Dana Carlson

http://www.danacarlson.com


Night Shrine
44 × 38 inches
embroidery, applique, beadwork and paint
2008

What appeals to me is basically just mark-making - the accumulation of marks and what they add up to when they are abutted and stacked up on top of eachother. My work gives me an opportunity to put all these marks together - to combine imagery, symbols, landscape, still-life, portraiture, literal marks that read only as marks, gestural marks (on a continuum from painterly 'fine-art' marks to dorkus majoris marks), pattern & decorative marks, + the whole material quest. It's a lot. They all get to be players in the pictorial vs. abstract painting battle that remains un-won.

Starting a new work is like embarking on an adventure of sorts. It's the lamest statement - totally cliche, I know - but it's true. Sorry. How well the plan is laid out varies but discovery is the thing. And beauty - a dubious term but my quest is not to make something "good" or even "considered" but to find the beauty that comes from the moment when all the pieces are balancing just right. Directness is key. Less mediation, less art, more thing and process. Process feels more honest. Absurdity is always welcome. Really what I'm looking for are new combinations, combinations that register on the feeling vs. semantic vs. form axis.

I think about how much good-looking, cool advertising and fashion there is out there - not to mention contemporary art. Our eyes get really trained to look in a set mode and so for me - I am trying to figure out how to escape that a little. That's probably impossible. Thrift store paintings start looking amazing - bad decisions can be great decisions - that kind of thing. It's not to be clever or ironic it's to find some other way. And yes, this strategy is yet another that's been around. Who knows. Ideally I want to make paintings in ways that I don't already know so much. That's my plan.

2002 - (but still applies)

I fashion myself as a Romantic artist for the 21st century - with some major hang-ups. By combining Abstract Expressionism's gestural risk taking with an ambition for the grace, beauty, and swooning elegance of Titian and Tiepolo, my work presents a lyrical, delightful, rock-n-roll dream landscape populated by birds, guitars, furniture, and pattern. This Romantic, almost surreal world of love and beauty is countered by a self conscious anxiety present in my mark-making and conflicting painting languages. The result is an absurd compromise of my inner, fantasy world with a nagging obligation to address my personal angst, however embarrassing. I liken it to listening to the Velvet Underground as a teenager driving your parents' car in the suburbs. Driving in that car you can be anything; your life feels full of possiblities and the world itself is utterly cool, but you still have to come home to eat your dinner and clean your room.

Dawn Tan

Hi! I'm Dawn. I live in Melbourne. I spend a lot of my time eating and cooking. I love food so much, it makes me make art out of it.

I create drawings and soft sculptures out of fabrics, choosing packaging I'm drawn to. But ultimately, the reason for creating food related art, comes from my intrigue with how packaged food is taking over natural, organic food. The idea of consumption becoming obsessive, how traditional made-from-scratch meals are now replaced often by instant colourful packaged food, serves as a basis for much of the work I create

Abigail Reynolds

Toxicity test is an increasingly disrupted crochet sequence.

Starting with a basic pattern for a string bag, each sucessive round of the Grand Mutator adds a level of deviation from the starting patten. This progressive mutation relates to Darwinian evolution where forms are considered to change due to mistakes in coding over time. Another reference for this work are the toxicity tests performed on spiders in the 1960's to determine the levels of toxicity of recreational drugs. (above) http://www.abigailreynolds.com/index.html

Rachel Denny

Rachel Denny's work is an exploration of the seductive beauty of our natural world and the imprint that human intervention has made on its flora and fauna. Denny is attracted by the exuberance of nature in urban and unexpected places. “A deer in an urban backyard, a family of Peregrine falcons at my neighborhood park, a coyote skirting a parking lot,” she says, “These all become a moment of wonder as they shake us out of our daily routines." Denny works in a variety of materials—wood, plaster, resin, wool, found objects—to name a few. She is interested in the potential of her materials and how they can be manipulated in unexpected ways. “I am inspired by the elegant forms found in the natural world and the time honored action of trying to depict these forms in a relevant and interesting way that is an homage to this beauty and wonder." Denny is best known for her “Domestic Trophies” work—deer heads covered in cozy cashmere cable knit woolens and the like. She has shown in galleries nationwide for over 10 years, and her work will be shown at The Ohio Museum of Craft and the Winston-Wachter gallery in Seattle in the coming year..

Alice Kettle

www.alicekettle.com

Stacey Page

StaceyPage.com

Tilleke Schwarz

My work is a mixture of graphic quality, content and fooling around. The humor in my work is typical for my Jewish background: a mixture of a laugh and a tear. Folk art and daily life are great sources for inspiration. I use mixed media with a focus on embroidery on linen and on drawings and paintings.

My work can be understood as a kind of visual poetry. It is a mixture of contemporary influences, graffiti, icons, texts and traditional images from samplers. The embroidery contains narrative elements. Not really complete stories, with a beginning, a storyline, and an end. On the contrary, the narrative structures are used as a form of communication with the viewer.

The viewer is invited to decipher connections or to create them. The viewer may assemble the stories and to produce chronological and causal structures. Actually the viewer might step into the role of the "author". It can become a kind of play between the viewer and me. The work also relates

to the history of humanity that is determined through stories.

TillekeSchwarz.com