Earl Elowsky Range
From Rule 6.3a of the Rules of Golf: The player should put an identifying mark on the ball to be played.
This year will be the only time that the Opening Day of Deer Hunting Season and the Final Round of the Masters ever fall on the same day, November 15th, due to schedule changes related to COVID-19. This provided a unique opportunity for me as it is a confluence of two major components of my identity as an average Michigander: golf and hunting culture.
I have made my “identifying mark” on these golf balls using the same type of Sharpie markers that myself, and golfers everywhere, use to mark our golf balls for competition. Utilizing that medium as the rule, I have created my own patterns as well as recreating them from my camouflage garment collection and the vernacular expression that I have experienced on vehicles, boats, and hunting blinds in my hometown.
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Guillermo Gudiño 2020
I’ve been thinking a lot about what we talked about in terms of this very specific world/pandemic situation to inform the work, and how not dealing with that would seem like avoiding it. Therefore I decided to focus on that single object that is now used in every country and by so many million people every day, how this single thing suddenly is everywhere and creates so many different reactions, problems, discussions, laws, health issues, ideas, etc… The disposable surgical mask is some kind of default already into which we can feel protected, protect or vent our frustrations. Because of that power it already has, using it as an object to look at can bring up many of the current themes that we all share through this time. One of them, which has been very important for me, is the uncertainty, which I want to highlight with this piece. The used masks inside the ziplocks belonged one to me and one to my wife, we did use them on many occasions, so they do have viruses, maybe many sorts of viruses, they could even contain corona, but we cannot be sure. Therefore, one material that’s being used in the piece is “virus”, but we don’t know which one(s), the protection from the virus is now carrying the virus, and looking at the inside of the ziplock can give us a sense of safety, since the mask is not protective anymore but it's now potentially dangerous. The two bags are shown together in the space, each one has a label, one says Berlin, the other one Chicago. The viewer can interpret that one was gathered from Chicago, the other one from Berlin. Although they both come from the same place, even the same household, the viewer is forced to compare and project their own prejudices about the two places. I do this on purpose, lying to the viewer, or pretending to, referencing another layer of the current problem: how easily the public accepts packaged and orchestrated information that is only at the surface, without researching a bit, and how easily this changes their opinions and beliefs. This push into a specific interpretation is reinforced by the material of the multiple, showing a documentary photograph of a disposed mask on the floor. There’s also some hint at quantum physics, matter and antimatter being in two different places at the same time, but that’s maybe too much for now and is not necessary to mention.
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Antonia Gurkovska Platinum
I have just descended from the mountain where I spent a few months looking for space and solitude completely losing privacy getting lost with something instead of in it such a popular escape even more so in these times of isolation. I have never been into smoking regularly or recreationally but I got really interested in growing it. The Plant. Platinum OG strain is a popular very sought after weed. It has strong medical and recreational effects due to its high content of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol). It gets you instantly but softly and gently takes you away into easiness. What does this for me is actually not smoking it but handling it. The plant look is very appealing – it has a platinum-silver shade due to its dense coat of crystal resin (very sticky) with some purple hues and bright orange hairs. Under the sun the crystals are mesmerizing. In the dark it has this herbal aroma, some earthy hints, a piece of flowering and spice, some sweetness, plus a lemon breeze. It has razor sharpness in its look and detailed texture but a tender touch and scent in contact. It is the feel of it from the look of it that I have tried to capture in a series of drawings made and remade lost and regained in the vast fields of the plantations.
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Lizz Mullis 03 HAIASI
Returning isn’t just point B, it’s the path of the line between point A and point B (or point C, or point F). Meditation isn’t meditation if you're doing what everyone tells you to do. I’m learning and hoping and pretending this is my version of meditation, when, sometimes it isn’t.
Google, “best pen for drawing."
For me it’s a tie between 02 and 03.
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Lonni Peterson A Closer Look
A series of thirteen watercolor paintings on paper examining flowers from a closer perspective. The inspiration for this comes from a love and fascination for the details our Creator has put into His Creation. My hope is that the viewer can also appreciate the awesome beauty of our world by taking a closer look.
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Nathaniel Robinson Shed
Speaking only for myself: Model and miniature is a thing I have reached for often, but I’ve had trouble making it work in real places, before my own and others’ real senses. What draws me to it undermines it -- its establishment of microcosm, which seems profound in the thinking of it, seems affected in the real. Possibly also there’s a dissonance as it edges closer to painting, my other world -- a funny taste, an offness, in seeing a sculpture fold itself into brackets. That very wrongness, that dissembling, is part of the attraction to model and miniature, true. But not every attraction should necessarily be obeyed by everyone who feels it, and I usually don’t. Still, there are ways. The ways consist in how the object’s representing and its actuality are set into relation. I thought I might be able to do that here in a 24x36 not feet but inches room. The roof should be shingled conscientiously. It could go right to the edges, maybe even a little over. It could shed but not stop a viewer’s identification of it without drawing too much attention to its efforts to do so. It could receive some help from an article shed onto the sidewalk, which I picked up and cast.
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Sean Ward Dialogue Excercises
A scribbled note found tucked away in a book owned by my grandfather:
“What does the artist do? The artist watches the outer life. He discovers the inner life. He liberates the human life. He manifests the divine life. He fulfills the supreme life.” - C.K.G., Sri Chinmay
Dialogue Exercises is a collection of art making activities. Some I have developed, others are learned from others and adapted, while others are simply found.
This isn't a self-help book to unlock creativity, it isn't a methodology to subscribe to or a life hack system to make you more productive.
It is, however, a way to navigate ambiguity, the unknown and the immaterial. The exercises provided in Dialogue Exercises invite you to explore your internal and external world in new ways.
Each Dialogue Exercise solicits fun, a loss of control and increase in chance, a low stakes uneasiness to discover something new. Use them to create a self-led, curriculum-like journey for yourself.
Consider them prompts. Interpret them in your own way. Make them your own. In the end they are yours, ours.
Dialogue Exercises is available as a print-on-demand book and as a free PDF.