Malcolm Cochran teaches sculpture in the Art Department at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. He holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI and an MA and BA from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. For more about his work, visit www.art.osu.edu/people/malcolm-cochran

Rocket Gallery Michelle Grabner

This week’s guest at STUDIO Visits is Chicago artist, writer, and curator Michelle Grabner.

When she writes about her own work, here’s what she says,

“My work consists of identifying, indexing, and transposing patterns. I also build elemental compositions that are foundational to the language of abstraction. These works take the form of painting, drawings, paper weavings, photographs, and stitchery. I am most concerned with enacting rudimental organization, articulating notations and embracing repetition. I believe that these dedicated activities are progressive and principled.”

Since 1999 she has co-directed The Suburban, an artist project space in Oak Park, Illinois. Since 1999 The Suburban has hosted over 150 artist projects.  (thesuburban.org)

Join us at 9am this Wednesday in Nevins to learn more about Michelle Grabner! Or check out her website: http://www.michellegrabner.com/

She has exhibited extensively in New York and internationally presented work at the NMAC Foundation in southern Spain; with Wooloo Productions and the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin, Germany; and as part of the 2007 Venice Biennale. Laurel was one of only two US participants in the Independent Performance Group (2004-2007), founded and facilitated by Marina Abramović.

Currently, Laurel is collaborating with Norwegian video/performance artist Terese Longva as well as serving as Associate Professor of Art at Alfred University. For more information, please see: longvacarpenter.com and laureljay.com.

I find inspiration in my immediate surroundings: the place, the season, the remnants on hand. In fact, I am wooed by mundane, seemingly ordinary things and common, repetitive tasks. I sculpt space and material to create heightened sites for routine but exacting gestures, nudging oversized sculptural objects into ephemerality. In the piece, Prospect, for example, the space is defined by three tons of dirt in perfect minimalist mounds, and the rhythmic tick tock of a cuckoo clock. As the performer, dressed in a shade of saffron shared by inmates and monks, I set to sifting a single pile of dirt for five hours without interruption. The soil sculptures are made impermanent, almost insubstantial, by this act of displacement. The transformation of the physical material during the performance serves as both motive and metaphor for the transformation of my mental and emotional state. I conjure a kind of quiet alchemy by imprinting the space, moment by moment, hour after hour, with simple, ceaseless effort: sifting, licking, kissing, laughing. In my work, in every way, I seek the magic of being richly and intensely present.

–Laurel Jay Carpenter

Todd Bartel received a BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 and also studied in Rome as part of RISD’s European Honors Program between 1984-1985. He earned his MFA in painting from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993. In 1990, Bartel was a recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship (U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.) and in 2000, he was awarded a Connecticut Council on the Arts Fellowship Grant in support of the continuation of his drawing series, “Garden Studies” and related “Terra Reverentia” assemblage series. Bartel has taught at Harvard University, Brown University, Carnegie Mellon University, Manhattanville College and Bridgeport University. He has been a guest critic at Rhode Island School of Design. Since 1998 Bartel has served as both an Artist Teacher and a visiting critic at Vermont College, MFA in Visual Art program. Since 2002, Bartel teaches drawing, painting, sculpture, installation art and conceptual art at the Cambridge School of Weston, Weston, MA. Bartel is the founder and the Director of the Cambridge School’s Thompson Gallery, a teaching gallery dedicated thematic inquiry, and “IS” (Installation Space), a proposal-based installation gallery.

