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I am interested in making paintings in an analog, physical sense. I believe that painting is a visual language made up of thinking, seeing and making. I build my paintings employing a process of pouring acrylic paint onto sheets of glass. Once the shapes have solidified and acquired elasticity, they are peeled off and collaged into larger compositions. These collaged constructions create a certain mimetic relationship between the visual information depicted and the processes in which they are made. This process-based painting allows me to explore how something is made and how it relates to having been observed and translated into paint.
With my current body of work, I have been interested in the lessons learned from failure. The paintings toggle between the object-ness of sculpture and the vast canon of painting’s visual language. My paintings are informed by fragments of urban landscape and culture that are found in the everyday. Still lives and landscapes that intervene into totemic monuments, set in precarious settings. The impossible idea of mending a vase with stickers, packing and duct tape. Most of these concerns arise from the unease of our current political and environmental predicament. I’m interested in the temporally of these homemade architectural structures, and the impermanence of their fragility and precarious nature. About what they say of our current consumer culture.
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I am a woodcut artist and printmaker, making woodblock prints inspired by the landscapes, creatures, and human enterprises of our world. While Artist- in-Residence at Homestead National Monument of America in Beatrice, Nebraska, I created these five multicolor relief woodcuts that tell the story of homesteading: Native Life, Plowing the Prairie, Putting Up Hay, One Room School, and Industrial Farming. Each is 7 by 9 inches in size, made using one block by reduction and printed by hand on Shin Torinoko White paper.
Homesteading under the Act of 1862 changed the face of the U.S. across the next 114 years, settling 10% of our land and bringing about an agricultural revolution, while making land ownership possible not only for male citizens but also for women, African-Americans and immigrants from all over the world, all
to the loss of Native Americans. These courageous pioneers received 160 acres and “proved it up” by building a home and farming there for five years before they could receive their “patent” and claim it as their own.
I enjoy the way my art engages me in life in our world, challenging my skills as I carve and print color by color, layer by layer. What unfolds is far beyond me as others see what I have done and find there something of their own experience. Life in our time, too, demands hardy souls who are willing to move into unknown territories and establish new ways of living through adventures of their own.
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Gregg Bruff has created artwork from childhood, working in pen/ink, pencil, watercolor and since 2005, oil. His paintings reflect the natural and cultural history of the Upper Peninsula – working to convey a sense of place. Painting subjects throughout the seasons, he focuses on seemingly common things – old barns, wetlands, forests, and enjoys painting maritime scenes of the region.
Gregg is an avid Great Lakes sailor, reader, cross-country skier, motorcyclist, enjoying a variety of outdoor activities. He has written for numerous publications, most recently Good Old Boat magazine. He is a former National Park Service ranger, retiring after 37 years, 25 of which was spent at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Other postings included St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, on the Inyo and Mark Twain National Forests, and at Ozark National Scenic Riverways.
He lives in Escanaba, MI and occasionally works at Clear Lake Education Center where his wife Mimi is the Director and Program Manager.
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This piece combines and appropriates clip art of the first Thanksgiving with historical photographs from dining areas of Native American boarding houses. Separately added to each image, are quotes taken from the comments section of two separate Facebook pages. One page is organized by people interested in changing the name and mascot of a local high school, and the other a page is dedicated to keeping the name the same. Out of context, and combined with images that show idealized and actual relationships between Native Americans and Europeans, this work examines the how language, imagery, and social media can distort and polarize the way we view others.
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My most recent series of drawings, “Mom Brain” fuses elements of realism with the transformative nature of new motherhood. Inspired by the first years of parenthood, the images are drawn from scenes of daily life. In a time when life is hectic and all consuming, yet somehow simultaneously meandering and repetitive, these drawings make a conscious effort to process and reflect my surroundings and experiences. The act of drawing slows down time, while observation alters and shapes memory. They become meditations on the act of looking, and on being and becoming.
“Valentine” depicts some paper ephemera left by my child. This image references the flatness of drawing, while simultaneously alluding to the history of realism and tromp l’oeil. The work explores the language of drawing by superimposing photorealism with a child’s spontaneous, unselfconscious, and ephemeral-style marks. Illusionistic representation dissolves into my brush work and the materiality of graphite.
