Stacey Webber

The Jeweler’s Saw is part of a small series of jeweler’s tools entitled Fancywork. The Fancywork tools are made with a method called filigree, which in this case makes use of twenty-eight gauge fine silver wire. Filigree is the process of wrapping wire and soldering it together to create an intricate metal design. Fancywork: Jeweler’s Saw is ten inches long, six inches wide, and one inch deep. The handle is extremely sturdy, but the frame lacks in strength due to its size, shape and technical process. When it is picked up and handled the tool is comically, possibly alarmingly, flimsy and unstable. The Fancywork series plays on opposition: fragile-strong, decorative-minimal, masculine-feminine. The use of filigree in the series also gives the objects a history in metalwork found in poorer cultures, such as India and Pakistan. Due to its labor-intensive nature and comparably cheap material, filigree questions the importance of toil cross-culturally.

Nathan Smeltz

Round Up Ready

The Jpeg image is from my serigraph Round Up Ready, a work detailing the mechanization of agriculture. The piece is 16’x19′ on handmade artists paper. The piece is part of collaboration with my wife and UW rural sociology PhD candidate Abby Kinchy. Robo-corn is coming. Watch out!

Chele Isaac

Personal Theatre #1

Installation for video PT#1 is a preliminary design for a series of publicly placed theaters. The physical installation is a prosthetic that assists the viewer in focusing their frame of sensory experience to a very confined space. This body of work is an exploration into the notion that attention is the scarcest resource.

Jessie Eisner-Kleyle

She Were Treading on Sharp Knives and Pricking Gimlets

I am currently using color photography to explore the ideas behind the original oral fairy tales, how they changed as they became written tales, and how those tales have affected our culture, society, gender roles and expectations today. I’m using as inspiration the text from volumes of fairy tales that I had at my grandparents’ house when I was growing up and creating modern images based on the ideas behind those tales. She Were Treading on Sharp Knives and Pricking Gimlets is inspired by Hans Christen Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”, which tells the story of a woman who leaves behind home and family to pursue the love of a stranger. She will trade her tail for legs and be able to live on land, but she will lose her voice and each step she takes on her new human feet will be excruciatingly painful. Andersen tells how each night she slips away to go to the dock and soak her burning feet in the ocean, but she carries on, silently suffering for the love of a man who merely allows her adoration because she is beautiful, but does not return her love. It is a tale of sacrifice and loss, and explores the very personal decisions we all make for our loves, lives, and futures. By combining the ideas behind the canonized tales with these images, I’m trying to explore how they relate to our societal ideas of gender and relationships. I see a connection between this tale and the modern wife, the woman who sacrificed her own identity to become a possession as opposed to a partner.

Sara Schneckloth

In Haptic Recall

Mixed media 132″ x 396″ Push your insides out, turn memory into mark, let what flows through body flow on to page. Spill your guts and poke them with a stick, see what’s twitching, scoop it up, put it in a jar, screw the lid on. Put the jar on a shelf with all the other twitchy bits and notice what they have in common. See what shrivels up to nothing, see what swells and multiplies. Take notes. Repeat process. Learn something? We can only hope. How do we hold memory? How do memories hold us? Through drawing, painting, and installation, my work strives to embody moments of remembering and raise questions about the relationship between the body’s physical performance of memory and inscriptive practice. In this undertaking, I see myself as both scientist and test subject, generating and cataloguing anatomical specimens of emotional engagement. My drawings originate from deep-seated physical reactions to vivid memories. Paying attention to my own bodily state – rushes of adrenaline, tightening of muscle, knotting of the gut – as I occupy states of recall, I generate figural forms that function as markers, or containers, of lived experience. My figures are organic and visceral, imagined biologies alluding to an interior dissected and penetrated. Taking an analytic step back, I arrange, classify, and connect, seeking systems of thought, anatomies of experience.

Lisa Fraker

Tara Mathison

Spring Break Speedos 2006

Whether you’re currently a co-ed or not, Spring Break Culture mentality has permeated our culture so much so that we continue to act like Spring Break participants or Girls Gone Wild spectators long after our adolescent years are over. Movies, books and cable channels have continued to hone this once high school tradition into a booming economy that keeps remaining gender roles & stereotypes intact, as well as creating new social constructs. Spring Break Speedos 2006 was a dialogue on what Spring Break Culture is & ultimately how it affects our society as a whole. But WHY talk about art when you can have FUN?! PARTY ON!!! For more information, please visit: 

www.houseofboris.org

Amy Chaloupke

Waterways

This piece is one variation in a series of nine small-scale aqueduct forms affixed to drinking fountains and sinks. Situated in various out- of-the-way locations, the forms act as plots on the map of my own personal geography. The series, entitled “Waterways” seeks to enliven those spaces in between point a and point b by appearing in various sites without permission, or prior explanation. This particular example was installed in the Botany building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. It acts to function in its normal way: to provide water to the intended drinker, and adds a new function to the space by allowing a participant to water the existing plant located near the water fountain as they quench their own thirst. The aqueduct structure is made of sautered brass and is approximately 36 inches high by 86 inches in length.

Teresa Getty

It Turns a Sandwich into a Banquet

Charcoal, ink, acrylic, and pencil on arches hot press paper 45″ x 85″

Stacey Heim

Blue Green Blue Green Blue

The 3″x10″ mixed media drawing floats in the center of a white 22″x30″ sheet of Rives BFK. This drawing is from a series of four that explores transparency, pattern, repetition, and layers. Science and my environment are important influences and I am concerned with developing and building upon a vocabulary of marks in my work. I enjoy letting the image form intuitively while responding to smells, textures and the visual qualities of my mediums. In Blue Green Blue Green Blue, several lines of the same marks are repeated several times and layered in different drawing mediums and colors. The lines overlap, but are not registered which reveal the effects of the texture and color combinations. The bottom layers peek through the to the top and the darker, more bold top layers diffuse some of the bright blues, green and yellows from beneath. Beeswax is arbitrarily added as a top layer over the whole image and lends its own color and diffusion to the layers sealed below it’s waxy surface.

Megan Katz

Recording Artists

Multimedia Installation/Performance In this piece, three typists, installed on scaffolding five feet above the rest of the exhibition, listened to the visitors’ chatter through headsets fed by a microphone planted in the room. Each typist, listening to the same input, was to type exactly what he/she heard, and the three outputs were projected side by side on the wall for the audience to read and compare in another part of the gallery.

Ba Harrington

Dowager

36′ x 45″ x 19″ Quartersawn red oak, analine dye, yeast, linseed oil This piece is part of a series of works based on a late seventeenth century dowry chest from Hadley, MA. I am exploring the idea of dowry, thinking of it in terms of what one brings to a relationship. I am using the given form as a constant through which to physically explore this idea. I am building consecutive ‘dowagers’ based on things revealed by my altering of the structure of the original seventeenth century chest. In this first Dowager, I left the panels out of the part of the chest that defines the storage case, inviting the viewer to enter the interior space of the furniture.