The History of collage and landscape painting are the same story. Since 1998 I have dedicated my artistic production to understanding and advocating for environmental concerns. In my drawings and collages, land depiction often appears in my work as marginalized or appropriated landscapes; while in my sculptures I often construct iconic “landviews,” which question the ways in which natural resources are consumed and how the surface of the planet is maintained.    ——Todd Bartel

For more information on Todd Bartel and for examples of his work, please visit:  http://toddbartel.tumblr.com

Laurie Beth Clark is a Professor of Non-Static Forms in the Art Department of the University of Wisconsin where, since 1985, she has taught studio classes in Video, Performance, and Installation, as well as Special Topics like Collaboration and Relational Aesthetics and more than twenty different academic seminars in Visual Culture Studies.  Since the 1980s, Clark has been making large-scale, site-specific installations and solo and collaborative performances, single-channel and multi-channel video works, and virtual environments.  She has done more than 150 shows and performances in thirty-five countries on five continents. Documentation of her creative work can be found at www.lbclark.net. Her work has been recognized with funding from the Art Matters, Arts Midwest, Film in the Cities, Jerome Foundation, McKnight Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wisconsin Arts Board and roughly one hundred reviews in newspapers and periodicals. Clark also collaborates with Michael Peterson under the group name Spatula&Barcode to produce projects that emphasize conviviality, locality, and food.

Parallel with her creative practice, Clark publishes critical and scholarly essays in print journals, electronic journals, and anthologies. Since 2001, Clark has been working on a global comparative study of trauma memorials.  The monograph in progress Always Already Again: Trauma Tourism and the Politics of Memory Culture includes research on apartheid memorials in South African, atomic bomb sites in Japan, clandestine torture centers in Argentina and Chile, commemoration of the American War in Vietnam, concentration camps in Germany and Poland, genocide memorials in Rwanda and Cambodia, and slave forts in Ghana.

I use art as a tool to investigate social issues. Rather than posing solutions to specific problems, my work asks viewers to re-examine the nature of their own positioning.  Since I derive my themes from personal experience, I hope to engage viewers in personal identification as well or in oppositional self definition. I believe that this will allow them to take more responsibility for themselves and for the human community in which they participate. The structure of my work reflects a profound commitment to the integration of theory with practice.  This synthesis is more accurately described in the term praxis: the critical revival of practice, setting practice into a critical framework of understanding.

Because my projects address pressing social issues within an aesthetic framework, they underscore the capacity of art to deal with relevant content.  The thematic material is broadly applicable so that these large scale participatory events often provide a forum for community awareness regarding the issues represented.  The site-specific nature of my work implies not only the physical specificity of location but also the cultural specificity of audience.  Direct initiatives throughout my work engage active participation by members of the community, including those who do not ordinarily make art a component of their lives.  Deliberately, my process does not remain hidden from the public in its planning stages, emerging fully formed at production time.  Rather, the projects solicit public opinion and participation throughout.  While there is no question that the final work reflects my own aesthetic sensibilities, those sensibilities are themselves established relationally.

Untitled (Robots), slip cast porcelain, woodfired, each approx. 10” 7” x 4” ©2007

This Wednesday we welcome Bill Cravis to STUDIO Visits! Join us at 9am for a talk by the artist about his work. Right afterwards the sculpture graduate students will ready the stage and invite Bill to come back for a conversation in front of the live audience.

As Bill puts it in his biography, he grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, oblivious to the turbulent 1960′s.  In the drought summer of 1988 he saddled a Fuji touring bicycle and headed west, from Lexington to San Francisco, where he spent several years as a worker-owner of Rainbow Grocery in the Mission District.  Still restless, he apprenticed to potter John Connors in the foothills of Mt. Ashland, Oregon and later spent a year in Japan, visiting ancient kiln sites and assisting Japanese potters with their work. These alternative educational experiences and others – including a 3-year apprenticeship to a natural foods chef in Harvard Square – contribute greatly to the overall dynamic of Cravis’ current artistic vision.  He returned to higher education in 1999, earning a B.F.A. degree in Ceramics from California College of the Arts (2002) and an M.F.A. degree from Carnegie Mellon University (2006).  His distinctions include full fellowships to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2004) and to the Vermont Studio Center (2010).  He is also the recipient of a $10,000 Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant (2006).  Bill Cravis has held full-time visiting faculty positions at Ohio University, Athens and Saint Cloud State University, Minnesota.