The Artist Exchange program is a mentoring process that enables local and regional artists to teach and learn together while engaged in challenging, innovative work over the course of eight to ten months. The 2008–2009 participating artists:

Barbara Waterman-Peters
The Artist Exchange program has provided an opportunity to re-examine the work of the 30 years of my professional career. Melding subject and content, composition and scale, line and color from the vocabulary of my past work to that of the present has long been a goal. Finding commonalities, determining which investigations maintain their validity has been a method of checks and balances, not one of generating new ideas. But for this project I brought this methodology to bear on the actual creation of the work. Rather than simply being justification, it was stimulation toward the synthesis of elements. To effect the restatement literally and figuratively I re-used two canvases which forced deconstruction of their initial images/masks/surfaces and a subsequent reconstruction incorporating the few remnants. Two unanticipated results occurred: one, most of the chosen imagery is from recent vocabularies; and two, those that aren’t emerged from a past far before 1979.

Several mentoree applicants caught my interest for a variety of reasons, but I felt that ultimately the relationship should be mutually nurturing and challenging. Andrea Fuhrman’s intellectual inquiries stood out immediately as a good fit because some of them echoed my own. Our dialogue during this process both in conversations and emails has been satisfying and enriching. Ideas, principles, even a shared love of words and poetry permeated the discussions of art. Working with Andrea has been a privilege; I look forward to a long friendship.

Andrea Fuhrman
Wikipedia suggests that graffiti refers to inscriptions, figure drawings found on walls of ancient sepulchers or ruins, as in the Catacombs of Rome, Pompeii, or cave paintings from 30,000 BCE. I photograph train graffiti, as if an art supply—my diary of moments. Trains are vandalized with spray paint. I appropriate. I transform. I steal. I document so a secret language is not lost. I am scribe, translating, engrossed. I find passages that are poetic, calligraphic remnants made by others. And though the act of spray painting on trains is illegal, is it not a revolutionary act? The train’s track is stitching that connects distant geography. The train is a treadle, my camera’s shutter a needle. The train’s steel wheels are spinning mandalas. Its cargo includes coal, used to scribble graffiti in antiquity. The train screeches, bangs, impervious, rolls its great impassive weight. My building shudders, windows rattle, as trains roar by, insistent. Whistles blow, warn day and night. The clacking tracks a heartbeat; parked behemoths breathe weighted silence. I walk among freight cars with camera; my little stele, scratching impressions of painted hulks. I gather graffiti as beach glass, respond to raw beauty of messages painted by others faraway.

Mentor Barbara Waterman Peters listened to my questions. A gift. I contextualized, reminisced, and compared earlier work to new vision. Impelled to create, I’m surprised to carve a new path in a medium I’d explored and neglected. Person and artist exist, distilled, and emerge through a different medium, photography.

Marc Berghaus
My two pieces in this show, Freeway Chase and Sound Shower #1 (Radio Wave), represent very well my recent shift of interests from chance and causality—how and why things happen, and our perceptions of them—to our perceptions of our environment: natural, built, and more and more the broadcast and internet media, which surround and envelop us as much as trees, buildings, or air. Freeway Chase is part of a series titled Aperiodic Rituals, which explores the lack of meaningful ritual in our culture, and the news media’s attempts to fill that need through stories that have a satisfying emotional arc. Sound Shower provides an actual environment to be entered—an isolated zone of sound—in which local radio stations actually bathe the listener, while the sound is being manipulated into behaving like water.

My experience with the Artist Exchange program has been nothing but positive, in two ways: first, the simple meeting of different artists during our retreats. I live in an extremely isolated part of Kansas, and chances to meet with other artists and exchange ideas and experiences are a rare pleasure, especially with those as interesting as the people in this group. Secondly, working with Brady has been nothing but fun. Intelligent and enthused, his excellent work belies his youth and he is in need of very little “mentoring.”  That said, it has been fun to work with him on the mechanics of solving technical problems, in addition to kicking more general ideas back and forth.

Brady Hatter
By placing the viewer in a conversation with a reanimated body, I intend to disturb comfort. Attraction and repulsion can occur at the same time. I create a new alternate biology for these natural objects and render them with an invented science. The unsettling movement holds the memory of the natural world with a skewed perspective of reality. A higher degree of reality constitutes a check of our own mortality. Contemporary French theorist Julia Kristeva writes, “The corpse, seen without God and outside of science is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.” 

When applying for the Artist Exchange program, I was making a transition in my artmaking from static work into sculpture in motion. I decided that working intuitively was not enough. I began questioning the fundamentals of why this new way of making gripped me and was in search of clarity. Through the meeting and mentoring received from Marc Berghaus I was able to question every step of the process of building dynamic works of art. His assistance and encouragement have brought my work to a new level of quality and professionalism that I struggled to achieve on my own.

Sandy Wedel
Direct personal experience when encountering any phenomenon determines its value for me. The sensorial response to any visual perception enlivens the imagination to an experience unique in space and time. The depth of that experience is in some measure dependent on the observer’s commitment to engagement. Perceptual focus drives evolution of thought and experience around the work, and what is not at first glance visible or important reveals itself. As an artist, I am interested in creating a visual that compels the participant to navigate the gaps, ask questions, assert an opinion or carry with them into their daily lives some aspect of their experience.
My creative preference is for settings that allow introspective thought and reflection. The Artist Exchange process has allowed me an opportunity to connect with other artists in a way that has propelled me forward artistically beyond what I anticipated. I have discovered once again that isolating myself in the studio needs to be balanced with exchanges and dialogue.

Amy Payne
Art can be a chance to make a statement about cultural, personal, or societal situations. It can also be an outlet to tell a story when words cannot suffice. In my two installation pieces, I wanted to combine the story and the statement in a tactile, physical way. The story is not a narrative to be read literally; it is a complex expression of my disparaging view of the world directly around me. Though I am making a statement, I want the viewer to interpret the details themselves.

To create the installations, I combined altered found objects with ceramic sculptures, wire, plaster, and various types of paints. Never before have I used found objects in my sculpture. I have to credit this development, and the courage to try something outside my comfort zone, to the Artist Exchange program and to my mentor, Sandy Wedel. Her encouragement and ideas helped to expand my repertoire and added to my artistic arsenal. The group retreats were a great way to network and socialize with other artists I probably otherwise would have never met. Overall, this experience has dramatically altered and improved my artistic path.