Chalet Comellas-Baker on the inspiration for “The Lonesome Cut Up”:
I just watched this really cool documentary, you know, I'm living in Nashville now, so I had to watch that country music Ken Burns deal. So I was thinking about Hank Williams senior. And he wrote this song and the whippoorwill... he mentions the whippoorwill. I had already been looking up how the whippoorwill have been declining in population over the past, like from when he wrote it. This is what I looked up—from 1949 to present. What are the populations, the numbers for the whippoorwill? And they have been in steady decline. So I told him I was like, there's a project here, so I want to do something with this. But I'm not really sure what. One thing I was thinking about was I'll take the lyrics and I'll do this cutup technique. It's something that he used to do. It's something that David Bowie used to do. It's something a lot of musicians did. You just take it and the structure of it inspires the next iteration.
Read MoreAlice Stone-Collins on the process of working with cut paper:
It's the same thing I guess as if you were working on a painting and you knew it needed something and you would have to either rub something out and repaint on top of it. I guess the only difference is is I'm just doing it with with cut paper. I also kind of like building them from the ground up. Like I like the concept of painting that street with all those deer and seeing what it looked like before all the deer were put down. Any type of interior space —like again the bed and the bunnies— I like seeing the empty room just with the floorboards and then gluing the bed down. Like it's almost like you're like going through the process of adding fur(niture)— …It makes me feel a closer connection to the pieces and the places that I'm recreating.
Read MoreAs a mold maker/caster I'm always thinking about sequences of objects and thinking about repetition of objects and the arrangement of things in a way that one object relates to another has been important to me for a long time, I think. So, I think objects all offer individually something to a conversation, but it's often as a collective. They come to be sort of greater than the sum of their parts in terms of conceptually what it could mean. So in this case the fragments are important I think to me in terms of communicating fragility—even sort of an ephemeral quality. There's maybe a question in these objects about if they're finished or if they've been broken. You know, the thing about clay—and actually glass is similar, textiles is similar—the material has a memory. It sort of has a sense of... it carries with it what's been done.
Read MoreMeredith Lynn on collaboration:
Actually something that I really appreciate about working with Katie is that—seeing her work through ideas and problems in her own work and knowing that when she calls me and says “I think that you need to reexamine this idea”—knowing that she is also pushing herself through those same challenging and difficult conversations in her own work and then knowing that I can be open and vulnerable to those criticisms that she’s bringing to me because I know that she’s also bringing that to her own work. I think that’s something that we all need to strive for… is to be willing to have your mind changed. Not about everything certainly— I think we have to have certain ethics and ideas that we hold fast to—but being willing to put up any of your ideas to scrutiny, I think is really important.
Read MoreJenny Fine on her photographic series “The Saddest Day”:
They had invested all of their savings in becoming farmers…They had gotten a load of, I think they call them guilts… from some farmer…One of those pigs were sick and so it introduced …dysentery into all the pigs and they had to all be slaughtered on the same day …Basically it devastated my family. And so I was really interested in that narrative of my father and my uncle as young people having to slaughter 100 pigs or whatever all in the same day.
And that they often referred to that story as the saddest day. And so, we went to the farm to really kind of reenact that and that was just sort of the narrative I wanted to reenact. I wasn’t really sure what was gonna happen because I knew that no matter what you do— this performance for the camera— no matter how much you prepare, that you’re always at the mercy of the moment.
And I was using my twin lens Mamiya camera— which you don’t look straight forward. You actually look down into the camera. And so I wasn’t actually facing this narrative —my family— straight on. We were in the landscape of the farm and I’m looking through this square viewfinder straight down. The landscape in a way became the stage. And as they were moving in and out of the frame they were coming on and off stage. And It became really this theatrical reenactment or attempt to reenact the saddest day.
Read MoreHannah Tarr on how Instagram has affected her process:
I’ve deleted the app. I’ve like told myself I’m not allowed to go on it. It just makes me sad. …
I’ve found that I see other people’s works sneaking into mine and I see mine sneaking into others that follow me too much lately. And I’m wanting to kind of be more secretive and under wraps at least until I have enough that I feel like I’m ready to show, or I have the opportunity to show a bunch of work. And then it’s unleashed and it’s gonna wow everyone and be awesome…
But it’s weird. I think I look at things differently. I measure up myself differently and my own work differently. I think about the product instead of the process a lot more. Because I’m just seeing these images; I’m seeing so many images. ... And I’m like “Oh this is good” and “I like this painting”… But I don’t think about what it is that gives me the subtle joys. Why I love painting is surprising myself and making little jokes in my head and having fun with kind of what turns up. And Instead when I’m like “Oh my painting looks like this” or “it needs to be this”— I get too focused on the end result. And I think that that’s a product of looking at too much right now, but not in person…
Read MoreTatiana Veneruso on how she became a curator:
The end of 2011 was the Occupy movement. And at the time I was working for this like corporate advertising agency and hating it so much... so I was definitely feeling the sentiment of that movement, and I thought, well how can I help? ... And so I thought, oh, I'll do an art show...but I'd never curated a show before, so I didn't know really how to go about that.
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