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My paintings explore ideas of longing, wonder and mystery through the creation of dramatic spaces and constructs. Using plants and distilled shape, I am interested in broadening our perception of nature to include a transformative inner journey-focusing on vibratory color, layered emotional realms and sensations of experience. Inspiration comes from meditation, contemporary and ancient art, plants, music, textiles and adventures in the out of doors. Hiking within the terrain of hills and forests has informed my love of mystical topography just as musical rhythms inspire robust color, pattern and movement. I work to participate in an active dialog with the world using plants, patterns and symbols as characters traversing new territories and relationships.
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Coming to the UP in 2002 opened a world of photography for me. My motto: “Never leave home without your camera.” It has proved to be a means to capture the spirit, adventure, life and breadth of my time spent here so far. All seasons, outlets and venues offer their magic and mystery and are woven with color and light. I was lucky enough on retirement to take two semesters of Digital Photography through NMU Art & Design and I moved to a whole new “photo life!” As you view these scenes please enjoy and hopefully you can weave them with your own stories and adventures.
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My work explores architectures within which we build fantasies and through which we maintain our material realities. For the last few years these interests have been filtered through a fascination with the untethered, idealized landscapes of aerospace and free fall. I think about the physical space of free fall as a metaphor for a contemporary sense of, and desire towards, groundlessness. The techno-utopic, upper-middle-class, millennial American desire to live anywhere and have unlimited access to convenience, while at the same time being told (and telling) consistently that this access is bringing about the end of the civilized world within our lifetime (through climate change, surveillance, etc.), feels akin to the freedom a skydiver feels and craves: excessive and necessarily temporary, with a hard stop. Rather than dismissing urges towards mobility, I want to get close to the complicated feelings of both wanting freedom and knowing it to be an at times privileged and extractive impulse. Keeping this ambiguity in play, the text, drawings, moving image and audio often contradict one another. Building architectures which support and echo images from the sky, sometimes moving, sometimes still, that I collect and generate is central to my sculpture practice. I am drawn to the materialities of aluminum and glass; aluminum is transported from my MacBook and ribs of airplane wings, and glass brings both a visual openness and physical precarity. I build armatures, welding, drilling and tapping the aluminum and allowing objects to shift over time in my studio as I take apart and reassemble. Through this constant dismantling and reassembling, I am able to posit and reposit relationships between bodies, materials, information and dreams.
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I am a printmaker, my imagery evolves through the process of printing, a synergy resulting from the layering of images, marks, and colors. The work explores the tension between intentionality and happenstance, often starting with everyday elements such as blinds, woven scraps, building facades, windows, or corrugated material. The work starts with a plan, the known, often leading to unknown or unanticipated results. The process of printing introduces unintended variations and elements that are intentionally mined to develop the image and create a series. Even with the best intentions and careful planning, plans often go awry. How we build on these unintended errors, mistakes, or unintended consequences results in works that are more engaging and creative than the original plan.
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I think of the Equivalence Series as social bodies. As both metaphorical abstractions and dimensional material figures, opened and compromised, these works investigate feminist subjectivity by propositioning the viewer’s perception. Through the viewer’s perception and its generosity they act as models initiating relationships and by these relationships they become a re-determined whole cloth made whole again.
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By using subtle colors and details, and complex compositions, my art expresses our connection to the natural world. It encourages the viewer to contemplate the interconnectedness between all things. My art is about texture, technique, pattern, and detail. My engineering education is an integral part of my success in planning and executing the complex and detailed landscapes and weavings that have kept me fascinated for the past 20 years. I use all kinds of threads, fibers, and colors to create depth and texture in my work. “Nature has infinite variation and beauty. With such a vast resource, inspiration is unlimited”.
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To enjoy and be knowledgeable of the systematic socialization of behaviors and interests can bring forth tension in the psyche. I enjoy cooking, I take refuge in cleaning, and pride in the cleanliness of my home. At the same time, I am aware of the systematic undervaluing of women’s labor in the home and how the cleanliness of the home reflects unproportionally on the woman living there. I’m aware that I was taught how to be a ”good girl” and a “Lady”. Through education we become aware and intellectually see the incongruence of our beliefs and actions. Through alteration and transformation, I reveal and heighten the absurdities of the gendering of labor and the expectations put on women. I use repetition to move actions beyond the repetition of the quotidian. I use objects found within my own home rooting myself in the everyday. I manipulate, repeat, change scale to slip out of reality into the surreal.
