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Curtis Miller

Curtis Miller

Curtis Miller was born in Corsicana Texas in 1979. Growing up in Texas, Curtis relocated from Austin to Baltimore in 2011 to attend Maryland Institute College of Art's Hoffberger School of Painting (2013). He has exhibited his paintings throughout Texas at K Space Contemporary, Gaddis Geeslin Gallery, Joan Grona Gallery, The South Texas Art Museum, and the Art Center of Corpus Christi. In Baltimore, Curtis has exhibited his paintings at Terrault Contemporary, City Arts, Maryland Art Place, John Fonda Gallery, Jordan Faye Contemporary, and Platform Gallery. He also exhibited his work at Marianne Boesky Gallery and The Painting Center in NYC and is a previous Sondheim Prize semi-finalist. Curtis currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD with his wife, 5 year-old daughter, and 18 year-old dog.

Artist statement

Perhaps one of painting’s strongest qualities, separating it from other visual media, is the ability to incorporate texture, to insinuate touch. It is this haptic quality that further emphasizes the value of its presence and the value of our being present. My paintings are as much built as they are painted. I think of them as stages that allow paint to exist in different contexts. The majority of my content/imagery is developed during the building of the ground using marble dust gesso tinted with dispersion pigment. Building a ground can take weeks to finish. The painting process is typically much faster. Sometimes the paint further supports/participates in the composition; Sometimes there are places designated simply for paint to be paint. I want the viewer to be rewarded for their time spent looking at my work, and especially for moving closer. I want my work to convey to the viewer the process of making itself, and perhaps suggest they, too, could participate.

Sera Boeno

Sera Boeno

Sera Boeno (b. 1991) is a sculptor and installation artist from Istanbul, Turkey. Her praxis is research-based and heavily influenced by the socio-politics of her motherland. Narratives of and around women in historically silenced topics –politics, sex, religion, trauma– are central to her work. Concrete, metal, wood, and digital processes make the foundations of her practice. Boeno holds a B.A. Dartmouth College with degrees in Neuroscience and Studio Art, and an M.F.A from Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art with focuses in curatorial practice, critical studies and art education. She is the recipient of several awards and grants including the Baltimore Jewelry Center Fellowship and Amalie Rothschild '34 Rinehart Award for her work. Boeno has shown and worked in various creative projects between Turkey, Japan and the United States. She is currently based in Baltimore, MD. 

Artist statement

My praxis is research based and influenced by the socio-politics of my motherland. Silenced topics –politics, sex, religion, trauma– are central to my work. I cast and catalog memories; I paint urban development; I sculpt violence against women; I make objects out of police misconduct; I collect small, intimate bits of information, and re-contextualize them in larger discourses. This transformation of particular, evanescent stories into public, enduring narratives is a constant in my work; the subject matter varies. Currently I am working on Kelimeler Kıyafetsiz: a research project on representations of women in political speech from Turkey wherein I collect quotes that refer to women re-present these in monumental forms that celebrate male glory. In 2015, the text took the form of writing stones visually drawing from Orhon Inscriptions: Turkic artifacts glorifying 8th Century Göktürk Princes. In 2016, the text was built into a concrete frieze inspired by Assyrian reliefs eulogizing kings of Nineveh. The 2018 iteration takes the form of an obelisk. The contemporaneity of the methodology and the materials is antithetical to the archeological visual language of these works, yielding modern day historical objects, reflecting the antiquated conceptualizations of womanhood in modern day patriarchies. The text reads “Men and women are….each other’s complementary”. Parallely, the 2018 monument has complementary counterparts: a set of golden mouth ornaments that cage the lips of its wearer in Turkish Illumination motifs. Delicate, seductive, and silencing, these beautiful gags confirm women’s exclusion from the linguistic realm, marginalization and ornamenatalization within history.

Luke Ikard

Luke Ikard

Luke Ikard (b. 1990, Houston, TX) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Baltimore, MD, where he is an Artist in Residence at the School 33 Art Center. He is an Adjunct Professor at George Washington University and Carroll Community College teaching courses in 3D design and new media. He completed his MFA in Multidisciplinary Art from the Mount Royal School of Art at Maryland Institute College of Art in 2017, and he received his BFA in Studio Art from Sam Houston State University in 2014. Ikard was a 2017 Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship finalist and Trawick Prize semifinalist. He received the 2015-2017 Merit Scholarship from the Mount Royal School of Art. His work is part of the College of Fine Art and Mass Communication permanent collection at Sam Houston State University. Ikard has also produced site-specific work at the Sam Houston Memorial Museum Park and has exhibited throughout the United States. His work has most recently been shown in group exhibitions at Maryland Art Place, School 33 Art Center, and the International Art Gallery in the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.

Artist statement

I employ domestic objects guided by sound to create the opportunity to perceive an unfamiliar past or to invent a new one. I utilize my knowledge of sound, emerging technologies, and skills as a woodworker, to investigate the object's capacity to serve as a trace of authentic experiences. I use domestic materials, animation, science fiction soundscapes, stage equipment, 3D printing, cassette tapes, and interactive electronic technologies to create a sentiment of displacement; a longing for a home that no longer exists or never existed. In my work, interactive technology is paired with stage equipment to highlight the absence of a participant and as an invitation to perform with the object. I draw from objects that exist as samples of distanced experiences, an experience which the object can only evoke and resonate, and can never entirely recoup. These objects suggest potential narratives, loss, and memorial fragments which collide to form new events.

