Sara Stites
Artist's Statement
Using mostly functional objects from the studio, I have been building precarious, tentative “sculptures” in front of drawings and paintings that contain figurative elements as well as marks and erasures.
These sculptural objects mimic, in 3 dimension, the hue and form articulated in the drawing. Manipulation of the light source and shadows further a process of refinement and integration, particularly when the result has been photographed as the final “artifact” of the process.
Objects, like a careful drawing, become democratized when considered within my photos where other materials are placed alongside the drawing.
I celebrate the studio through the use of detritus, whatever is at hand, waiting to be repurposed in the photograph. The imagery becomes a melding of abstraction and representation, always considering gravity, air and light.
Artist's Links
Website: www.sarastites.com
Elaine Defibaugh
Paint and collage
Artist’s Statement
My work is inspired from my experience in landscape. My main objective is to create a new language from Nature, Art & Science. The merging of charts from research conducted on the molecular studies of plants onto my photographs serves as an underlying story revealing another element of nature we don’t visually see. This is mysterious and intriguing to me. I’m revealing the aesthetic of a secret language, which often is only understood by those in the hard sciences.
I intend on creating a sense of time and space allowing moments of reflection much like Monet’s Water Lilies and Edward Steichen’s Flower series. I am progressing that vision and enthusiasm by merging the organic with science and introducing the visuals found in the science of plants.
I’m interested in wallpaper because of its history and how it relates to class & culture. Often wallpaper in homes are of a botanical nature. There is something comforting about the imagery because in a sense it transforms one into the natural environment, which adds the element of nostalgia and longing for exterior freedom. I’ve always been inspired by William Morris’s designs from nature. His wallpaper is classic and has the organic quality I look for when I select my printing surfaces.
Artist’s Links
artist’s website: www.elainedefibaugh.com
Paolo Ambu
ARTIST STATEMENT
Everything can inspire me; emotions, nature, light or shadows. I donʼt pursue inspiration, it just happens, and whenever the inspiration comes, itʼs inevitable. I must paint. Whether Iʼm inspired by my emotions or nature, the common thread in my work is the desire to provoke and seduce the spectator.
Over the years my work has evolved from purely representational art to include more fluid and spontaneous abstractions. Sometimes these contrasting movements merge into one; figurative meets abstraction creating a connection between the two worlds.
In my work, research and discovery are the driving force that shapes each project. As an artist, I don't set out to produce art about one subject or another, sometime the materials themselves become the inspiration for a specific piece or larger body of work. I use an assortment of materials, often found then recycled; therefore the methodology and techniques are slightly different processes in each piece.
Through this experimentation, new areas of inspiration often arise that lead to the next body of work. Over time, by cross-processing my canvases some pieces have morphed into three-dimensional works, bridging traditional painting with sculpture.
Though varied in execution, similarities between the different projects, whether in subject matter, material or technique, it results in the clearly identifiable characteristics that define my work. Each piece need not be defined by the artist, but by the strength of its very existence.
ARTIST LINKS
Website: http://paoloambu.wordpress.com/
Instagram: @mr.paolo_ambu
Nereida Garcia-Ferraz
BIO
Nereida Garcia Ferraz is a painter, photographer and video maker who graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received the following grants: Ryerson Traveling Fellowship National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1985 and in 1998, The Ford Foundation grant in 1994. Illinois Arts Council Visual Arts Fellowship in 1985, 1986, 1989 Mac Arthur Foundation Media Grant in 1994 as well as The Richard Diebenkorn TeachingFellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 – 2001.
She has taught at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The San Francisco Art Institute, and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has also been a resident/visiting artist in many Art Schools and Museums. She currently works at MOCA’s Women on the Rise Program and Miami Art Museum’s Brick X Brick Outreach Art Education Program since 2008, working with youth on issues of Urban Design and Architecture, also at the Idea Lab atBASS Art Museum in Miami. Founded The Photography Program at MACLA, San Jose California in 1998. Her works have been exhibited in numerous Museums and Galleries around the US and abroad. Among them:
Chicago Art 1945-1995 at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Paisajes de Ida y Vuelta, Museo del Chopo, Mexico City, FOCIIllinois State Museum, Museo de Arte Moderno Mexico City, Islip Museum among others.
She co-Produced and directed the award winner video-documentary Ana Mendieta: Fuego de Tierra.” The film is in the collection of MOMA, Guggenheim Museum, Yale University, San Francisco Art Institute and many other Museums and Universities around the world.
