Artist Statement
Art reminds us that we are human, existing among others. Art serves as a phenomenon that heightens awareness. It educates us in what it is to be human, compassionate, inquisitive, and awake. Public artwork generates a site for participation in public culture and dialogue, this is place making, and place marking. Site-specific sculpture offers a sense of passage, physicality, and orientation, framing perception through the lens of community, culture, place, topography, and time. Using juxtapositions of space & material, shadow & reflection, structure & the ephemeral, I initiate a dialogue of fabricated form with the natural environment, challenging our changing perception of that environment. My work is an investigation of our use, misuse, and interpretation of land.
Artist Statement
I seek out materials, spaces, and physical objects that are embedded by the forces of time and location. As index of time and place, they are left with the residue of these forces. The object becomes the place. I am particularly interested in our use and interpretation of land. My work is an investigation of our influence on the land and the land’s influence on us. The work is seasoned by natural forces of growth, decay, stratification, entropy, light, and shadow. I work with the environment by placing a fabricated form in nature, presenting a new perception of what has always been. Each form is site-specific, developing an honest relationship to location. I am inspired by the atmospherical force of sun, weather, and wind blowing over open spaces. The work collects some of these forces like a photographer might collect images of place, with light and film, but more abstractly. I find research in walking, on hikes, within layers of geologic time, in the open spaces and unique topographies of land, and in a simple, often quiet, awareness to this space. I want to condition the act of looking with the act of walking at the human pace, investigating human perception. Art happens in the awareness to time and space rushing around us.
Poem as manifesto; under-which I subscribe and find inspiration, written by Wendell Berry.
Let me be plain with you, dear reader.
I am an old-fashioned man. I like
the world of nature despite its mortal
dangers. I like the domestic world
of humans, so long as it pays its debts
to the natural world, and keeps its bounds.
I like the promise of Heaven. My purpose
is a language that can repay just thanks
and honor for those gifts, a tongue
set free from fashionable lies.
Neither this world nor any of its places
is an “environment.” And a house
for sale is not a “home.” Economics
is not “science,” nor “information” knowledge.
A knave with a degree is a knave. A fool
in a public office is not a “leader.”
A rich thief is a thief. And the ghost
of Arthur Moore, who taught me Chaucer,
returns in the night to say again:
“Let me tell you something, boy.
An intellectual whore is a whore.”
The world is babbled to pieces after
the divorce of things from their names.
Ceaseless preparation for war
is not peace. Health is not procured
by sale of medication, or purity
by the addition of poison. Science
at the bidding of the corporations
is knowledge reduced to merchandise;
it is a whoredom of the mind,
and so is the art that calls this “progress.”
So is the cowardice that calls it “inevitable.”
I think the issues of “identity” mostly
are poppycock. We are what we have done,
which includes our promises, includes
our hopes, but promises first. I know
a “fetus” is a human child.
I loved my children from the time
they were conceived, having loved
their mother, who loved them
from the time they were conceived
and before. Who are we to say
the world did not begin in love?
I would like to die in love as I was born,
and as myself of life impoverished go
into the love all flesh begins
and ends in. I don’t like machines,
which are neither mortal nor immortal,
though I am constrained to use them.
(Thus the age perfects its clench.)
Some day they will be gone, and that
will be a glad and a holy day.
I mean the dire machines that run
by burning the world’s body and
its breath. When I see an airplane
fuming through the once-pure sky
or a vehicle of the outer space
with its little inner space
imitating a star at night, I say,
“Get out of there!” as I would speak
to a fox or a thief in the henhouse.
When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, “Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!” I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.
My purpose is a language that can make us whole,
though mortal, ignorant, and small.
The world is whole beyond human knowing.
The body’s life is its own, untouched
by the little clockwork of explanation.
I approve of death, when it comes in time
to the old. I don’t want to live
on mortal terms forever, or survive
an hour as a cooling stew of pieces
of other people. I don’t believe that life
or knowledge can be given by machines.
