gallery talk

After a special request, Kalina Winska and I are delighted to announce we'll be giving an informal artist talk in the gallery on Friday at noon. Please join us as we share a bit about the processes and concepts behind the work as well as how we set up successful parameters for collaboration.

Friday, October 28th
12-1pm
"the gallery"
Rietz Union 2nd floor

Parking is admittedly tricky that time of day, but if you aren't a student with a parking pass, there are metered spots in the garage next to the Rietz.

Plying Thoughts Show

I'm having a show this week! A friend of mine and I have been planning this all summer. We even collaborated on some work we're both really excited about.

We're in the middle of installation now, but the particulars are below. If you're in the area, we'd love to see you. Come by for the reception Thursday, October 20th, 7-9pm at the Rietz Union Gallery, or if you'd like, contact me (erinhcurry@gmail.com) for a private tour with Kalina and I.

Plying Thoughts presents both individual and collaborative artworks by Erin Curry and Kalina Winska. They began working together this past summer based on a kinship between their art practices and personalities. The title of the show refers to the dialogue between them and how the connection manifests itself in collaboration. The works between them are a result of an exchange and response process.

In the show, Kalina and Erin also present themselves as two distinct personalities with independent artistic visions through their individual works.

Erin Curry, a UF Sculpture alum, currently lives and works in Gainesville, FL. Her recent work revolves around handspinning raw chaotic fiber into orderly line and shaping ordered line into tangled or woven mass. The thread preserved within the work, either as the object itself or the record of it, functions as a gesture of archetypal human creation as well as shorthand for spun stories of personal narrative, highlighting our complex, often ineffable relationship to the world around us.

Kalina Winska, an artist from Poland and currently an MFA student in Drawing/Painting Program at University of Florida, creates large-scale drawings and installations. Her art draws upon loss and the threshold of displacement. Interpreting this liminal state through the transformation of materials, objects, and familiar images that often derive from personal memory and Polish Folklore, lies at the core of her studio practice.

For more information on the artist duo, please visit www.plyingthoughts.wordpress.com. The backlog of images and thoughts will continue its slow arrival once the show is up.

tangleblot

Another form of disorder -mirrored- becomes unexpected structure.

Tangleblot 1 (our vessels). ink and graphite on paper. 6"x6". 2011. private collection.

Tangleblot 2 (their bones). ink and graphite on paper. 6"x6". 2011. private collection.

Abstract symmetries crept into my work during last spring and summer. This method presents an intriguing way to generate unusual forms, suggestive and yet not derivative.

They appeared, too, during my Plying Thoughts collaboration with Kalina Winska.

note: I'm reaching into the past to bring some of these now older projects to light, so I'm postdating them closer to the time they were made to avoid too much overlap with current projects. Your blogreader might make this confusing.

Schlaufenhaufen

"loop pile"
a word gifted to me by my German friend, Kisa. Saur
to describe the pile of line at kiters' feet
and my favorite found drawings.

The ones below were collected at the Cervia International Kite Festival in April of 2010. 

 Anna Rubin's delicate monofilament

Ohye Makoto's Edo kiteline(synthetic braid)?
such surprising angularly
stored on a bamboo winder in a rotating figure eight.

Alessia Marrocu's rokoko battle line
postal twine
she explained it never gets cut (truth, it survived the battle just fine)
before lift off she'd pick it up, shake it and flip it before dropping it again to make it stay all in one mass, a loose tangle.

Kisa.'s dyneema line.

Kiteline

Some of you may remember the call to artists I mentioned in December. Since then my print has been completed, shipped, sparred for flight by kitemaker Scott Skinner, and sent onto to Japan.

Despite all the terrible tragedy that visited Japan at the beginning of the year, some things resolutely stayed on course; in March, the print show opened in Kyoto at the 6th Kyoto International Washi Association Exhibition and in the beginning of June showed again at the 1^st International Mokuhanga Conference in Kyoto. My print joins a group of other print and kitemakers' work as well as some innovative larger kitework by Yoshizumi Nobuhiko (who also makes very small kites, some only a few mm in size) and Scott Skinner's own work. The show will travel a bit more this year before retiring.

It's a bit of a thrill for me to know my work has traveled a world away and has a long journey ahead of it before finding a new home.

Kiteline (in process)

13" diameter

woodblock print on mulberry paper

Though I've explored the image of a tangle for a long while, it resonants particularly well for a kite as anyone who has noted a pile of line at a flier's feet. When in the sky, this kite reflects what is on the ground, mediated by a thread and the hand holding the the line between them.

