Exhibition Views

http://krause.uoregon.edu/2011/04/19/materiality-a-craft-exhibition/

Materiality is an exhibition curated by Liz Glass and Lyndsay Rice, showcasing work from the California College of the Arts and the University of Oregon. Conceived out of an interest to investigate the uses of craft in these two communities, Materiality brings together works in a multitude of materals. 

The works in Materiality reflect the expansive use of craft materials and methods to create expressive objects. Usually associated with the dialogue of “use,” these works demonstrate the ability of craft to transcend function, and the power of the materials at conveying concepts. Some of the works build their own mythology, while others activate pre-existing cultural tropes; some are engaged, primarily, with examining the nature of their own material, and others use these media as a means to an end. The works inMateriality take up many themes personal and cultural themes, including the hiddenness of history, the collision of cultural forms, and the experience of sound.

Max Esplin

 There is power in ritual. This is highly important in the Mormon religion, as well as in the nighttime soap dramas on television. Every week the Sacrament is served, and sins can be washed away. Every week, Criminal Minds is able to locate a serial killer or arsonist through some minute detail, and the world is better until the next episode. I see a systematized obsession starting to take place in my practice embodied in the ritual of making. I make these objects in order to reflect the objects I have seen the Society use. But, my resources are limited and I can’t remake them perfectly accurate. Through ritual, these obviously hand-made objects become accurate stand-ins for what I have seen. Common craft store materials are invested with magic to become “art”. A fetish is an object regarded with awe as being the embodiment or habitation of a potent spirit or as having magical potency.[1] My work is my fetish.

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[1] fetish. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fetish (accessed: April 05, 2011).

Alex Hernandez

I create interventions on craft by embroidering on top of objects originally used as decorative substance around the home. In doing so, I bring themes of darkness out into the light. Subjects such as domestic abuse, substance abuse, violence, gender roles, alternative lifestyles, oppression, and other subjects often ignored in a household setting. I use my own history to create motifs to enhance objects and materials that were once useful in homes, but now discarded, forgotten or lost.

Alida Bevirt

Fur neck piece I

Investigation of opulence inherently possessed within fur. The silhouette is a mutating mass of decoration. The direction of the hair gives the sense of hackles raised, as this adornment is emotive to the wearer. The zippers act to show cutting and mending.

Robert Mertens

R. Mertens

SoniCraft Manifesto

SoniCraft is the combination and comparison of similar tactile, structural, spacial and rhythmic qualities sound and fibers can haptically manifest. In other words, the physical perceptual qualities produced by soundwaves, and material textures. Developed and organized by R. Mertens, this series combines performance, fibers techniques and sound installations. These works utilizes public participation as a shared activation of space and memory.

SoniCraft identifies similar actions within fibers and sound such as: spinning, splicing, weaving, patching, sampling, looping, clipping and gating, I intend to give the viewer the opportunity to discover these tactual attributes through a sense of “performance”. This performance can be thought of as: exploring the space around my installations, contributing to the installation via taught craft, or intervening into the set pattern to reconstruct the installation.

SoniCraft allows the audience to explore the shifting tactile traits of the sonic or fibrous materials and gives the audience an opportunity to choreograph their own “performance” experience. Through this “performed” contribution they help to change or modify the installation, which alters other interpretations of the viewing experience.  Similarly, allowing the audience to interact and re-pattern/organize the installation; this offers a perpetual re-experiencing of the installations.

Carlos Ramirez

 

Carlos Ramirez

Crushing Nickels Into Quarters

In my series of work, Crushing Nickels Into Quarters, I draw from imagery of 1980s video games, Meso-American architecture, and Minimalism to make sculptural work in reference to times of transition and change. Using clay, I give material to the immaterial by creating monuments to the signposts in my life. Through my work, I seek to connect to others who have had similar feelings arise out of experiences of great upheaval and change.

Jake Ziemann

Jake Ziemann

(Wel)Come Home

My work mirrors the sickly, sweet qualities of growing up in rural Iowa—where animals run fervent, so much so that they enter the home through the means of décor and adornment.  The banality of death is ever-present within the cabin as well as outdoors.  I use the notion of the trophy as a supplanted object, an uncanny aspect adding to the simulacra of the country home, symbolizing an underlying tone of longing and ritual.  Precariously hovering between hunting machismo and domesticity, I suggest a personal past laced in ambivalence—one that questions the authenticity of experience as well as fabrication of a regional identity.

Meghan Urback

Meghan Urback

Wool Studies

I work with cloth, thread and paper to record memory, text, and meditative rhythms. I choose a muted color palette to highlight complex texture. Dangling threads and topographic lines are repeated motifs in my work. I am drawn to book-like forms and often juxtapose circular abstract shapes with rectangular grids. I also create installations made of fragments which take on organic forms.

