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2008-2010

Christian Benefiel

Christian Benefiel

Christian Benefiel is a Maryland-based artist focusing on sculpture and installation. His work has been featured in many solo and group exhibitions both nationally and in Europe. Recent shows include Structural Tissue at BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown, MD, Sea of Tranquility, Ocean of Doubt at VisArts in Rockville, MD, Indirect Effect at AREA 405 in Baltimore, MD, and the Foggy Bottom Sculpture Biennial in Washington, DC. His sculptures can be found in public parks and schools in Kentucky, Minnesota, Maryland, DC, and Finland. Internationally, Benefiel’s work has been included in exhibitions in Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and England. He is the recipient of the Hamiltonian Fellowship, MSAC Individual Artist Grant, and a US Fulbright Grant to Helsinki, Finland. He teaches sculpture at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, WV.

Artist statement

Christian Benefiel’s sculptures address the interaction of elements in systems. His work is driven by the way that a social construct is dependent on balance and tension, both physically and visually. In the end, the argument itself is the construction, the product, and the notion that an issue is more complex than opinion. Through physical structures constructed from networks of wooden and found material forced against itself, Benefiel visualizes the human desire to selectively manipulate the existing environment for purpose or comfort. The form of the works plays on a psychology of species, the connection to materials and places beyond the civilized or enlightened world, and the role and method of individual pieces that make up the larger ideas of arguments and dialogue.

Tom Block

Tom Block

Tom Block utilizes the visual arts and writing to explore the interaction between the spiritual life of humanity and our sometimes-sad shared reality. His work is hardly religious, but explores humans’ attempts to make sense of this world and our shared struggle to develop and live by a moral code. At the very best, he hopes that his art will have an activist influence, causing viewers to question their own personal roles in making the world a better place.

Anne Chan

Anne Chan

Anne Chan earned an MFA from MICA and has over a decade of experience in corporate and architectural photography. Chan thrives on communicating the right message visually. Whether it is a large scale government facility or an internal poster campaign, Anne has collaborated with marketers, designers, architects and developers to help promote some of the best talent and capture some fantastic places to live and work.

Ian MacLean Davis

Ian MacLean Davis

Ian MacLean Davis earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. His works have been exhibited throughout the United States and his artwork is collected internationally. Ian lives, works and teaches in Baltimore and its outlaying counties.

ianmacleandavis.com

Leah Frankel

Leah Frankel

Leah Frankel is a visual artist whose work deals with the relationship of human existence to its remarkable environment. Using site as impetus, Frankel’s installations employ ordinary objects to draw attention to our earth’s gravity, the passing of time, or the flatness of the horizon. Frankel’s site specific projects include Colony of Earthcubes at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C., a relief rendering of the Wissahickon Watershed made from reclaimed building materials at Germantown Academy, in Fort Washington, PA, and a series of installations in, around, and in response to a backyard shed in Columbus, Ohio. Frankel was a fellow at the Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington D.C. 2008–2010, completed her MFA at The Ohio State University in 2014 and is currently Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY.

Linda Hesh

Linda Hesh

Linda Hesh combines the personal and political playing with taboos and challenging social norms in a variety of media. Born in Chicago, Illinois, she lived in New York City, Alexandria, Virginia and recently moved to the Netherlands. Text, photography and a multitude of materials comprise her public interactive artworks along with works for exhibition. Her interactive pieces have been in Saint Petersburg, Russia; Chicago, IL; Washington, DC; New York City and Haarlem, the Netherlands. "Linda Hesh's All Gay Review" was her most recent solo exhibit in Washington, DC. Her art is held in public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Kinsey Institute, and The Library of Congress. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Huffington Post have featured her art.

Michael Dax Iacovone

Michael Dax Iacovone

Michael Dax Iacovone spends his time investigating public space, walking through cities, driving across bridges and borders, and digging trenches in the desert. He is interested in formulas and creating systems to experience spaces, leave marks, and generate art. He has a BS in Photography from the State University of New York, an MI in Contemporary Art History from Middlesex University in London, an MFA in Photography from VCU, and an MFA in Studio Art from MICA. His work has been exhibited internationally in Sarajevo, Belgrade, Warsaw, Budapest, Paris, Warsaw, London and Pyramiden (a soviet ghost town in the Arctic Circle). Domestically he has exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St.Louis, Orlando, Baltimore, Salt Lake City, and Washington DC, among other places. He has written art reviews and articles for Sculpture Magazine, BMoreArt, and The Brooklynite.

Michael Enn Sirvet

Michael Enn Sirvet

Michael Enn Sirvet is a contemporary sculptor and multidisciplinary artist who lives in Washington, DC, and Baltimore. He was born in the forested suburbs of northeastern New Jersey, with a backyard that bordered a 50-acre wetland. This enchanting area was only twenty miles from all that New York City had to offer. Having a father who was a renowned mechanical engineer, a grandfather who was a master carpenter, and a grandmother who was a nature painter influenced Michael’s creative and scientific life greatly beginning in his earliest years.

Michael attended Fordham University in New York City where he earned a degree in Finance with a minor in Art History. After receiving his degree in Finance, he promptly put that to no use whatsoever by entering the publishing industry in Manhattan. For two years after leaving Fordham, he spent his time in both the steel canyons of New York City, and amid the hills, valleys and waterfalls of northeastern New Jersey. It was during this time that he began to closely relate the machines and intricate mechanical designs of his father’s work, with the complex rhythms, structures and patterns he discovered in the nature and the wild - resulting an outcome of his first serious creative forays into the visual and musical arts.

An avid trail runner, his moving meditations in the hills and hollows of the New Jersey’s Ramapo Mountain Range led him to return to college for further exploration of the arts and sciences. At the University of Maryland, Michael studied Mathematics, Engineering, Sculpture and Music, and began traveling North America to explore the most intense offerings of the natural world. Today he will proudly declare that he has camped, run, hiked and mountaineered in well over seventy of the United States National Parks and Forests, with lifelong visits totaling well into the hundreds. Michael graduated University of Maryland with a degree in structural engineering and a deepened fascination with science, the arts, nature and the patterns that bind them together. He practiced engineering with some of the leading engineering firms in the Washington, DC metropolis; in the final six years of his career he was with one of the leading firms in the world, Silman, working on such structures as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the National Museum of American History.

While working as a structural engineer, Michael’s sculptural mindset took root and in 1999 he began creating sculptural works of art in evenings and on weekends. As his engineering career advanced, the intrigue of purely aesthetic, abstract structure eventually overtook him, and in the autumn of 2008, he left an immensely rewarding position to pursue a career as a sculptor.

Today Michael’s artwork is in collections across the globe and he is represented by multiple galleries across the United States. He continues to travel to fascinating and often remote locations to immerse himself in the wonders of nature, and human-centered design, and upon his return, combines his observations of natural order and disorder, with the science, mathematics and engineering to create the art he loves in the studio.