The machine economy has set afire
the household of the human soul,
and all the creatures are burning within it
“Intellectual property” names
the deed by which the mind is bought
and sold, the world enslaved. We
who do not own ourselves, being free,
own by theft what belongs to God,
to the living world, and equally
to us all. Or how can we own a part
of what we only can possess
entirely? Life is a gift we have
only by giving it back again.
Let us agree: “the laborer is worthy
of his hire,” but he cannot own what he knows,
which must be freely told, or labor
dies with the laborer. The farmer
is worthy of the harvest made
in time, but he must leave the light
by which he planted, grew, and reaped,
the seed immortal in mortality,
freely to the time to come. The land
too he keeps by giving it up,
as the thinker receives and gives a thought,
as the singer sings in the common air.
I don’t believe that “scientific genius”
in its naive assertions of power
is equal either to nature or
to human culture. Its thoughtless invasions
of the nuclei of atoms and cells
and this world’s every habitation
have not brought us to the light
but sent us wandering farther through
the dark. Nor do I believe
.artistic genius” is the possession
of any artist. No one has made
the art by which one makes the works
of art. Each one who speaks speaks
as a convocation. We live as councils
of ghosts. It is not “human genius”
that makes us human, but an old love,
an old intelligence of the heart
we gather to us from the world,
from the creatures, from the angels
of inspiration, from the dead—
an intelligence merely nonexistent
to those who do not have it, but —
to those who have it more dear than life.
And just as tenderly to be known
are the affections that make a woman and a man
their household and their homeland one.
These too, though known, cannot be told
to those who do not know them, and fewer
of us learn them, year by year.
These affections are leaving the world
like the colors of extinct birds,
like the songs of a dead language.
Think of the genius of the animals,
every one truly what it is:
gnat, fox, minnow, swallow, each made
of light and luminous within itself.
They know (better than we do) how
to live in the places where they live.
And so I would like to be a true
human being, dear reader-a choice
not altogether possible now.
But this is what I’m for, the side
I’m on. And this is what you should
expect of me, as I expect it of
myself, though for realization we
may wait a thousand or a million years.
by Wendell Berry.
From, “The Mad Farmer Poems”
Artist Statement
Exploring the tectonics and relationship between material and action, one understands self in temporal existence, location, and society. I am a materialist, structuralist, and a fabricator. Fabrication is often improvisational. In a technocratic society of instantaneous consumerism, I believe much can be learned working with little; To improvise with materials at hand. Our relationship to earth can be clouded by a digital vail. I believe the future is in the hands of makers and those who touch earth and the land. I am for work.
I work to excavate sensory experience from the strata of social and physical history of place and site. As student of topography, geology, nature, and eroding structures, I study the traceable physical effects of time. In time, nothing is still. Ruin and entropy are fundamental properties of things constructed. In silence, time is amplified. In the debris of human activity, are artifacts telling stories of ourselves.
I am interested in a temporal and tactile conception of space; specifically, with work that manifests a presence in relation to nature and place. I work with fabricated materials and mechanical processes, in a post-industrial setting, engaging simultaneously in dialogue with nature and constructed society.
Progress exists in tandem with resistance, like a hammer swing on an anvil. Knowledge is found in exploring the pressure of opposing forces. This work seeks a moment of silence, in-between a loud world of consumption, language, and noise. This is an indexical investigation of natural forces and human experience through time and place.
The human experience is realized through a study of relationships. The relationship between materials, space, process, language, and the sensory experience, inform my studio practice and influences my classroom dynamic. Similar to the pressure, resistance and time necessary to form material things, the educational process is a product of challenges, resistance, guidance, time, and in-process problem solving. These influences are key to my continually developing teaching philosophy.
Within the study of art and design, technical and theoretical knowledge is built upon inquisition and experience. Through material exploration, conditioned ideation, and practiced public communication an implicit creative knowledge develops in the student. I strongly advocate for a curiosity in the potential of materials and in the experimentation of new ideas in material handling. As material knowledge grows, aesthetic investigation and conceptual thinking is continually conditioned. I also advocate for a critical investigation of social roles, aesthetic frameworks, and personal responsibility.
