Arden Bender Browning
Neatly organized frozen moments are not real. Experience is messy: overlapping reflections, memories clouding the present muddled by competing background noises. Theurban environment is a vast sea of fluctuating boundaries arguing claim to the demarcation of space as “wild”, “inhabited”, “private”, “public”, “forbidden”, and “open”. I make sprawling wall-sized and room-sized paintings on Tyvek as a direct response to this environment.
My imagery is derived from actual and virtual meandering throughout fringe neighborhoods within Philadelphia. Google maps’ street views counter my real experiences of place by allowing me to jump through time and space. My fleeting impressions of spaces correlate with the inherent distortions of Google’s low resolution snapshots of fluctuating, blurred spaces. Similar to the experience of locating one’s orientation by coming to the surface when snorkeling, I often find myself lost and need to zoom out of a street view to an aerial view for navigation. No matter how closely I zoom in on a space, the truest details are inaccessible...similar to the gap between public and private space in actual experience.
Rachel Bomze
What’s in a mark? The process of painting lends itself to placing a trace or mark on the canvas and then reacting to that. As a process, I begin with a structure. The structure is a gestural grid that continues to be layered. There are no direct representational images in mind when I begin a painting, just the experience of placing marks on a page. I see painting as mark making, where my drawings become meshed into paintings. No longer in my mind is there a separation between the two. I am simply leaving a mark on the canvas.
I am constantly thinking about how a trace is a mark left behind by something that has passed. Upon closer inspection, there is immediacy in my work as seen through rubbings, printing and using textural elements. I think of these marks as a memory of what was used in making the marks, but not literally having the mark-maker in the piece itself. However, string has become that mark-maker which is directly referred to on the canvas, or indirectly through the string’s own path. Instead of simply making the mark in my paintings through a gestural line, the string has become that lyrical line that I can physically move around and leave it’s trace imbedded in the surface forever.
Jessica Demcsak
Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination. -Gaston Bachelard
When experiencing the world, one cannot overlook the structures that surround us and give us shelter. The house itself is our first world. Structures house our dreams, memories, secrets and failures. Each space and corner represents a time in our lives. Aged structures retain a history of the experiences and thoughts of its inhabitants. Memories rub off the insides and outsides of the spaces that exist and become a part of us, whether it is our memories of a similar place or the building’s memories of other inhabitants.
Architecture is like a man made garden with buildings sprouting up instead of flowers, their overcrowding like weeds in our environment. It is a love hate relationship between the necessity of shelter and the taking away of space. I am inspired by its dichotomy of beauty and ugliness, necessary protection and excessive luxury.
When visiting a place, I document my experience with photographs. I photograph curious spaces and ones which have history. I try to pare down the intricate decorative elements and shapes which speak the most of a place. I leave the silhouettes of the new structures and instill them with my own thoughts and memories. The impression that is left acknowledges the experience.
My paintings are object like. They reference wood boxes and protrude off the wall more than a painting on canvas. Because of their small scale, the “boxes” have a precious quality, which is increased by the way they are created. Small objects create a sense of nostalgia, which I feel while I am painting them.
I place the paintings in my lap in close proximity to my body. The layering of memories, in addition to transparent and opaque painted layers, illustrates the wisps of thought that arise when remembering a specific location. Painting in such a devoted way, will hopefully reflect the closeness of the viewer’s gaze. The idea that the viewer will share the same space as I while creating the painting is fascinating. Sharing an experience through an object relates to the idea of memories contained in a space. The process of constructing the “boxes” and then painting them is vital to me.
We live in a world where structures are like weeds overtaking a garden. However, sometimes it is the overlooked weeds that are the most fascinating of all.
Julianna Foster
My most recent work includes a series of images that represent distinct narratives; which are informed for the most part by my interest in cinema and its relationship to photography. The selected work reflects an ongoing investigation into the ways that the photographic image can portray a psychological relationship between the characters in each image or series of images and of course between the viewer and the subject. By exploring how the individual image can transcend its own limits, and by association, provide the opportunity for a pictorial narrative to unfold I hope that each story forms something of a larger narrative that continues to reveal itself in a variety of forms, be it a photograph, book or video. All of which rely on the fundamentals of narrative to examine and comment on the human experience.
Julianna Foster lives in Philadelphia and teaches at The University of the Arts, Media Arts Department, where she received her Master’s of Fine Art in Book Arts and Printmaking in 2006. She is a member of Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA and has been a member of InLiquid since 2003.
Lee Lippman
From the beginning it has always been the process involved in painting that has been the driving force in my work: a sensuous process that initiates a non-verbal dialog between the canvas and the painter: a dialog that continues through the entire process in which the canvas continually informs the artist until the work is completed. For this dialog to take place there needs to be a stimulus, an “inspiration” For some it is internal,-and for others it is external. For me it is both.
Since having lived for many years in the mountains of Southern Mexico my work has been responsive to the landscape that surrounds me: to the relationship of sky to the land below, to the fact of the infinity of space and the finite quality of visual information of the land below. The land and what is upon It have become the visual informant that provide the impetus to begin the process: the application of color, the scraping, the changing, and the constant reworking until the canvas becomes a painting: a combination of individual marks color and composition that have become a whole and the dialog has been resolved.
What is painting? What is it we are looking at? Is it a picture of something external or a diagram of the thought process that made it? How do I explain why I put the black line across the red area the white where it is. It is difficult to understand, but, again, the canvas tells me where and what it needs.
Sarah Zwerling
I love the way when you are walking down the street and see something so beautiful, even if it is as small as a fallen leaf, that it stops you in your tracks and burns into your memory a unique feeling from that moment. My digital prints are collages each based on a photograph that captures an emotional connection to a specific place. By both adding color and hand cut images of paper flowers and birds and selectively subtracting superfluous details of the original photograph, I am able to create an image that is my re-imaged memory of a particular place. I want to create evocative images inspired by my environment and provide an unexpected emotional experience.
