1998 Painting
Ross Palmer Beecher
Ross Palmer Beecher brings a distinctive visual vocabulary to her work, combining painting with found and manipulated objects and materials. Drawing on folk art traditions for both subject and style, Beecher balances comfort, nostalgia and familiarity against the darker aspects of American culture.
Lauri Chambers - 1998 Fellowship Recipient
As a painter, Lauri Chambers focuses on the content of a work instead of its subject matter. Chambers says, "Content is revealed by process, to understand my work it must simply be looked at. I want the encounter to be very, very quiet." These black and white abstract compositions are formal, ordered and austere, yet hardly unemotional. They are described as road maps of contradictory impulses; formal, emotional, and above all, human.
Mary Ann Peters
At the core of Mary Ann Peters' work is the fusion between drawing and painting. Working in both intimate and large scale, she draws upon photographs, visual dictionaries, encyclopedias, music, poetry, her Lebanese heritage and travel memories. She creates works which are at once fragile and powerful.
Jeff Hansel
Jeff Hansel explores the manipulation of implied space using patterns, texture and color. His work is abstract, built upon a landscape framework. He is an original, veteran painter whose works reflect a personal purpose and vision.
Barbara Earl Thomas
Barbara Earl Thomas is an accomplished and versatile visual and literary artist. Her recent paintings are tightly composed apocalyptic scenes that complement her subject matter of violence, war, and failures of community manifested in our neighborhoods and on the nightly news.
1998 Photography
Eduardo Calderon
Many of Eduardo Calderon's works, particularly the "street" photographs, have been informed by travel to and residencies in other countries. Calderon has a unique style that is a blend of American, European, and Latin American traditions. The human dimension is always present in his work and is revealed with humor and insight.
Mary Peck
Mary Peck has for many years been a scholar and presenter of the subtleties, the sacredness, and the changing character of our most fragile landscapes. She describes her artistic method as quiet and solitary, which permits her to build a familiarity with the places that become her subjects.
Lynn Thompson
Lynn Thompson has a long history of creating art that expresses her concerns for social issues. Using photography, Thompson says she "explores subjects such as the notion of appearance as a highly variable signifier of essence, the relation of appearance to perceptions and motivations influenced by consumer culture and society, and the broad concept of individual circumstance involving issues of private space, economics status and happenstance." By allowing form and content to influence each other, Thompson arrives at multiple solutions through exploration of materials and process.
Benjamin Wilkins - 1998 Fellowship Recipient
Benjamin Wilkins is a craftsman as well as a photographer. He fashions structural and mechanical objects and elements specifically for the photographs in which they appear. By combining human forms with these objects, Wilkins creates visual metaphors while preserving ambiguity. "I don't expect that the well of creativity will solve the mysteries of my life," he says, "but I do get some sense of control over the confusion by creating these testimonials to the uncertainties."