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| "Living and Sustaining a Creative Life" |
6:00pm - Artspace 50 Orange St.
Doors Open
6:00pm - 6:30pm
"Living and Sustaining a Creative Life" for sale
6:30 - 7:30pm
Author and Artists from Smart Painting talk:
Sharon Louden, artist and author of "Living and Sustaining a Creative Life" will discuss her recently published collection of artist essays. The conversation will open with a discussion of the motivations behind the book, which looks at the question of "day/professional labor" and "artistic labor" as forces that are always in tension with one another. Following, contributing writers and artists Sharon Butler and Jay Davis' will read short exerpts from their contributions to Louden's text.
The conversation will open up to involve two of the artists featured in Smart Painting, the current exhibition at Artspace. Namely, Blake Shirley and Sharon Butler as well as the show's curator, John O'Donnell. Rather than host a routine Artist Talk, this conversation will provide an entrance point to discuss how everyday labor and ritual influences an artist's practice by manifesting in the material relationships at play in the artwork itself or informing an artists' process, conceptual toilings, psychological longings and overall sense of time.
We have invited multi-media artist Larissa Hall to join conversation to reflect on the video project she presented at CWOS 2013 which described the working conditions of artists who were also full time graphic designers, stay at home moms and waitresses, among other professions.
Sarah Fritchey will mediate the conversation, which will open to questions from the audience.
After the talk, audience members are welcome to stay and mingle with our panelists and purchase signed books by Sharon Louden.
About the book: This collection of essays is intended to show the reality of how artists -- from emerging to mid-career to internationally recognized artists, juggle their creative lives with the everyday needs of making a living.
Each chapter is dedicated to one artists' point of voice and voice. Here, they share with us how creativity necessarily has a place inside and out of the studio, on a day-to-day basis and over the long haul.
About the author: Sharon Louden is a practicing, professional artist living and working in Brooklyn. She has exhibited at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Neuberger Museum, and the Weisman Art Museum, among other venues, and it is held in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and National Gallery of Art. Learn More www.sharonlouden.com.
Artist Talk Panelists include: Sharon Louden, Sharon Butler, Jay Davis, Larissa Hall, Debbie Hesse, John O’Donnell, Ben Piwowar, and Blake Shirley. Moderated by Sarah Fritchey.
About the exhibition Smart Painting: Smart Painting is an activity. Through this activity, the ten artists in this show pose a range of questions. At their most basic level these include: what does a painting look like? How was it painted? And what was it painted on? Featuring works by: The show features works by: Blake Shirley, Sharon Butler, Deborah Dancy, Zachary Keeting, Ben Piwowar, Jenn Dierdorf, Rob D. Campbell, Derek Leka, Clare Grill, and Tatiana Berg.
About John O'Donnell: John O'Donnell lives and works in Connecticut. He is a multidisciplinary artist and has created performance pieces for the Museum of New Art in Detroit, MI, Proof Gallery in Boston, MA, Flux Space in Philadelphia, PA and SOHO20 Gallery in New York, NY. O'Donnell is an adjunct professor of studio and digital arts at University of Connecticut, Gateway Community College and Eastern Connecticut State University.
About Sharon Butler: Artist and writer Sharon Butler publishes Two Coats of Paint, a painting blog which recently received a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation grant for arts writing. Known for her early interest in what she calls the casualist tendency (or, "New Casualism") in contemporary art, Butler is represented by Pocket Utopia (New York). Affiliated with Brown University, she divides her time between NYC and her hometown in southeastern Connecticut.
About Larissa Hall: Larissa Hall is a multimedia artist living in Woodbridge, Connecticut and graduate student in Interactive Media at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. Her current video series “Someone else’s job” examines the day-to-day lives of working people through community participation and guided imagery meditation (larissahall.com). In addition to her artistic and academic pursuits, she also works full-time as the Lab Manager for the Social Robotics Lab at Yale University (scazlab.yale.edu).
About Debbie Hesse: Debbie Hesse is an New Haven based installation artist; her work combines organic and artificial materials and forms with cast and painted shadows to create parallel, hybrid, ephemeral environments that explore ideas about growth, materiality and the ethereal. Hesse holds a BA from Smith College, a Masters in Painting and Printmaking from University of New Mexico, where she also was a fellow at Tamarind Institute of Lithography. She is a recent recipient of a Rhode Island Visual Artist Sea Grant, Vermont Studio Residency Individual Grant and a Connecticut Visual Artist Sea Grant. She also collaborates with other artists as Curator, Director of Programs and Artistic Services at The Arts Council of Greater New Haven.
