Rob Hackett

August 7-29, 2015

Equidistant

<into two camps, sculptural work and print based work. The distinction between the two doesn’t last long though, as the two heavily influence each other. The work is a constant push and pull between source material generated in sculpture, photographed, adapted to print, cut up and collaged, examined, and used to again inform sculpture. The way the two elements dovetail into one another in the process and generation of ideas creates a relationship where neither one holds up the other, but rather they work together in order to stand.

The idea of median, as it relates to the spectrum of my work, is very different from just the intersection of two and three dimensional work. We can think of intersection as a single point and median as a reference to the center along an entire spectrum. Because of the way my process takes me to both ends of the dimensionality spectrum, with the end points being as important as the median, the median wouldn’t be where it lies without paying close attention to the entire field.

Rob Hackett is a Maryland based artist by way of Pittsburgh. A recent graduate from the University of Maryland, he is currently teaching drawing and sculpture at UMD part time. Rob’s work has been featured recently in MAP’s Young Blood exhibition, a solo show at VisArts, and is currently a 2015-2017 Hamiltonian Fellow.

www.robhackett.net

September 4-26, 2015

Lay of the Land

Three mountains that were part of the Freedman Land project served as the subject of these paintings. Susan Grace painted “plein air” in West Virginia in front of mountains that evoke the notions of release and of freedom. Grace is interested in both the cool “field painting” aspect of the mountains that can lean towards a repetitive flat pattern and, conversely, she is also interested in how the mountains stir deep emotions. Moving through these mountains creates in us an interior landscape that draws from us aspects of challenge, intimacy and something therapeutic. The two opposing approaches, the landscape in its realistic perspective and the flat abstract repetitiveness, present the same dichotomy that challenges Grace in picture making. The mountains are the perfect paradigm for the dilemma she has set herself as a contemporary painter. Committed to working with paint on a flat surface, Grace’s eyes are trained to accept the “medium is the message.” The dilemma for her is to rectify the urge to celebrate the “flat rectangle” of the two dimensional canvas and the urge to forge forms and to allow those forms in turn to frame a story.

In designing the composition, Grace might overlay the composition with an armature of a grid or a perhaps a large wedge that bisects the picture plane. These compositional devices can be used to either strengthen the “pattern-like” aspects of the rolling hills or to strengthen illusionistic space. The four edges of the canvas play an important role in inventing a composition. How to keep the viewer’s eye from sliding off the edge? How to keep the eye moving and making additional discoveries over time? Here a nod to real space: here a mark that draws attention to the surface. Grace’s work involves a dichotomy: is the picture plane flat or spatial? She works to keep these two divergent paths alive.

Susan Grace earned her Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Chicago and a certificate in Painting and Drawing from the National Academy School of Fine Art in New York City as well as completing a course of study at the Art Student’s League in New York City. She has exhibited her work in Washington DC, Virginia, and London, England.

Grace’s current works are large-format oils that capture the landscape of the Appalachian Mountains and what they offer us in the beauty of their abstracted forms and their healing qualities. Her influences are her teacher, Robert Beauchamp, who pushed the “plasticity” of a painting, which he in turn learned from his teacher, Hans Hoffman. Grace is a recipient of the 2015 Workhouse Arts Center Director’s Collection that “highlights talented Workhouse artists who stand out for craftsmanship and an outstanding creative practice that pushes artwork outside the norm.” She is currently a Resident Artist in the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, Virginia, a nonprofit art organization consisting of a group of over 70 visual artists.

July 6 – August 1, 2015

Habit, ceremony, superstition, ritual. Everyone Actually is Each Other converses about the autonomy of the creative process by securing the contradictions and overlaps as integral to studio etiquette. Employing a series of audio recorded interviews expressed through instructional drawings as an interface, this show considers the work ethic of eight separate creatives. From a DC based slam poet to a New England based figurative sculptor, these diagramed processes are filtered through the constructs of a singular hand.

Stephanie Williams is a tinkerer and doodler, whose work as a multimedia artist navigates autobiographical narratives of identity, memory and misconception; telling story through its pieces rather than its whole. Through self-‐‐directed processes of close examination, disassembly and reorientation of sensorial fragments, she curates a context in which our bodies’ amalgamated experience understands the world around us. Williams received her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and has shown both nationally and internationally including Irvine Contemporary, the Arlington Arts Center, Transformer Gallery, and Lawrence University’s Wriston Art Center. She was both a Vermont Studio Center and Toby Devan Lewis Fellow and was recently a resident artist at the Wassaic Project and the Elsewhere Collaborative. She is also a member the DC Arts Center’s art collective Sparkplug and is Assistant Professor at James Madison University in Virginia.

www.stephaniejwilliams.com

July 6 – August 1, 2015

Why am I compelled to draw trucks raising hell, dirtbikes peeling out, and army helicopters racing across the canvas? I grew up on a farm in rural Kentucky, deep in the sticks. We only had a handful of neighbors. There were very few children around that were my age, except my siblings. We weren’t allowed to watch much television.

We lived in between Fort Campbell and Fort Knox. Military planes and helicopters frequently buzzed our house. When I heard them coming, I’d drop what I was doing and run outside to stare in awe. I still run out to watch the airshow when I’m visiting the farm.
It’s common for people to think of vehicles’ relationship to humanity, and, in a broader sense, the natural world, as an antagonistic one. Vehicles Misbehaving is my attempt to capture the primal beauty I see in these machines.

Joseph Crawford Pile grew up on a pig farm in rural Kentucky. His great-grandfather, Christopher Pile, bought the farm in 1864. Pile was raised in the house his grandfather built, who bought the land with the wealth passed down from his grandfather, William Pile, who received a land grant in Kentucky for his service in the Revolutionary War.

Pile dreams about the farm every night. Usually the dreams are a mix of family members and peers from his formative years, all set on the farm with a desperate apocalyptic theme. He has spent his life trying to interpret these dreams, to gain insight into his personal, emotional, and psychic identity and his place in the world.

Pile’s mother is an artist. As a child, he watched her paint portraits, landscapes and still lifes. She fostered his interest in the arts and enrolled him into summer art programs as a teenager, which lead him to art school as a young adult.
Pile currently live in Baltimore, Maryland.

www.joecrawfordpile.com

July 6 – August 1, 2015

Nick Clifford Simko’s work considers the parallels between the construction and destruction of visual culture. “Fragmentia” examines the values of the past through the form of fragmentary pieces in the present. Adapting the material and metaphorical language of allegorical tapestry, these torn and tattered compositions isolate specific moments from the larger scene. For Simko the process of collecting, collaging, tearing, and destroying historicized images is a way to reveal the impermanence of art and explore the flexibility of its meaning.

Simko utilizes methods of accumulation and elimination to realize these tapestry works. The first step involves collecting subject matter with a digital camera, such as figures, animals, and landscapes. Using photographic imaging software, the artist carefully collages the individual elements together into a cohesive composition. Next the designs are woven into textiles on a computerized loom. The weavings are then cut and distressed. The final installation juxtaposes the remaining fragments in relation to the missing pieces.

Nick Clifford Simko is an interdisciplinary artist who utilizes digital photography and computerized loom technology in his practice. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries in Baltimore, Richmond, and Washington DC. In 2013-2014 he was a member of EMP Collective, an interdisciplinary arts organization in downtown Baltimore. He holds his BFA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the Maryland Institute College of Art. In fall of 2015 Simko will begin his MFA in Photography at the University of New Mexico.

www.nickcliffordsimko.com