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One of my wood turning mentors once said “ if you turn wood for fun, you might as well have fun doing it”. This piece expresses my slightly warped sense of humor... As a visual pun, it pokes fun at the “footed bowl” concept in general, while presenting a tongue-in-cheek salute to the high top Converse All-Star sneakers (Chuck Taylor edition) that many “baby boomers” wore as teenagers. After all, if you can’t find fun in what you make... what is the point?
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I am a Fiber Artist, specifically weaving large rugs and wall hangings. Initially, the yarn speaks to me. I lean in and listen. My current designs, are drawn from symmetrical and geometric shapes, using bold colors or just dark and light yarns to express my vision. B&W is a series I have been working on for many years, it keeps calling to me to explore new ground and new creations.The process of weaving can be very meditative and grounding. This aspect has always appealed to me. Weaving is also very technical and mathematical, because it is so technical, I have to know exactly where I’m going before I get there. Weaving, using the interlacement of yarns, gives me an outlet to express myself that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. Like my other hangings, this piece is about ornament and texture, skilled labor, timeless beauty, and the inner spirit made visible.
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My work is about place. Remote and specific places that still manifest the essence and transformative power of the wilderness. The paintings portray my experiences exploring the wild places of Northern Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula. These are places I have returned to throughout my life and are places that have helped shape my identity. The paintings record my immersion and focus I find in these isolated forests and authentic cabins, disconnected from the habits of everyday life. Rugged boreal forests, beautiful night skies reflected in lakes, deer hunters, and cottages in the woods populate my paintings and evoke a psychological state of being lost and found in nature. My studio practice extends drawings and works on paper made “in the field” to my “studio” in an effort to evoke these experiences and portray their substance. My work strives to address the hidden connections between the outer perceptible world and the inner essence of our emotional life. I draw influence from the aesthetics of my Northern Wisconsin upbringing in addition to 19th century Nordic landscape painting and American artist adventurers. My most recent project centers around a book about my family cottage in Northern Wisconsin. My grandfather and his children built this cottage in the 1960s as a timeless retreat for family and friends to experience a togetherness in nature.
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I work in clay for its fragility and strength, plasticity and permanence. Clay has the ability to be transformed easily in both form and texture and makes it the perfect medium for my creations. I don’t attempt to portray actual things from nature or create functional pottery but I do want my work to look as if it could have lived or been grown somewhere. I’m inspired by carefully looking at the world around me and to discover beauty in unusual places.
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I make small-scale collages out of magazine paper that explore landscapes and human-built environments across the northwoods eco-region where I live. I am especially interested in unincorporated communities, evolutions in land use, and under-examined human stories. My logic for working small is both philosophical and practical; my intention is to make pieces that feel intimate and accessible, but also provoke curious scrutiny.
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I really enjoy fantasy and sometimes like to incorporate it into my artwork. Often, I use the ocean, lake, river and stream waters to portray fantastic creatures in human-like settings. With my art, I challenge the viewer to use imagination to enjoy with a smile the work being presented. This seascape, operated by three standing dragons, portrays the need for responsible and professionally operated care centers for children of working parents. There is an accompanying legend that lists all the sections of the day care center. Humorous portrayal of human activities transposed to the sea world helps the viewer to relate his or her experience to the concept being presented. Through humor, I hope to stimulate a lighthearted sense of wonder about life and all its’ possibilities.
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As a female and Midwest native, family traditions and constructed gender roles influenced me to question the idea of traditional painting. I translate the history of craft traditions and women’s work in the Midwest into a contemporary painting and sculpture context. By using nostalgic colors from the 90s, craft traditions, and manipulating canvas in an unconventional way, my current work explores my experiences of being a child of the 90s and my place in society today.
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Winter, snow storms, skiing, and Nordic racing are what I love about living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Lake Superior, in all her glory, creates our own weather environment, always unpredictable to some degree. I attempted to capture the mood, snow, wind, exhilaration and joy of Nordic skiing.
