on the Earth. Working with unfired clay allows me to create temporary structures which are ultimately dismantled, and the materials reused in new configurations. In this way, the work exists as a temporary formation in an endless cycle of growth and decay.

Magdolene Dykstra is an artist and educator. Working in sculpture, installation, and mark-making, Dykstra’s practice focuses on exploring the tension between individuality and multiplicity, impermanence and the embedded potential for transformation, visibility and anonymity. Her methodology centers around repetitive actions that lead to an accumulation of small components within intricate, shifting ecosystems using materials that embody a relationship with the Earth, its forms, and processes. After studying biology and visual arts in undergraduate degrees, she received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Magdolene has been awarded several grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Notable exhibitions include site-specific installations at the Gardiner Museum (Toronto, ON) and the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery (Waterloo, ON), as well as solo exhibitions at the Jane Hartsook Gallery (New York, NY) and A-B Projects (Los Angeles, CA).

As an artist, I am particularly interested in how we cope with an increasingly incomprehensible and threatening world. The imagery in my work is based on actual objects-- Victorian taxidermied furniture, handmade pillowcases, artificial grottoes, and old valentines. They belong to the material culture of sentiment which, as an artist, I reclaim to narrate my sorrow and anxiety about catastrophic environmental degradation. I resonate with the work of French illusionist filmmaker, Georges Méliès, whose film Le Voyage à Travers L'Impossible so comically illustrates burgeoning scientific inventions of limited success.

As a personal form of expression, I find in kitsch the ability to wax poetic about that which I cannot fully express in words alone. It is a form of remembrance, a spiritual practice that is historically embedded in the industrial revolution, capitalism and our very removal from Nature itself. As we hasten towards the impending climate crisis, I am struck by both the human ingenuity-- the spectacular problem solving-- and also the futility of trying to engineer our way out of an imminent ecological crisis. My work starts at the intersection of sentiment and futility in the face of such ecological devastation.

Katherine Burling is an artist based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Burling holds an MFA from James Madison University. Her practice incorporates a love of material culture, the decorative arts, and vernacular artists. She is inspired by feelings of loss and chaos, oftentimes personal as well as social, ecological and political. Her most recent work imagines gardens which cannot grow without human intervention, and the futility of our haphazard meddling with nature.