Both form and process are important in my work: I value handcraft and use labor-intensive techniques such as quilting and stitching both for the meditation they offer and the traditions they carry. I use fiber because it is a material rich in metaphor: society is often described as a fabric, woven or knit together by the thread of social relations. Specifically, I use fiber to address family history, personal identity, and the cultural and personal memories tied up in hours spent knitting, stringing, or sewing.
I feel kinship with contemporary artists who use handcraft in a time of mass manufacturing and digital technology and am drawn towards discussions of how the nature of handwork empowers makers and their local communities. In using new materials, incorporating text and using fiber as a method of discussing personal and cultural narratives, my intention is to extend the boundaries of traditional textiles.

Courtney Kemp

Courtney Kemp

Untitled

I investigate the formal, social, and utilitarian implication of the domestic object, focusing on the display vessel as context of cultural hierarchies. The vessels I create are freed from the expectation of utility, their forms merely hint to the implied function long since lost through material shift and abstractions of scale.  Domestic interior structures, such as the mantle or the banister spindle, abstract and replicate in the space of the vessel, creating context for the items to reside and utilize the language of display to speak to hierarchy. I aim to question the purpose of the display vessel in both the contemporary and historic home; if removed of surface decoration or shifted to nontraditional materials, do formal aspects of the display object exude their implicit value? Furthermore, how do contemporary living and the over-accessibility of disposable objects influence our relation to display items in the home? My forms become at once hybridized and pared down, replacing decoration and valuable material with found object, buffed surfaces, and repaired inconsistencies.

Aubrey Hillman

Aubrey Hillman

Untitled 

I continue to be drawn to functional spaces within our everyday environments, and the potential which exists within monotony. In a sense the word graffiti comes to mind though ultimately I hope to keep my tags discrete. I have been interested in altering the blank (such as drain covers, and other gridded hardware) by incorporating decoration. A consistent interest of mine is the potential of the absurd infiltrating our everyday, especially in unexpected ways. There is imagery in the form of decor and patterning imbedded in our functional environments and often the content of that imagery is not considered too its fullest potential.

My enjoyment in creating work comes mostly in the physical making. The actual construction seems to be the calm within the storm. Though I would not hold myself specifically to metal as my medium, it continues to keep my interest through its formal potential and challenges and as a result, the medium informs the content within my work.  

Bean Gilsdorf

Bean Gilsdorf

Historical accounts often unfold gracefully in the "one damn thing after another" fashion of conventional timelines; yet the actual events on which they are based overlap, pile up, obscure, and distort.  The study of history may be a search for clarity, but in the end what we have is less of a tidy explanation than a melee of names, dates, and costumes, with some blood splashed around for effect.  Perhaps the most trenchant commentary on history comes from Ambrose Bierce, who describes it as, "…an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

Recently I've been using imagery from the Civil War as a way to approach the glut of information that complicates a clear view of the past.  The Civil War was the first conflict to be documented by traditional forms such as printing and painting, and also by the emerging technology of photography.  As such, it's the first war to explicitly blend fact and fiction--tall tales, first-person stories and propaganda all manufactured and presented as the true account.  The images I've used are taken from the pages of a popular mass-market series.  They provide an allegory for the construction of history: a constant friction between the unknowability of the past and the desire to shape foolishness and tragedy into heroism and glory.

Zoe Sargent

Zoe Sargent

Fade

My current inquiry is into the tension between time, labor, and the value that can be assigned to objects based on how much effort is expended on them. I am investigating the acts of repetition and manipulation as means to create importance and ownership otherwise static or minor objects. While embracing the underlying traditions of textiles, I look for ways to juxtapose conventional techniques with unexpected forms.

Lily Lee

Lily Lee

Untitled

Through processes of labor, embellishment, and ornamentation, I orchestrate moments of cultural collision.  The wreckage of these crashes function as paradigms to bring the absurdities of everyday life into focus.  Pulling from disparate yet ordinary, trashy, and nearly vulgar sources, my work generates fantastical conceptions within the banal and anonymous. Through the proliferation of decoration I accentuate yet attenuate the idiosyncratic nature of everyday visual signifiers. 

Sarah Nance

Sarah Nance

untitled (composite maps); 2011

The composite road maps are pieced together based on areas of similarity in the patterning of the extracted networks. Gravity’s pull distorts the work and causes it to drape like fabric. It also visually resembles the venous systems of the internal human body as well as the external roads of our environments. I find richness in relating the “other,” our environment, to what is most intimately ourselves; a more integrated view of the self within the world may well foster a personal sense of responsibility for those surroundings. This is crucial in an age of technologies and media that continually distance us from the real.