The student begins to understand the relevance of what she is making by exploring aspects of social context: tradition and culture, history as driven by multiple social frameworks, nature as challenged by environmental industrialization, and contemporary expression within a global society. Design is defined by problem finding and subsequent problem solving. Artistic expression is found in dialogue with a shared social experience. I am committed to student artists finding a personal language to examine, express, and re-examine the society and physical environment around them.
Students in an atmosphere of collective participation should be motivated to discuss the undefined position of the artist in society and culture. Critiques, guest lectures, topical discussions, collaboration, and individual research are catalysts for growth. These experiences help students develop skills as critical thinkers and speakers. It is vital that students use the critique as tool for improvisational testing of ideas. Critique is a time to help the individual artist focus ideas, exposing possibilities for further investigation. Cooperative educational environments challenge students to explore art and design’s unique parameters. This encourages independent thinking simultaneously with shared experience, discovery, and learning from peers. I am committed to an integration of skills, ideas, research, and philosophy that is developed individually and conditioned communally.
Maintaining an awareness of developments in the continually evolving contemporary field of art and design stimulates the instructor to effectively direct students to sources of individual interest, development, and practice in new media. I strongly value the resources available in an academic community. I enjoy the progressive synergy of work produced and ideas generated by cooperating with other department instructors, schools, industries, communities, organizations, and cross-disciplinary arenas. Contemporary art is not autonomous in form, material, or media, but attained through interdisciplinary methods of working in a world of multidisciplinary resources. The goal of this enterprise is a long-term commitment, building a creative community where learning and teaching become reciprocal.
Art is human dialogue in a shared sphere of human experience. To teach art is to guide perception, find questions, and challenge thinking; To present students with the tools to find their own critical and unique lens in which to experience and engage with the world & society.
Landscape and Memory
curatorial statement
Skyscrapers, landfill mounds, and industrialized agriculture often lead society to collectively assume that via human engineering and construction, it is we who shape the landscape to ourselves. In contrast to this line of thought, Landscape and Memory presents the self as shaped by environment and landscape. We examine how the physical world, in the form of place and history, forms us.
Landscape and Memory explores experience and sensation of landscape rather than its image. We experience earth and place intimately and communally; from each experience we take away more than a picture. We take away spiritual pieces of place that are embedded in our haptic consciousness. Landscape and Memory is an antithesis to a photo show or a photo album. Landscape and Memory is antithetical to landscape as purely picturesque. The show stands in contrast to the sterile death of a location’s depth and history via the flattened moment in time, of a camera’s shutter and its subsequent object of memento. And although it does not exclude photography, Landscape and Memory presents these experiences through a diversity of artists and media.
This exhibition explores the memory of the land itself. To trace memory is to unpack, relive, or mentally remake experience along the trail of our sensory perception of landscape and earth. Grandmother to civilizations that have camped, bled, built, and destroyed upon her surface, the land itself holds a memory of time far beyond the mental capacity of humankind. Be it geological, anthropological, or spiritual, memory is imprinted upon location, earth, and upon our own consciousness through the vehicle of formative experience with earth and landscape. This exhibition has the opportunity to explore landscape’s memory as we review a changing landscape in a warming climate and industrially intoxicated planet. The exhibition points to an erosion of land and mind. But also, the exhibition desires to reveal the ability of land and place to restore and revive, both itself and our human spirit.
Landscape and Memory incorporates media in film, object, and material that record experience and trace memory beyond symbol & image, finding a place in-between land and mind. Landscape and Memory moves beyond surface into the depths of perception and sensation grounded by a greater landscape and shared human experience, evolution, geology, and memory.
– Joshua Ray Smith, curator
Temporal: Semiotics of Time and Place curatorial statement
“Exterior space gives way to the total vacuity of time. Time as a concrete aspect of mind mixed with things is attenuated into ever-greater distances, that leave one fixed in a certain spot. Reality dissolves into leaden and incessant lattices of solid diminution. An effacement of the country and city abolishes space, but establishes enormous mental distances. What the artist seeks is coherence and order – not “truth,” correct statements, or proofs. He seeks the fiction that reality will sooner or later imitate.” – Robert Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art: Spectral Suburbs,” Art International, 1968.
