Making Strategies explores the unscripted nature of the artist’s studio, a site of controlled decisions and instinctive discoveries aiming for a tangible, subjective expression. The studio—from the Italian studiolo, a place for contemplative reflection—is one of the more intimate, compelling, and revered spaces to the public mindset, and invites an almost voyeuristic curiosity for the layperson. This show presents the work of several artists who devise methods of working that are specific to their personal processes, conceptual physics, and material inventions. Inherent to their artworks are visible components of the methods and means they employed for successful fabrication of the piece, thus allowing a glimpse into their creative coordination of mind, eye, and hand.
Just as there is no one single type of studio space, there is no one single language for the cycles of discovery and tactile feedback that happen in the studio and around art making. Artists’ in-studio solutions can be both confounding and revelatory, as those solutions move in a forward motion that are irreversible but never linear. From the well of invention pours endless iterations by way of intentional gestures, harnessed accidents, indirect forces, and tools purposely designed for the task that creates the desired effect.
The process reveals the need, the need incites the mind. And so process and mind are at once symbiotically entwined. Here, we welcome viewers to get a glimpse of the collaborative apparitions that vaguely prompt us! Follow the flow! Enter through portals to strategic quasar imagining!
Making Strategies is an exhibition, but also a conversation that was initiated by gallery artist Andy Hall. It features work by Leslie Baum, Joell Baxter, Nick Brown, Ben Dowell, Andy Hall, Alexander Herzog, Matt Rich, Jennifer Rochlin, and Scott Wolniak.