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I am exploring the culture of a rural America, where prosaic lifers occupy diners, job sites, camps, and crannies of the backwoods, threaded with the iconography of bucolic tradition, assuming rough postures, longing remainders of a dirt life. Here is a place of grit and liquor, of sentiment, a deep oasis where love and death hurdle on toward another feral season.
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My paintings are an exploration of process, color, and form. I am interested in how to put paint on in ways that activate the work; I might pour, scrape, brush, drip. My works are not descriptions of anything; I am interested in the liminal - something on the cusp of being, just beyond what is known, a memory, a feeling. I like the hand to be present, as well as restraint.
The concept of Yin and Yang - that all things exist as inseparable and contradictory opposites - is an element in my work. I try to simplify and use opposing forces such as chaos/order, organic/geometric, masculine/feminine; a balance between this and that. In making my work I straddle control and spontaneity.
Crafts and especially textiles are things I love and look to constantly for inspiration. I turn to nature as well. I hope there is some humor and joy in my paintings.
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I’m interested in the ineffable qualities of “object-ness:” what is sometimes called aura, and unabashed, radical spirituality in art. As powerful containers of intention, the artifacts of a civilization not only say “We were here,” they say “We are here.” My work is rooted in a long-term meditation practice and is involved with process and material exploration; making drawings and sculptures is a complementary discipline of devotion. I use tactility to draw the viewer into the work and toward introspection through the seduction of intense looking.
Anandi’s Cube, featured in this exhibition, is from my current body of eccentric mixed-media modular sculpture in foam, bamboo, concrete, and acrylic media. These are inspired by early childhood memories of 1960s pop culture: the Panasonic donut phone, inflatable furniture, Peter Max graphics, and so on; their titles often refer to Saturday morning cartoons, comics, and top 40 songs. In this case, the title refers to my gray tabby cat, Anandi, who seems to have an unusual fondness for this work.
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Living up in Marquette the past two years has allowed me to appreciate the aspects of everyday life. Being this far north has completely changed my outlook on what we consider photographic. I used to only associate the U.P. with its immense natural beauty but I’ve recently grown to appreciate things around my daily life. Whenever I go out—I always bring a camera with me. This photograph was captured on film with my medium format camera. Shooting on film has allowed me to slow down my process of creating photos and notice different scenes or compositions that I otherwise would have just walked right past. I will continue to shoot on film because I enjoy the challenge it encompasses. This photograph, along with others will emulate that process and I hope to continue my work into a future publication like a photobook or small zine documenting my time here in Marquette.
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I began my work as an artist in the area of ceramics with wheel thrown and hand built forms, both functional and nonfunctional. These organic forms with their continuous line have found their way into my paintings and despite an occasional effort to expel them, are stubbornly dominate.
Concerning color, the saturated hues found in my work are influenced by a love of folk art, outsider art and the use of color in early 21st century functional ceramics such as Fiesta Ware and the ceramic work of Russel Wright. I recall from a young age being very disappointed when my paint-by–number sets had only one brilliant color to be applied to a tiny area amidst masses of brown and gray. In this way, vivid color has always been my preference. As for content – the images that show up in my work expand from strong feelings of place and instance I have experienced in my lifetime, in this way they are self-portraits that say ‘I know here.’ Most often unconsciously, it seems that I am creating a kind of open-ended narrative that references identity through memory and place, sometimes burden of place, in the physical world. My art is always trying to work out what that might be and in that way I make it for myself. In this recent series entitled ‘Secret Identity,’ I’m experimenting with that narrative in the classic genre of portraiture and human expression. In these visual biographies of women I know, who all live in the same small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I’m looking for a glimpse of not so obvious traits, searching out clues about their personality that isn’t always apparent.
