ARTIST STATEMENTS

JACKIE BROWN

At the heart of my work is a love of materiality and my current work stems from an interest in geological processes that span thousands of years. This was initially inspired by experimenting with a 3D clay printer and observing the way it extrudes material in layers that mimic the slow buildup of strata. I am also fascinated by how the 3D printing process alludes to the history of coil building in ceramics and I love the potential to use a traditional material like clay in new and expanded ways through emerging technology. The pliability of the raw clay allows me to embrace the anomalies and imperfections of the printing process and combine parts while the clay is still wet. I also fuse parts together during the firing process letting elements meld and morph in unexpected ways to generate experimental works that suggest shifting landscapes. At times the forms offer a sense of structure and order while at other times appearing looser and more chaotic, suggesting entropy and precarious states of being.

LYDIA KINNEY

In my process, the paintings are where the future would fit.

I do not feel a future in my body. I do not see what a future could look like with what I have around me. My imagination is stretched thin, and my most pragmatic habits fall short. Much of the work I find most resonant is work depicting the figure: work about the artist’s relationship to body, to space, to form. Particularly strong work exhibits these relationships with self.

Abstraction fills in the gap for both: the resonance of figuration as sensation and the pessimism of lived experience are one and the same when married in my work. Painting gives me a new visual language to illustrate the sensation of loss (future tense), alienation (physical), and doubt. I can invite a viewer to the sensation without inviting them to a representation. My paintings are still, always, an environment. Some works are rooms with little doorways and no floor. Other paintings are large confrontations of open space. Recently motifs of heavily draped paint hanging from gestural inverted landscapes dominate the work, an image of concealed place

I keep saying: I still want it to be destabilized. The most recent work is as unstable, environmentally, as I have ever known it to be. For all the worldly and introspective doubt that I bring into the studio practice, the paintings are their most liberated.

JOSEPH SMOLINSKI

My work over the past fifteen years has examined the roles of technology in our changing landscape. This questioning has led me to investigate communication networks, energy and oil companies, and the industrial agriculture infrastructure. I am interested in how these industries compose our construct of the “the natural environment” as well as physically shape our planet. My research-based work moves through media such as drawing, painting, sculpture and digital practices that often overlap and inform one another. I utilize historical methods of image making while simultaneously embracing new digital technologies and recognize this duality in environmental discourse that longs for the past and also strives for the future. My intent is to exercise both as a means to raise new queries about the nature of the environment.