ArtSake

At first glance, their work bears little resemblance. Candice Smith Corby (Painting Fellow ‘08) creates enigmatic paintings of peculiarly placed women and furniture, on unconventional surfaces like doilies and handkerchiefs. Julie Levesque (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ‘05) invents sculptures, installations, and drawings that tell mysterious stories of identity, memory, and duality through striking monochromatic figures and objects.

But creatively, the two artists draw from a similar place - a basis of stirring personal inquiry.

We invited Candice and Julie to engage in a dialogue about their work, and they found shared ground in explorations of family connections, domestic imagery, and frozen moments.

Detail from FORK, KNIFE OR SPOON? by Julie Levesque (2006), wood, mixed media

MCC: I am curious how a particular work of art begins for each of you. With an idea? With a material? With an image?

Candice: A lot of times, I get an image in my head, or at least a portion of it. Or maybe I’ll hear a phrase from a song, or when I’m reading, a phrase will strike me. Sometimes they’re family quotes. But they’re always visual - the language is always visual - so I get an immediate picture. And the material is already figured out for me: gouache and watercolor. Although sometimes I’ll bring other things in, like acrylic, flocking, glitter or different sprays.

Julie: For me, it really depends on what I’m doing. If it’s an installation, it almost always starts with a space. But if I’m just working on individual sculpture, it usually starts with an idea that has a sliver of potential. And then I just hope that, somewhere along the line, there’s that moment of magic that expands it and touches something that’s universal. Materials, in the beginning, were really important to me. They really helped me sort things out. But now its really moved more toward concept, and then the materials fit the concept.

Candice: So you have a concept, and then you think about how it might become physical, and what might make the best match?

Julie: Exactly. There are some materials that I’m really excited about, like salt. If I can drag that in there, I will.

MCC: One thing that you pointed out, Julie, was that both of you explore a kind of domestic narrative in your work, both in the materials you use and in your subject matter. What is it you find in this domestic place that’s so fertile for your art?

Candice: There’s a public image and a private image that are always hand in hand. What somebody might see from the outside might be completely false from the inside. Now that I’m a mother, there are days when I feel like I’m a crazy person, and then there are days where I feel totally at ease. You can be the same person and have opposite ends of saneness. I look to the women in my family as references - those are the stories I hear. I definitely have specific little dramas that I reference in my work.

Candice Smith Corby, ‘TIL DEATH DO US PART (2007), gouache on cloth napkin 14 in x 20 in

MCC: So it’s not as much that you’re attacking the grand theme of the domestic, but that you work from ideas and events from your own life and family?

Candice: I do both. I think there are definitely autobiographical stories that I’m referencing but I think everyone has those stories. I’d like it to be more universal so that not just I can identify with it.

To give you an example: one of my grandmothers is not a nice lady. And she never has been. She’s older and sort of senile but she’s still able to muster up some nastiness every time we see her. She went to church because you’re supposed to go to church, and she wore certain things because you were supposed to. But the way she behaved behind the front door is different. Ironically, everyone at the nursing home loves her and thinks she is the sweetest old lady. Those are the things I think about - the personal vs. the public, and the humor within the serious.

Julie: I think this is where we match up really well. Because I could have just said basically what you said. It’s that contradiction of what’s presented as what family life is supposed to be, as opposed to what it actually ends up being, when you get right down to it. Everybody thinks that they really shouldn’t be quite the way that they are. I think we really suffer from what marketing projects to us in that respect. It sets up a perfect tension.

I like to think in terms of spaces. When you’re a kid and you’re growing up, you have to walk that minefield. Whatever landscape youve got is the one that you’re going through, and there’s just no way out of it. When you look at it through a kid’s point of view, those worlds are really small and really intense. We have forgotten how intense they are. I keep dragging myself back there to visit that - like the second grade classroom that I built (What Remains). When people got into that space, they exploded with their own stories.

Julie Levesque, installation view of WHAT REMAINS (2002), wood & mixed media

MCC: Identity is such a strong current in both of your bodies of work. Can you describe how identity plays into your art, such as Julie’s installation Fork, Knife or Spoon?

Julie: Fork, Knife or Spoon? is a show that’s based on surprising people into telling the truth about themselves. The core of it is a table with a graphic of all the European silverware, like a pickle fork and a slotted spoon and a dinner knife. People are invited to trace the image of one and write why that utensil best describes themselves.