The composition for the print was created by sketching with ready-made cotton line dropped from above as it might be in flying a kite and recording my favorites until I settled on one to make. Tempting as it was to use handspun for my sketches as I do with Specimens, I refrained, as it seemed most appropriate to use line that the kite would fly on to maintain gestural symmetry. 

This above/below symmetry mediated by the hand shows up in my Spindle drawings too, albeit less visibly in the completed works. During creation of the drawings, I draw the image from above the prepared paper which lays horizontally. The roving of wool is tamed into a line by hand and the spindle holding a piece of graphite below it draws a roving line into chaotic masses.

My to-do list includes sparring and bridling one of the extra prints of Kiteline and flying it myself soon. In the proper circumstances the sun will illuminate the kite from behind, and the tangle will glow through paper left bare of ink.

For now here's a few images from the printing of:

This printing ink smells divinely of burnt linseed oil.

 When counterspace ran out, the oven became a drying rack.

Further Reading:
Scott Skinner reflects on process, the exhibit, and presents more of the submitted prints in Kitelife magazine here.

next wave and delighted

Though my blog has lain largely fallow, my art practice continues to grow.

Recently, my Spindle Drawings were selected for an exhibit in South Florida at the Lighthouse ArtCenter Museum for Next Wave: Young Contemporary Artists which consists of Floridian artists under the age of 35. The opening reception was held Friday and it will remain up through September 1st with a few more events associated with it between now and then, so if you find yourself in the West Palm Beach area in the meantime, please visit the museum to see the show.

I'd also like to mention Traces of Spun II received Best in Show. I'm honored and pleased.

  Traces of Spun II 

graphite on paper  
22" x 30"

(made with handspindle)

Within the gallery space, my drawings were paired with a few ceramic pieces by Ronald J. Shaw whose work is featured on the bottom right of the show's flyer. His process involves creating marks on stoneware by dropping horsehair on the pots during firing which ignites and carbonizes on the surface. Our works complemented one another quite well as both of our processes in creating linework require relinquishing a certain amount of control while maintaining restraint.

Of the twenty five artists represented, a few of the works that stood out to me particularly: Nathan Selikoff's generative digital works which transcend the sometimes harsh surfaces of digital art to reveal something more ephemeral as if recording flashes of natural phenomena, Sarah Nastri's delicate collages of transferred trees on surface embossed with snatches of lace, Rachel Rossin's mythical oil paintings depicting tropical esoteric mythologies (see her painting on the top of the flyer), and Micheal Bauman's sculptures, my favorite of which is Remembrance which is a glass topped box holding a grid formation and ammonia crystals grown within.

The event was also the first time I'd seen Kalina Winska's paintings for the show in person. Kalina and I met just over a year ago, and I've enjoyed seeing her work develop as she's veered through drawing, sculptures and back to her original medium, painting. I am looking forward to seeing more of what these swirling worlds hold.

Kalina and I also have a special project in the works that we'll share soon.

Here's my favorite of the Kalina's work in the show:

Kalina Winska

This Far and No Farther

oil on canvas

26" x 26"

Tanglebook as obfuscation and revelation

My entry for the 2011 Brooklyn Art Library Sketchbook Project is perhaps less a collection of sketches and more a sketch itself for a later work.

I've wanted to explore my Tangle sculptures as more tangible objects, allowing others (and myself) to walk through the tangles and see how the relationships between them change as the book is paged through.

I believe if you click on the image you'll see the whole book as a slideshow.

Erin Curry. Tanglebook. graphite on vellum. (c) 2010-2011. collection of the Brooklyn Art Library.

in progress here

note: I'm catching up around here and posting things LOoonG overdue at the date closer to when they happened. Those of you using blogreaders, I hope you'll forgive any confusion as to why posts a year old are showing in your feed.

Thrice

The third in this series finally marks a feeling of familiarity with the drawing spindle. With this tool, greater proficiency comes with a need to mindfully let go of rigid rules, to find a way to coax a specific line and tether a delicate drawing without binding it.

Traces of Spun #3
22" x 30"
graphite on paper

Traces of Spun #3 (detail)
22" x 30"
graphite on paper

spun drawn

Two waited a long time. Month after month passed as small studio experiments joined its side on the daylit wall. The place of open air contemplation ever shifted as wisps of graphite, paper, mylar, and silk came and went, all except for this white rectangle with the quiet buzz in its middle.  

The barest hint of spring brought it through my hands again, this time to completion and followed swiftly by its sister.

Traces of Spun #2
22" x 30"
graphite on paper

click to see larger

The long incubation period makes all the more appropriate the final form held within holds the ending of division or beginnings of connection.

treelines

Vascular winter.
Bare lines against stark cold white.
Subtly moving drawing.