ARTIST STATEMENTS

CARLY GLOVINSKI

Carly Glovinski makes work that explores the make-do, resourceful attitudes associated with domestic craft and a reverence for nature and the great outdoors. The elements of time and place are embedded in her work, measured by tides and seasonal flower blooms, and marked by repetitive processes and attention to detail. The past bumps up against the present in work that embraces a slip in perception.

The shadow box drawings...

I was originally drawn to typeset drawers for their symbolism as holders of language - literally - their practical use was the storage of letter blocks for typeset printing. I also like their appearance in thrift stores and flea markets, reborn as a kitschy wall display, meant to display tiny collections of various items, curated by its owner, each compartment its own little stage.

For Reference and Library ...

Over the past 10 years, I have made various works that include a trompe l’oiel painted book. These books have been placed on chairs and hidden in library shelves. In these two works, I am looking at this collection of sculptures as both self-referential and illustrative of my interests and environment.

Reference forms a self-portrait of sorts, with the titles or subject matter of the books combining to reflect a cross-section of my creative motivations. Library becomes a little gardening library that points to other major themes of environment, landscape, and the labor of care in my work.

RACHEL GROBSTEIN

I create miniature sculptures and paintings based on objects from everyday life. I often work in series investigating artifacts, souvenirs, and collections. My work isn’t aimed at replication; I’m interested in capturing specific gestures - tactile and material qualities which are often transformed in the process of making. These pieces invite close scrutiny through a radical scale shift. The details unfold slowly, in conversation with the amount of time it has taken to create the work.

My work often explores the objects found in liminal or transitional spaces. A recent series of sculptures is based on real-life roadside memorials, layering homage upon homage. This project explores how collections of objects in memorials offer a powerful language of loss, love, and memory, and how these places for negotiating grief and trauma become portraits of the deceased, as well as those they have left behind. Another series of miniature tableaus is based on the objects found on people's bedside tables. I began by asking friends for pictures of their nightstands and then expanded the series to include colleagues and strangers across the country. These biographical collections of objects speak to universal themes, from memory and self-care to sexual identity and dream life. Other work has explored dashboards and rearview mirrors, museological displays of artifacts relating to the UFO phenomenon, and scavenger birds.

I am currently at work on a series about the past few years of my own life, navigating my daughter’s birth, the complexities of the transition to motherhood, a miscarriage, separating from my husband, and revisiting the death of my own mother twenty years ago.

DUNCAN HEWITT

I see particular things - things that look back at me. I remake them, most often carving and painting wood.

There is close observation and a making process that is old. At the same time, they are off-kilter - something new felt in suspension between it is and it isn’t - no longer what they seem to be.

This grows from a collaboration - a vulnerable space between myself and a source - during which both change.

JUSTIN RICHEL

PAINTER’S PROBLEMS

Painting is perhaps the most plastic and malleable of all artistic mediums. There is no resistance to the artist’s hand. It captures and encapsulates every bit of the artist; from the thought to the hand, to the canvas. The physical, mental, emotional, and energetic are recorded in the paint. The movement of a sore shoulder, selfish desires, and the pain of existential dread stick to the surface of canvas. In this way, every painting is a self-portrait.

With an interest in artifice, simulacra, and trickster mythologies, my most recent body of work delves deeper into the inquiry of painting itself. The impetus for this recent body of work began with a simple line of questioning.

“What is a painting?”

Perhaps the simplest answer to that question is its materiality. - Traditionally: Paint, canvas, and wood supports.

“What is the function of a painting?”

- A window, a portal, an aperture

- A framework or ideology

- An object of and for contemplation

- A perceptual lie / a conundrum / a quandary

Adhering to the subsequent list, the work is simply constructed from paint, canvas, and wood.