All of our actions occur in space. Life itself evolves through time. Temporal is a re-examination of the relationship between human sensation, our environment, and the synthetic world, a re-evaluation of our perceptions of reality as we read the physical world around us. Temporal investigates the conventional role of gallery space and the lexicon of work found within that is specific to the gallery. Temporal is a three-part pursuit, juxtaposing the image of time, the object of time, and the space of time.
A picture often is an intellectual reference to something other than the paper or canvas on which it is printed or painted. Likewise, a photograph is a metaphor serving as portal from the place of the gallery to space experienced somewhere else. The photographic image is a product of a stop in time, a place or moment frozen. To appreciate the metaphor between this syntactical construct and our perception of specific location is to realize fluidity of time.
“The biological metaphor has its origin in the temporal order, yet certain artists have ‘detemporalized’ certain organic properties, and transformed them into solid objects that contain ideas of time”1. An object enters the gallery embedded with the corrosion and essence of time, thus containing an “idea of time”. Temporal examines the art object as artifact. The art object installed becomes a place in itself, made active in spatial negotiation. Rejecting the autonomy and commodification of the modern art object, temporal installation produces a non-objective, yet specifically phenomenological, place in the gallery. It is also by material metaphor that an object may represent another site or place in a semiotic iconic method different from the image.
Through metaphor and signifier, or the haptic and phenomenological, Temporal evokes both the presence and absence of time in place. Does time have a texture or a mood? Where is time? Can time be altered, encased, slowed, or hastened? Is time an abstract construct used to measure, or does it exist sovereign from human perception? Light of the sun shadowed dark, turning light again, marks one day; and thus becomes the quintessence of time. Following this logic can the sightless, unable to know light different from dark, know time? Time is a symbolic language agreed upon, specific to place and perception?
Temporal references site as historical archive, explores the space of contemporary places, and simultaneously looks toward our changing landscape or cityscape. Temporal uncovers layers of lived history, the visceral aesthetic of a place, and the eroding imprint of people and natural forces on these places. Temporal explores our perceptions and experiences of place: the place we are now, places we have been, could go to in the future, and the places inhabited by others before. Time re-examined uncovers layered sediment of human experience in the strata of every location. Temporal examines the physical and psychological factors that constitute an understanding of place.
Temporal explores the universal, timeless and time-filled language of art, and examines the relationship between art, site, time and the power of display.
– Joshua Ray Smith, curator
1 Robert Smithson, “Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space”, Art Magazine 1966.
Function
Curatorial Statement
The early american modern architect, Louis Sullivan, stating that design is a reflection of material, structural, and social functions, infamously declared:
“form ever follows function”
Function deconstructs the modernist barriers and boundaries between form and function, between fine and utilitarian artworks. This exhibition defines design as structure at work, and utility as aesthetic form, presenting a manifestation of Craft in engineered material and conceptual space. The concept of “function” is re-contextualized. The exhibit poses the very question of functionality in our mechanical landscape and contemporary society. Function points a finger at a civilization textured with object making, tools, devices, products, consumerism, mechanization, and the comfortable existence that such objects and design afford.
Function finds passion in process. This exhibition is tactilely and viscerally infused with the smell, smoke, fire, dust, wax, dye, sand, grind, and joining of object making. The show collects work from various regional artists who delve into the idea, concept, utility, and aesthetic of “function”. Some of the exhibition’s artists make artwork that succinctly “works”, some work shifts perception of an object’s functional role, others find an aesthetic in the manufactured and discarded, or in objects of practical utility made non-functional, while still others explore a new visual language deriving from a memory of our industrialized, and post-industrialized society.
The visitor is welcomed into the visually tactile experience of smart design, material awareness, social function, and then allowed a critical eye to view the objects that comfort, define, and challenge our society.
“Form follows imagination, and function is a script for where and how we interact with these creatures we live with.” – Vivian Beer, participating artist
- Joshua R. Smith, curator