It started out with my mom. I had just seen Pat Shannon’s exhibit at Boston Sculptors. She had taken furniture that belonged to all of her family members and sanded it down to its bare wood and arranged it together. I started thinking about what I would choose as an object for my mother, and what would she choose. And so I tried to ask her that question. And she refused to answer me. It was hitting a button, and she just would not go there. And I got really frustrated with her, and I said, “Okay mom, just tell me, are you a fork, a knife, or a spoon?” And she immediately said, “Oh my God, I’m a salad fork. I just like to poke a little bit!” And we laughed so hard because it was so true. That’s exactly her. I built the idea into a show at Clark Gallery a while ago, and I’m bringing it back to Babson College. I’m expanding it to an online conversation. It’s a blog and a network. People can post there directly, or they can text or email me and all of their responses will be on the site and then printed out and taped to the windows as part of the physical exhibit. I want to see how viral I can get this to go.

Candice: That’s really exciting.

Julie: It’s something really different for me. It’s made me talk a lot to other artists who are working with collaboration, like my studio-mate Deb Todd Wheeler and Jane Marsching.

Candice: When I choose furniture (to depict) in my work, I’m thinking about how they represent people. Or somebody’s posture. The way that the chair might be positioned. I try to find furniture that gives a sense of personality or a point of view, confrontational or coy, turned over or turned away.

Candice Smith Corby, STARVING FOR ATTENTION (2007), gouache on handkerchief 12 in square

Julie: Is there furniture that you use that’s authentic, like your grandmother’s couch?

Candice: There are a few. But I also have a furniture fetish. So if I could, I’d probably have ten couches or more.

Some of my images aren’t exactly someone’s specific piece of furniture, but they do reference the situations they’re from. Some are symbolic, too. Furniture and objects also go back to that idea of representation of perfection, what you have and what you don’t have.

Julie: A lot of your imagery could come from a ’50s ad, with that perfect woman in there holding up hundreds of objects. I love the balance you’ve gotten in that frozen moment. There’s a sense of, if I could just hold on! I think you capture that so well. I have the sense that there’s stillness there in that chaos. That contradiction totally speaks to me.

Candice Smith Corby, BENDING OVER BACKWARDS (2008), gouache on paper, 20 in x 24 in

Candice: I like how you talk about the stillness and the frozen moment. I don’t deal with change very well myself. It makes me think of a drawing I made once. It was 95% finished. This drawing was pretty detailed, immaculate, no mistakes. Then I spilled my whole cup of coffee on it. It’s on the paper, it’s there. You can’t erase it. So I looked at it, mopped it up some. And I think - there was a train or an airplane - and it all became the exhaust smoke.

I’m always trying to freeze things, but you don’t always have control. And you have to keep going.

Julie: I’ve come to really cherish that. Being a sculptor, there are times when I have made a mistake on an expensive piece of material, completely shattering what I was trying to build. And in that physicalness, I end up really changing it - having to sit down and say, now what? Most times, that will shift me into a direction that is almost always 100% better than where I was going. That’s where a small idea starts to change to something that becomes meaningful.

MCC: What’s up next for both of you?

Candice: I’m working on a project in which I’ll do a wall installation that goes beyond one wall, an interior space. But I’ll be using furniture.

Julie: Using actual furniture or paintings?

Candice: They’re painted, life-size furniture on canvas that I cut out and then apply to the wall. A lot of times I paint the wall either a graphic, flat pattern or a wallpaper pattern. But I might play with having more of a spatial situation to set the furniture in. But it all comes back to a flat surface.

Julie: Which works really well - taking a three-dimensional object and making it two-dimensional in three-dimensional spaces. That’s a lovely play in itself.

Candice: Thanks. So I’ll make some new pieces for that. And then I have a series of drawings/paintings that I’m working on, that are loosely based around feats of strength.

Julie: Kind of the supermom thing.

Candice: Playing on that.

Julie Levesque, SMOKE (2008), 48 in X 34 in X 3 in

Julie: After “Fork, Knife or Spoon?” I’ll be in the salon show at Clark Gallery in December and then I’ve got a show in Appleton WI at Lawrence University next March. So that is going to carry on the two-dimensional work I’ve been doing.

My work is really changing. I’ve been making these drawings of crouching figures on large white panels that are really spare. Working on “Fork, Knife or Spoon?” has given me a break from that. I’m not quite sure where I’m going quite yet, but I hope that it gels into something new.

Candice Smith Corby’s (Painting Fellow ‘08) paintings have shown at Miller Block Gallery, Danforth Museum of Art, and HallSpace Gallery, among others. She has an exhibition forthcoming at the Essex Art Center in Lawrence, May 8-June 12.

Julie Levesque (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ‘05) has shown at Rice/Pollak Gallery, AJ Japour Gallery, and Clark Gallery, among others. Her installation Fork, Knife or Spoon? runs at the Reynolds Center at Babson College, through December 15. You can read and contribute to the online version of “Fork, Knife or Spoon?” here.

