Joyce Billet

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am interested in nature, raising awareness of destruction, absence and decay through the tension that exist between the analog and the digital. While the works start out painted by hand, the final pieces are computed, digital works. There is complexity in the technical process. Through programmatic steps, I hand paint monochromatic brushstrokes on canvas, and then translate them into a computer-generated format so that they can be laser-cut and etched. Although the drawing is programmed, there is a space between the initial painting and the way it materializes itself on the chosen surface allowing each piece to be unique. Through tenacious curiosity the works lie between an essence of painting and sculpture, between wood and paper. The dialogue begins here by questioning the material, the process, and the purpose. In translating the treatment of material from traditional approaches to their digital counterparts there is tension that invites conflict.  Cutting, carving and perforating surfaces through burning with a laser cutter reveals stress and collaboration between tradition and evolution. Following a strong craft tradition, wood and its byproducts are the main materials used in my work. The disposition of a material to be etched, cut, malleable, and organic, ties to nature from beginning to end, involving my hand and tools, challenging the evolution that wood has come to have. I am interested in duality: positive and negative forms, presence and absence, darkness and light. Just as nature has textures, debris, deposits and layered materials I aim to evoke the dialogue between the natural and the digital. This piece raises awareness of destruction and evokes nature with its positive and negative forms. The brushstrokes are laser etched to create a dimensional surface that reveals stress and collaboration between tradition and evolution.

BIO

Joyce Billet is a practicing artist that merges her forward-looking technical expertise with conceptual ideas. Her background in architecture has influence on her work which plays with materials and scale to mix the sensations of painting and sculpture. She explores the tensions and relationships, between the natural and the artificial, between the unique and the mass produced, between tradition and progress. She has been selected to participate in group shows juried by curators such as Maurizio Pellegrin, Heather Darcy Bhandari and Margaret Carrigan. In 2019, she was picked by a committee of art world experts as one of 130 talented independent and emerging artists to participate in The Other Art Fair in Brooklyn. Billet graduated with a Bachelor’s in Architecture from Pratt Institute and in 2010 she received a Master of Science degree in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University. Billet worked at firms such as Norman Foster in London and Studio Daniel Libeskind in New York. She then went on to apply her artistic skills as an in-house architectural designer at Chanel. Billet is a French-American artist who currently lives and works in the US.

ARTIST LINKS

Website:   www.joycebillet.com

Instagram: @_j_b_c/  

David Rohn

BIO

David Rohn grew up in  New Jersey and Long Island, suburbs of NYC  and studied art and urbanism at Colgate University and NYU, and later Architecture at Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He worked in NYC in Architecture and Design where he  began painting in the early 1980’s, later returning to Paris in ’89 where he continued to paint and exhibit at Galerie Julien Pellat, Le Salon de Montrouge. La Masse des Beaux Arts, Paris. In 1992 he moved to Miami where he also started writing about art, exhibiting at Bianca Lanza, and later Carol Jazzar Contemporary, developing socially-reflective and interactive installation and performative art  projects, from which his  (self)-Portraiture series’ emerged in 2008. And later, street figures beginning in 2017, after his Miami gallery closed. He has exhibited and been reviewed widely in South Florida over the past 25 years, including virtually all the local / regional museums, alternative spaces and galleries, and publications. He has also exhibited occaisionally in New York, LA and Berlin. More recently his (self) portraiture has morphed into constructions using cast-off / found objects, photography, and painting, intended to reflect contemporary ’throw-away’culture and fatal consumerism. His work has been includes, and widely reviewed at many galleries and museums in S. Florida, New York and L.A.  and continues performative collaborative projects individually,and with Partner Danilo de La Torre, (and other collaborators) under the collab LaboMamo (www.labomamo.com), and his own self-portrait-based, unofficial public art projects.

