Morrice, Michigan is a place dotted with blaze orange hats in the fall. Fields of soy beans line the dirt roads, and most people there are familiar with making bread or growing vegetables to show at the county fair. I realize it may seem like a faraway place, maybe terrifying even or derided as bucolic, but any detailing of my life and my art practice necessarily includes this beginning. It provides me with a particularly rooted understanding of space and material as both politically and socially engaged. I hold onto the tension between the rural and urban divide in the United States, especially as it recently has become a more stinging and abstracted divide. Deliberately focusing on spaces typically out of focus, could read as defense or a position of unrelenting nostalgia for the countryside as we move more broadly towards urbanization and globalization. Instead of defending, celebrating, or remembering fondly, I am most interested in presenting work that attends to the immediate ... view more »
Morrice, Michigan is a place dotted with blaze orange hats in the fall. Fields of soy beans line the dirt roads, and most people there are familiar with making bread or growing vegetables to show at the county fair. I realize it may seem like a faraway place, maybe terrifying even or derided as bucolic, but any detailing of my life and my art practice necessarily includes this beginning. It provides me with a particularly rooted understanding of space and material as both politically and socially engaged. I hold onto the tension between the rural and urban divide in the United States, especially as it recently has become a more stinging and abstracted divide. Deliberately focusing on spaces typically out of focus, could read as defense or a position of unrelenting nostalgia for the countryside as we move more broadly towards urbanization and globalization. Instead of defending, celebrating, or remembering fondly, I am most interested in presenting work that attends to the immediate complexity and materiality of rural space by using materials and performative gestures that are both curious and inquisitive. The work contributes a rural perspective to broader conversations about material, space, bodies and place in all their complexity. Part of this conversation includes an earnest humor for me, as I use materials in often inappropriate or deliberately ineffective ways. My art work has emerged from a rooted position and brings lived rural experience- informed and analyzed through a critical academic lens- into the gallery and into an art conversation. The goal of this is to broaden and include a wider range of experience in conversations about material, space, bodies and place. These concerns mimic those within contemporary culture, and from the gallery to the 4-H fairgrounds those concerns remain central. This realization makes rural voices essential and necessarily formative in defining contemporary art.
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