Join the dialogue - share your own responses to these questions or the artists’ discussion by adding a comment below.

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An handful of past MCC fellows/finalists recently got some nice (and free) publicity: Globe art critic Cate McQuaid had very good things to say about Sally Moore’s (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ‘07) exhibition Edge and Jane Marsching (Photography Finalist ‘03), Deb Todd Wheeler (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ‘03), and Tanit Sakakini’s exhibition Figment’s Imagination.

Greg Cook pointed out this Chicago Tribune story of a local artist abroad. Boston’s Bren Bataclan spent October in the City of the Big Shoulders to trade paintings for the pledge that the recipient will “smile at strangers more often.” (The Trib, clearly an anti-smile establishment, punished him by calling him “Bret.”)

Speaking of giving away your work for free, literary agent Nathan Bransford asks: does it pay?

And does it pay for a city in revival to offer artist space for free? Fall River is about to test the theory. Artists can apply to take over empty storefronts, rent-free (they do pay utilities), in return for staying open to the public at designated times. The Herald News has the story.

As we approach election day, CultureGrrl makes a heartfelt plea to the next administration: end this long national nightmare and revive of National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowships for all disciplines!

Speaking of NEA, it’s rolling out a new program to support new plays, and the first group of selections and finalists have been announced. Congrats to Massachusetts artists Lydia Diamond and Anne Gottlieb - both created works named as finalists.

The literary blog The Millions probes how a settlement between Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers could pave the way for major changes in book publishing. Most notably, out-of-print or impossible-to-find literature could be made available in digital versions or through print-on-demand technology.

Anyone out there know a William Young, formerly (and maybe still?) of Winchester? Authorities are trying to find him: they’ve found the George Benjamin Luks painting somebody pinched from him 37 years ago!

At HubArts, Joel Brown explores how an abandoned state mental hospital in Danvers has inspired hyperbolically creepy pastels by a Massachusetts artist.

Artists in the Berkshires can pick up marketing and business strategies in small business seminar for artists in Pittsfield.

Image: Jane Marsching, MCCALL GLACIER (2006), large-scale lightjet print. Jane’s digital prints are exhibited in Figments Imagination at Miller Block Gallery, through December 12.

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BEN BERMAN STEPHEN DIRADO JANE GILLOOLY CHUCK HOLTZMAN ARIEL KOTKER JULIE LEVESQUE JANE MARSCHING ANDREW NEUMANN MONICA RAYMOND SALVATORE SCIBONA DEB TODD WHEELER JOAN WICKERSHAM

… are coming soon to a reading, exhibition, screening, award ceremony, or publication near you.

(I.e. they’re all featured in our November 2008 Fellows Notes, which we just posted).

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If only the walls could talk. Well apparently they will at the Worcester Art Museum starting this Thursday.

The provocative artist-activist collaborative THINK AGAIN (David John Attyah and S.A. Bachman) are at it again. Working in the longstanding tradition of agitprop artists, they have created a new work called Actions Speak. Upon receiveing their comission, THINK AGAIN rolled up their collective sleeves and completed a 67′ long mural at the Worcester Art Museum(WAM) as part of the Wall at WAM series. Action Speaks is the 7th project in the WAM series.

Debuting the week before the presidential election, THINK AGAIN’s Actions Speak aims to promote dialogue between art and public response as well as between global reality and local action. The project combines text, photography, drawing, etching, sculpture, and digital design. And apparently it is also the first Wall at WAM project to utilize both the museum’s interior wall and exterior faade (where a projection will be on view after dark during public evening hours on the 3rd Thursday of each month).

Image: Wall at Worcester Art Museum: “Actions Speak, detail” by THINK AGAIN (David John Attyah and S.A. Bachman) 2008, inkjet on paper, 17 x 67 feet. (FY99 MCC Photography Fellows)

Photo Credits: Images courtesy of The Worcester Art Museum

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At Kino-Eye are nifty photos from the Berwick Research Institute’s recent Artist Encampment on Bumpkin Island. Ten groups of artists embarked to the Boston Harbor island with only the art supplies on their backs to “homestead” and adapt their creative ideas over five days. Berwick’s website called the project “part residency, part survivalist experiment, and fully impressionable, malleable, speculative and reflective.”

Recently, the Mellon Foundation announced it has awarded $10 million in organizational grants to support new plays. I’m amused by Culture Monster’s take on the announcement: “(With) state arts budgets being slashed as though they were screaming victims in a horror movie, every donated dollar helps.” Alas, no Massachusetts institutions were granted, but Massachusetts playwrights have been supported by some of the funded orgs recently, Sundance Institute named Kirsten Greenidge a Time Warner Storytelling Fellow, the Playwrights Center is currently hosting Monica Raymond as one of its Jerome Fellows, and Steppenwolf Theater Company produced Melinda Lopez’s play Sonya Flew in the 2006/07 season.

