Salina Art Center

August 27, 2010 — October 10, 2010

Artist Exchange

In working toward its mission to create exchanges among art, artists, and audiences that reveal life, the Salina Art Center relies upon creative partnerships with artists who serve their communities as progressive thinkers, leaders, and agents of culture and positive change. The Artist Exchange, initiated in 2006 as part of SAC’s Artist Initiative, is one such partnership.

Each year, six Kansas artists—working independently or collaboratively in their studios—meet regularly for eight to ten months to share ideas, develop formal skills, and to support each other’s artistic practices. This rigorous interaction culminates in an exhibition at the Salina Art Center, featuring new work produced by the artists during the Artist Exchange program.

Artists participating in this year’s program are Shin-hee Chin (McPherson), Priti Cox (Salina), Matthew Hilyard (Andover), Michael Krueger (Lawrence), Michelle Meade (Salina), and Debbie Wagner (Bennington).

Statements by the participating artists:

Shin-hee Chin
Cultural context has significantly informed my artistic practice, having spent half my life in South Korea and the past two decades in the United States. In my years dealing with issues of a bi-cultural lifestyle, art has helped me reconcile the conflicting nature of these influences. My work reflects this binary relationship—female vs. male, East vs. West, art vs. craft—these paradoxes inhabit the same space just as Korea and America co-exist in me. From these cultures, I draw inspiration specifically from the feminist tradition, Christian spirituality, and Eastern philosophy.

The Artist Exchange Program has provided me with valuable opportunities to work collaboratively with other artists towards a common goal of enriching the cultural landscape of Kansas. It has served as a forum in which ideas and information are freely exchanged, challenged, and encouraged in pursuit of artistic excellence. The Program enabled me to embark on an inner journey of self-discovery as an Asian American artist, while working on projects exploring the changing cultural arena that transcend local, national, and global boundaries. I am very grateful for the opportunity to work directly with Matthew Hilyard and the other Artist Exchange participants this year. The experience of working with kindred minds reminds me of the time proven adage: the sum is always greater than the parts.

Priti Cox
The three pieces I have included in the Artist Exchange exhibition are from the series Stri Jaati (“female ‘caste’”). Women in contemporary Indian society often have their roles cut out for them by the three C’s: Caste, Class, and Corporation. In this body of work my intention is to go behind these societal pressures—imposed by the state on a political level and by the patriarchal system on a personal level—and expose these women as human beings struggling for justice and basic dignity. I have assembled these individual pieces especially designed for the Art Center space. The idea is to communicate the intricate fabric of Indian culture as being both repetitious and stagnant, now exacerbated by economic globalization that benefits less than 5 % of the population.

I believe all artists have their own working styles and motivations. And working together as a group can create an environment conducive to a crossing of focuses as well as a learning experience. And this program has provided both of that for me. What I have taken away from this exchange is that each of us is trying to communicate the same thing—what we are learning from our own life experiences.

Matthew Hilyard
In the body of work exhibited in Artist Exchange, I am particularly interested in the visual language of a literal experience. When a traumatic event takes place, it leaves an imprint: psychological, emotional, and physical scars are created. Memory plays a significant role in the process. Through memory, themes of love, loss, sexual abuse, and illness are explored. The photographic medium helps with this literal translation. Through my process, I physically re-create events from my personal experience. I scratch and add text and other materials to the surfaces that give the works a tactile quality and creates a sort of “moving” narrative that I hope tells a story and represents the image as touched by time. Through these physical manipulations I attempt to create a commentary from a buried personal experience.

The Artists Exchange program has provided me the courage to reach deeper in exploring personal issues. Working with my mentor Shin-hee Chin has motivated me in this continued search to be courageous in my art making process. I encourage all artists, no matter the discipline, to seek an opportunity such as this.

Michael Krueger
Narrative is a powerful force in our everyday life and I believe we long for an unfolding of the ordinary into the mythic. I am searching for the extraordinary in everyday life and looking at history and landscape, as means to better understand a world that is built on past events and memories. A deep sense of self, hope, melancholy, mystery, and a vein of tenderness are qualities that I seek to have in my work.

I have grown and changed as an artist because of my participation in the Artist Exchange program. The opportunity to commune with motivated and passionate artists has been a rich and rewarding experience; I am looking forward to a continuing blossoming of my new relationships. I found the program meetings to be warm and open to unabashed genuine exchanges—a gift of creative rejuvenation to be coveted.

As for the art that I created during this mentorship program, I chose to create several small vignettes and one larger drawing. The pieces for me represent a humble departure from recent work and ongoing work. These drawings are snapshots of the landscape derived from memories, fantasies, photographs, and ephemera from boyhood camping trips in South Dakota. From conversations with artist Debbie Wagner, I gained the insight to appreciate connections to past observations and current studio investigations. While showing Debbie some photographs I took as a small boy we shared a moment of creative epiphany that brought resolution to the ideas I was inching towards. For me one of the most powerful transformations to come out of this experience has been allowing myself to be more vulnerable with other artists and to share my studio process more openly.

Michelle Meade
During the Artist Exchange program, I set out to explore the idea of giving my puppets life beyond the puppet show. By creating the puppet characters and casting them as a story in book illustration form, I am able to “direct” them as I have directed players in a play. The puppets are able to experience a life longer than that temporary meeting with the puppeteer’s hands. Capturing the characters on film to create an illustrated book narrative enables them to retell their story in new ways and to reach new audiences.

Combining my interests in visual and performance art with a passionate, lifelong reverence for childhood imagination, I illustrate my child’s eye view of nature through this whimsical experience of Arden’s Garden. For the exhibition, I worked to create a “Stage Costume” and puppet play, as well as the children’s book.  A book I had as a child, The Lonely Doll, by Canadian fashion photographer Dare Wright, has long been an inspiration for a book project of my own.

The Artist Exchange program has given me the creative engagement I needed to realize these works. Sharing ideas and our common experiences as artists engaging in the creative process was refreshing, inspirational, invigorating, and validating. I was especially grateful for being surrounded by strong female artists, especially my mentor Priti Cox.

Debbie Wagner
As an artist, I am fascinated by the creative process. Many of my best ideas occur during the night while I sleep. Much of my work has developed from these nocturnal ideas. Equally, one of the purest forms of the creative process is the subconscious doodle. I tend to draw elaborate doodles while listening to someone speaking. After years of doodling in church, I realized I had an intrinsic body of work on the church bulletins. I felt these drawings were my subconscious reaction to spiritual stimuli. After sorting through these impromptu sketches, I discovered some of the designs were very fluid, complex, and pleasurable.  Although I considered painting the sketches, I re-created them by experimenting with the textures of fiber.

I have sewn, knitted, crocheted, macraméd, and needle pointed, but these craft forms were not the appropriate vehicles for this project. I wanted a more painterly look. So, I applied for the SAC mentorship program to aid my venture into an unknown arena. What I found waiting for me was the opportunity to work with natural fibers in the world of felt fusion.

The mentorship program has provided an avenue for my exploration and given me an intrinsic freedom to create. It has been a great experience and encouragement to have the group’s camaraderie while exploring a different artistic process and medium.

2010 Artist Exchange Exhibition