2000 Painting
George Chacona
George Chacona works in a combination of photography, printmaking and painting. Often, his images, diagrams and text are photo-etched onto marble, copper, or other materials and then painted and patinated to produce deep, rich surfaces. Chacona’s source material comes from the mythologies of the ancient Mediterranean world, historical eroticism, scientific studies of human sexuality and speculations on the origins of the cosmos, and his more recent work, movie and pop clips. His explorations of nature’s calamities and images are metaphors for the human condition.
Deborah Mersky
Deborah Mersky describes her work as "the result of specific investigation and questions: how to intertwine observed and invented images from the natural world; how to make repeated pattern imagery feel metaphoric and compelling, and still a little hypnotic?" Her work transmits elements of contact between humanity and nature and comments on the tension between them. Mersky states, "I want paintings to feel inviting but also awkward and unresolved. That awkwardness is inherent and essential."
Mary Ann Peters - 2000 Fellowship Recipient
"Painting is the foundation for my work, be it studio pieces or public projects or installations. Painting carries both the weight and wisdom of history which is a silent challenge that I carry with me." Peters experiments with fragmented forms and abstracted geometry and employed historical precedence in her art. Sometimes powerful and at other times quiet and contemplative, her images integrate architecture as well as ancient and non-western art forms.
Liza von Rosenstiel
"My paintings seem simple. The simplest sentences, in my life, have been the most powerful. She’s dead? Will you marry me? I’m leaving. You won. Simple sentences carry a huge subtext and instantly create new paths, wanted or unwanted. My goal in painting is to create a seemingly simple narrative painting where the viewer wonders which way an action or a momentary pause will go. I use animals, objects and humans as stand-ins for the foibles of human nature."
2000 Sculpture
Lita Batho
"The construction of my work often incorporates repetitive techniques, such as welding small pieces to create one larger form. My use of steel has served as a strong framework on which to build more elaborate works and ideas. Using basic and accessible forms such as the figure, tools, and cages, I allude to less concrete issues such as: the body within our technologically advanced society, the experience of physical labor, the fragility of our bodies, or the difference between inside and outside."
Claudia Fitch - 2000 Fellowship Recipient
"My work in drawing and sculpture plays with images from popular cultural expression such as topiary hedges, 1950s hairdos, decorative statuary, display fixtures, and clothing. The seemingly banal decorative surfaces of such everyday images pose a fascination for me: they present a broadly understood but deeply familiar visual trope open to be re-drawn, re-invented, re-posed, re-lived. Rigid cultural codes shift to fluid sub-conscious matter. Materials that hold very specific cultural associations and expected social use are irresistible subjects for my work."
Patrick Holderfield
In recent years, Holderfield’s primary ideas have addressed the relationships and associations between organism and environment. He has continued to play a complex game with the basic vocabulary of sculpture using both created and found objects, referencing the erotics of danger, tolerances and perfection. Holderfield says that "as an artist I am engaged with the creative and imaginative metaphor for these relationships. The materials and objects I choose develop associative links between the work of art, the viewer, and the conceptual intent."
Helen Lessick
"I am an artist of ideas, obsessed with the pleasure of seeing. Diverse in form, medium, and venue, the constancy of my work is exploration. Through the power and flexibility of visual phenomena I examine:
• representation: how a thing is re-seen through simplicity and context,
• material: the necessary and potent link between idea and manifestation,
• site: the influence of place on content, perspective and association,
• access: the physical, visual and conceptual paths to internal observations, and
• time: an agent of change in art and in personal perception.
I am an artist of ideas, obsessed by the joy of cogitation."