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I make visually volatile renderings of simple forms and ordinary objects from layers of transparent and translucent media. I create these layers using both additive and subtractive methods: painting tinted acrylic medium onto sheets of transparent polyester film, or cutting out shapes from sheets of insect screening and other materials. I then align the layers on metal rods and suspend them from the ceiling, or stretch them on aluminum screen frames that I mount on light boxes that sit on the floor. In either case, whether looking up or down, viewers see a succession of two-dimensional surfaces that collectively conjure a three-dimensional body. Their structure—schematic, segmented, sequential—gives these pieces an inherent instability that frustrates attempts to categorize them, as either whole or fragmentary, spatial or temporal, abstract or concrete—even as paintings or sculptures. With no single, fixed position from which to view them, the alignment of the layers is always in flux. Viewers, by shifting their own perspective and proximity, can transform these pieces in both subtle and radical ways. The floor pieces made from bug screen produce complex moiré patterns that make them seem to flicker and squirm as you move around them. The hanging pieces can appear solid and extended when viewed at an angle, flat and compressed from the front or back, but from the side they seem to fold into space and disappear.
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For the past nine years my work has focused on American Vernacular interior spaces and the architectural details and furniture often paired with these spaces. Much of the work from this period was born from a curiosity of the history of a space. Who inhabited this space before I arrived? What traces did the former inhabitants leave behind? Who were the builders of this particular house? The latter two questions are questions I still ask today when entering an older house laden with rich details in the trim work, dents in the floor, and scrapes and scratches on the walls.
While I remain interested in the aforementioned, I have recently become interested in the colors and patterns found in American vernacular interior spaces. I employ digital fabrication processes in this recent work as I way to record these patterns, shapes, and colors. Digital Extract uses an antique wallpaper pattern, laser cut into pine lath usually found inside the walls of older homes. The pieces are laser cut, then, plaster is pressed into the relief left from the cut. This piece is my take on the covered layers often left behind from former inhabitants of a domestic space. Furthermore, how do these rebuilds, additions, and modifications to a space dictate the way the current inhabitants travel or navigate the space? Additionally, I am interested in tendencies impressed upon us by occupying a space. Many of the pieces in this new body of work intentionally jut out into a space away from the wall to further demonstrate the ways a subtle change in the topography of the wall can dictate movement, and subsequently, the way we move through that space.
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I explore the beauty and character of corrugated cardboard in functional and sculptural forms. This study of the fine use and function of this low-status, recyclable, and often overlooked material is what drives my curiosity. The inventive process of creating objects with corrugated cardboard is exciting and stimulating, often resulting in a highly textured and elegant surface and form.
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My Three Rules of Art:
Never make Art that smells really bad without warning everyone ahead of time. I learned this the hard way.
Respect the sacrifice others have made to bring their souls to light even if you think their Art is dorky.
Money and Art do not play well together. Always keep your eye on them when they are “getting along”. Unsupervised, they will get into spectacular trouble.
Good luck and stay healthy, Patrick
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Lonerism Fork and Lonerism Sign are a part of a larger body of work, Lonerism, that depicts unassuming commonplace scenes. By the nature of these scenes and the objects found in them, a narrative of abandonment and isolationism is created. For example, such characteristics can be found in the image of the sign. A rusted out metal base with an image-less frame is no longer purposeful in an empty parking lot. A tool used to convey meaning and information, it now sits idle, forgotten and worthless. By principle the sign is devoid of its defining purpose. The artist composed the images so that they appear to be specific reflections of such negative ideas stated above; conditions of daily life that someone would stumble upon and attribute personal relation to their feelings much like the artist did when coming across these scenes. All of the scenes were physically unaltered upon approach when shot as to provide a connection between reality and the artist’s mental mindset at the time. The concept of lacking purpose, isolationism and abandonment flows heavily throughout the work due to this artistic choice. Along with such aspects, these two images were composed with natural light to create deep shadows and high contrast imagery. When light is utilized as it is in these images, the compositions begin to take on a brooding solitude, much like the reality one feels when abandoned or isolated.
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My work redefines aging fiber nets through needle-weaving and knotting; a discarded fishing net provides the armature for “Jetsam” — the things we intentionally let go to lighten our load. I integrate their scars and imperfections into the new, with the transformation extending their narrative. Acknowledging the nets’ past lives but absent their true stories, I imbue them with my own. Knotting within and across their fixed borders allows for long, reflective periods of creation informed by the familial moments and unexpected associations that their previous lives evoke. Beyond the personal, my sculptures speak to histories, loss and longing — a collective, perhaps imagined nostalgia, making the work less about memories than memory itself.
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Why can’t I notice the beautiful things on my commute?
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