ARTIST LINKS

Website:    www.davidrohn.net

Instagram: @davidrohn

Gallery:    www.cjazzart.net    

Lori Nozick

ARTIST STATEMENT

My art is tactile and deeply referential; materials of the primal earth, structures we create and discard, reclaimed and existing outside a fixed moment.  A tension and balance between security and impermanence echo, offering hidden narratives and exposed layers, examining ongoing cycles of cohesion and disintegration.  This defines the basis of much of my temporal, site-specific sculpture installations. Works seem solid yet permeable, ancient and transient, capturing the dynamics of social and environmental change, informed by archaeology, myths and scientific conditions. My wall reliefs reflect this quite literally in their raw construction.

Art historian and critic Robert C. Morgan has written, “…structure signifies an inventory of shapes and elements that pull together even as they move in different directions…”

My artwork investigates the demarcation of real and imposed boundaries.  Deeply resonant, walls provide protection, engender separation, imprisonment, or open for freedom. Utilizing nautical, geological, and historic maps underline and symbolize those boundaries, visual markers with collage and drawing to evoke a sense of place.  The archetypal images and forms of my work, the place or site, function as a repository of individual and collective moments and memory, forming a visceral bridge to experience a blending of time-frames, real and imagined.  

BIO

Lori Nozick was born in the northeast US,  and lived in New York for 25 years.  She is currently living in Miami Beach. Ms. Nozick holds a BFA from Philadelphia College of Art, and an MFA from Pratt Institute.  The artist has exhibited her work in galleries and museums, done site-specific installations, both temporary and permanent, interior and exterior,  been awarded public art commissions, and has received international, national, state, and foundation grants and fellowships for her work, including the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Emergency Grant.

Ms. Nozick was in a traumatic accident two months before the virus hit, and during this time, she has produced over 40 artworks, a series called “the Quarantine Collages”. The artist was invited to the residency, “Proyecto En Sitio 2nd Edition”, in November 2018 at La Coyotera Taller Estudio, Umecuaro, Michoacan State, Mexico, creating “Masts and Anchors”, a site-specific sculpture/earthworks with all local and natural materials.  Dirt and cement were mixed by my feet on the site and cast into earth-dug molds, along with local stone and logs. Ms. Nozick created an installation of walls at RAW/Art Basel Miami 2017, a light installation for the Bass Museum Contemporary Art In Unexpected Places in 2015 and invited to do a Featured Project at SCOPE Miami 2014, an interactive monumental sculpture with reclaimed architectural elements, colored acrylic panels, and an 8’ curved staircase. The artist’s public art commission , “Pensacola Beacons”, sponsored by the FL Art in State Buildings Programs, is a series of 3 light beacons at the UWF College of Business Plaza,  Pensacola, FL.  Ms. Nozick was honored in 2006 for “Luce Et Vita Universae”, selected as one of the Best Public Art Projects of the Year by the Americans For the Art Public Art Review, commissioned by the NYC % For Art, Public Art In Public School/SITES Program, and the School Construction Authority. A photo interview in Sculpture Magazine, "The Girl Who Liked to Smell Dirt", was published in the January-February 2012 issue.  Ms. Nozick had a solo exhibition of her drawings and sculpture at berlin art  scouts Gallery in Berlin, Germany in September 2010 and gave a lecture at the US Embassy in Berlin.  In recent exhibitions and installations, the artist has used reclaimed architectural elements and wood, solar energy and LED lighting, salt blocks, mud pigments, tar, dirt, charcoal burnt wood, sound and moving water as elements in her work, with increasing consciousness of renewable sources in art. Ms. Nozick has taught and lectured at William Patterson University, Pratt Institute, and the American University in Corciano, Italy.  She was an Adjunct Professor at MDC and an Artist in Residence with Perez Art Museum Miami, Institute of Contemporary Art/Miami, Arts4Learning Program, and done private mentoring and portfolio preparation, as well as arts workshops and lectures. She also has a design business doing decorative and unique surfaces for residential and public spaces, as well as specialized items, including unique map drawings, collages, working with business, museums, designers, and real estate developers.

ARTIST LINKS

Website: www.lorinozick.com  

Instagram: @lorinozick

Gallery links: www.berlinartscouts.de