Brian Dunn

Brian Dunn

Brian Michael Dunn investigates pictorial abstraction through quantized landscape pattern paintings and through painted reliefs that mimic the forms and surfaces of everyday objects. Born in Milwaukee, WI in 1982, Dunn received a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting from Boston University and a Masters of Fine Art from Cornell University. Dunn was awarded a Mid-Atlantic Arts Council Fellowship to attend the Millay Residency, a Pollack-Krasner Fellowship to attend the Woodstock-Byrdcliffe Residency and the Ellen Stoeckel-Battel Fellowship to attend the Yale-Norfolk Summer Program. Dunn’s work has been exhibited in galleries across the region including Terrault (Baltimore), Nudashank (Baltimore), Automat (Philadelphia), Woskobb Family Gallery (PA) Fjord (Philadelphia), Creative Arts Workshop (New Haven) Gary Snyder Project Space (NYC), Fordham University Lipani Gallery (NYC), Hundred Forsyth (NYC), Public Address Gallery (NYC) and Ventana244 (NYC).

Artist statement

Over the past few years I’ve developed concurrently two distinct bodies of work. One group, which I call ‘Sequences,’ is a series of paintings made up of invented representations of nature constructed through a series of overlapping and interweaving patterns of geometric forms. The other group, which I’ve dubbed ‘Sheetz’ is a series of low relief paintings on sheet metal that mimic the forms and surfaces of everyday objects. In the Sheetz series, I seek to create works which operate as both object and image, abstraction and naturalistic representation, and which display aspects of both their true and depicted materiality. The objects that I have chosen to re-create all carry some quality of ‘painting-ness’ (relative flatness, color, rectalinearity) and each object’s previously functional qualities take on new roles as signifiers of meaning when re-cast as elements within a painting. The Sequences series began with an investigation into the interaction of varied patterns across a pictorial field as they go in and out of phase. I sought the parameters of following set patterns across a limited set of coordinates as a way to counter my own compositional defaults and to inject a mechanized logic into the pictures. Recently, I’ve applied this systematic, repetitive approach to composition and mechanized, depersonalized paint handling to representations of the natural world. While these two directions in my practice deal with very different sets of questions, both bodies of work stem from devoting prolonged attention to often overlooked aspects of everyday life.

Rachel Schmidt

Rachel Schmidt

Rachel Schmidt is an installation artist based in the Washington, DC region. She uses time-based media and installation to explore urbanization and its impact on ecosystems, future landscapes, and the roll that myth plays in our understanding of the environment. Rachel received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore before moving to Warsaw, Poland for a year of artistic research. From 2012-2016 Rachel worked as an Exhibition Coordinator at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and has been an artist in residence at the Arlington Arts Center, Taipei Artist Village, Sabhal Mor Ostaig in Scotland, Vermont Studio Center, and the Taller Portobelo Norte in Panama. Schmidt has received grants and commissions from the Halcyon House, Foggy Bottom Sculpture Biennial, Mount Vernon Triangle BID, Arlington County Public Arts, and the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County. She has exhibited throughout the US and Internationally, and has been reviewed in Sculpture Magazine, Washington Post, and numerous other print and online publications.

Artist statement

I use site-specific mixed media installations to create future myths that explore the potential realities of the Anthropocene. I am interested in futuristic visions of a world without a natural ecosystem, where a synthetic biology governs how people relate and coexist. What role will myth play in this future world and how will the action of myth building take form and evolve? How will a vanishing ecosystem manifest itself in the awareness and scarcity of material use? In a world where the rules of the game are changing so quickly, how can artists respond quickly and nimbly to a shifting planet? I consider myself a futurist and even when I allow my imagination to speculate wildly about the future of humanity, I always seem to return to the potential realities faced by non-human life. Making art on future landscapes, climate change, and artificial habitats can be a loaded political discourse, but I have never approached it as such. I see it as an inherently human issue that impacts all of us personally and I use my installations as a way to connect through these shared experiences.

Kaitlin Jencso

Kaitlin Jencso

Jencso-Headshot.jpg

Kaitlin Jencso is a photographer who lives and works in Washington, D.C. Jencso explores the emotional terrain of ever-expanding and evolving relationships through loss, ephemera, bloodlines, and the land. Her photographs of the habitual moments in our everyday capture and communicate insular experiences. Kaitlin graduated with a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in 2012. She won Best Fine Art Series at FotoWeek DC in both 2014 and 2016 and received the Award of Merit in the 2014 Focal Point show at the Maryland Federation of Art.

Artist statement

Disenchanted grew out of the need to mediate the painful experience of death within my family. It is primarily composed of candid images in the diaristic tradition of my immediate family as we dealt with the prolonged process of death and its aftermath. We grieved the physical loss of these two people, as well as the emotional fallout and degradation of familial bonds that rippled out into the surviving family. There is never explicit imagery of their deaths, or even the people themselves, but the overall tone and melancholy of loss that seeped out into all aspects of life over the years is acutely depicted. The people shown in the images are rarely looking at the camera, but are instead presented through an intimate, yet voyeuristic lens as they go about their every day existence. Stretches of time are distilled in small, transcendent experiences that portray the underlying sorrow, beauty, and mundanity of remaining.