ARTIST LINKS
Website: http://nereydagarciaferraz.com/
Instagram: @nerigf
Julie Davidow
Painting
Artist’s Statement
Bio
Julie Davidow is a visual artist working in Miami. Davidow received a BS in Communications from the University of North Florida in 1986. After 10 years as a small business owner, she returned to study her first passion, art. She attended New World School of the Arts in Miami from 1996-1999 on scholarship with a focus on painting. Her work has since been exhibited at the Miami Art Museum; The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC; The Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art; The Tampa Museum of Art; the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC; Lawrimore Projects in Seattle, WA; Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; and numerous galleries nationwide.
Recent exhibitions of Davidow’s work include ArchiTECTONICS at Diana Lowenstein Gallery, Miami; Little Languages/Coded Pictures at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, NYC; Dis/Order at Artspace, Raleigh NC, and An Exchange with Sol Lewitt at Mass MOCA in North Adams, MA.
Davidow’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Miami Art Museum, the Girl’s Club Collection in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Epic Miami Hotel and many private collections. She is recipient of ARTslant's First Prize Golden Frame award, a Florida Artist Enhancement Grant, and the Leo and Raye Chestler Contemporary Visual Arts award.
Her work has been featured in ARTDistricts, The Week, New American Paintings, ArtPapers, Artdaily, The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, The Miami & Broward New Times, elsewhere. In addition, Julie is the coauthor of the book MIAMI Contemporary Artists, published by Schiffer Publishing in 2007.
Statement
My work seeks to establish order through the mapping of multiple visual cues. These cues include specific, compositional samples of the architecture of contemporary art museums and the contemporary art that is enshrined within these structures. This sampling is achieved through a diagrammatical folding and scoring of the raw canvas, creating an allegorical foundation for the structure of painting. Space, organization, pattern-seeking, discerning solution are all explored in this most recent series of paintings. With a continued underlying examination of the struggle between the natural and built environments.
Artist’s Links
website: www.juliedavidow.com
Karen Starosta-Gilinski
ARTIST STATEMENT
I work with tempting, sexy and provocative textured objects. The work involves psychology and an obscure side of analyzing personalities from the most tender and innocent to the most evil and complicated. My latest Series on canvas and sculptures are: “Luminescent Jewels”, “Still Life” 2008, “Your Toys” 2009, “Cotton Candy sculptures” 2009-2010, and now, Large Scale sculptures 2011.
Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1982, and raised in Caracas, Venezuela.
Graduated with Honors (Cum Laude) in 2005 from The Miami International University of Art & Design. Her work has been shown in Galleries, Art fairs and Art Institutions around the US, South America, Central America, & Asia (Shanghai Art Contemporary Art Fair 2010).
ARTIST LINKS
Website: http://karengilinski.com/
http://www.artslant.com/mia/artists/show/175013-karen-starosta-gilinski
http://www.arttakesmiami.com/karenstarostagilinski
Instagram: @karenstarosta
PJ Mills
Painting
Artist’s Statement
“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”
― Marcel Proust
Artist’s Links
artist’s website: www.pjmills.info
Juana Valdes
Image courtesy of Pedro Wazzan
ARTIST STATEMENT
Juana Valdes' works range from sculptural installations to hand-crafted works of fabric, photography, and video. Born in Cuba and raised in Miami, her work balances a combination of atmospheric storytelling and insistent feminist inquiry, brought to life through a thread of rural mysticism. A persistent interest in the semiotics of commercial and mass produced imagery animates and fuses the elements of her art. Her work projects the persona of an artist who is apparently part shaman, part urbane anthropologist, engagingly and allusively translating the details of her life history and wide ranging visual interests. Her works in photography and installation explore migration and transculturation directly and poetically, recreating both displacement and recollection. They elicit migration as a complex process, constructing history through a continuum that involves both the original sources of the diasporic community and the new homeland. The work reflects on the migrant’s search for utopia, questions Latino or “others” representation in mainstream America–what is ascribed, contested, granted, created--and investigates the connection between the constituent multiple cultures and nations. These serve as the raw material for her aesthetic and formal investigation.
The dynamism of her work is vested in the transition from sculpture to installation to performance, thereby shifting fields, and exchanging modes of visual recognition. Thereby, she balances such questions as “where and what is the art in art?” and “when does it separate from daily life?” With origins in a tradition of conceptual and performance art, Juana Valdes employs the sources of these traditions and their historical influences in an approach to art that exposes the way popular culture acts on art. Her work circumscribes issues of displacement and personal transmutation via the everyday object as a personal and time based reference--diachronic in orientation. These artworks bring into consciousness past histories in present day experiences.
ARTIST LINKS
Website: http://www.juanamvaldes.com/blog/
Instagram : @jvaldesart