The theater world being an opinionated sort of place, it shouldn’t surprise you that not everyone was thrilled by Mellon’s move.

It appears that the worlds of Massachusetts photographer Sage Sohier are nearly perfect in the eyes of the We Can’t Paint photography blog.

Sly as ever, Alex Ross riffs on the intersection between contemporary composers and presidential politics, at The Rest Is Noise. (Don’t miss the YouTube clip; strictly on aesthetic, nonpartisan terms, the original jazz score accompanying Sarah Palin’s interview is too brilliant to miss.) Speaking of politics, the Globe’s Off the Shelf book blog shares how three publishers (including two from Massachusetts) are getting directly involved in campaign donations.

Good job, The Healing Arts: New Pathways to Health! The 2006 documentary was honored with a “Best of the Festival” award from the Focus Film Festival. And also, good job to director Benjamin Mayer, and also to Vermont Arts Exchange, who produced. Oh, and good job to us (MCC). Cuz we co-produced. So, an inclusive good job.

Rejoicing in fifth anniversary-hood, Chicks Make Flicks screens The Axe in the Attic, which takes documentary filmmakers Lucia Small and Ed Pincus on a 60-day road trip from New England to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Thursday, October 30, 7 PM at MIT (77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge Room 6-120).

Exploring the indie film experience a little further… a California cinematographer discusses creative shooting and lighting decisions for an ultra-cheap indie shoot. (Props to the Filmmaker Magazine blog for linking to this first.)

Any arts administrators out there? Andrew Taylor has composed your theme song.

The old writing workshop chestnut “that’s dated” fails to hold up under poet and editor Elisa Gabbert’s scrutiny, at the Ploughshares blog.

(Did you catch the acrostic? Yipeee!!)

Image: Andrew Neumann, HAL (VERTICAL CONVERSATION) (2001), wood, motor, micro-processor, camera, LCD screen, 36 in x 12 in x 8 in. Andrew, a 2003 Sculpture/Installation finalist, exhibits kinetic sculptures in “The Last Picture Show” at AXIOM Center for New and Experimental Media in Boston, October 24-December 13. Opening reception Friday, October 24, 6 PM, artist talk Saturday, December 13, 3:30 PM.

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News about our past fellows and finalists just keeps materializing, like florescent jellyfish in seawater (and didn’t florescent jellyfish just win somebody a Nobel Prize? So there’s gotta be some good karma in those critters.)

Here are a few of the recent updates to the October Fellows Notes:

Director Juan Mandelbaum (Film & Video Finalist ‘07) has five screenings of his stirring documentary Nuestros Desaparecidos (Our Disappeared) at the Museum of Fine Arts, October 16-November 1. Our Disappeared is a highly personal investigation of the military kidnapping and torture of Argentinian women between 1976 and 1983. Juan will be present at each screening, along with a number of special guests.

Elizabeth Hughey (Poetry Fellow ‘08) and Michael Teig (Poetry Fellow ‘08) will read as part of the jubilat/Jones Reading Series. Theyll read Sunday, October 19, 3 PM, at the Jones Library in Amherst. A Q&A will follow the free reading.

Masako Kamiya (Painting Fellow ‘06) is among the artists exhibiting in the 2008 Dorchester Open Studios, Saturday October 25 and Sunday October 26.

Andrew Mowbray’s (Sculpture/Installation Finalist ‘05) solo show Tempest Prognosticator just closed at Miami’s Gallery Diet.

Deb Todd Wheeler’s (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ‘03) latest project, The Launch, is part of the exhibit Body Prop at the University of Northern Iowa, through Sunday, October 26. Curator Erica Duffy explains that the four participating artists “present objects that negotiate the relationship between the body and its environment.” Also, Deb is showing drawings and models in Figment’s Imagination at Miller Block Gallery, along with work by Tanit Sakakini and Jane D. Marsching (Photography Finalist ‘03). October 17-November 29, opening reception Oct. 17, 6 PM.

Read the full Fellows Notes.

Image: Installation view of THE LAUNCH, Deb Todd Wheeler (work in progress)

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Using little more than some plastic bags and tape, street artist Joshua Allen Harris has created an amazing array of inflatable animal sculptures.

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Click to see a video of HIS ROOM AS HE LEFT IT, an ongoing installation by Ariel Kotker (Sculpture/Installation Fellow ‘07)

And, we’re in business.

We’ve posted guidelines and the online application for the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s 2009 Artist Fellowships Program.

This year, the fellowships offer grants of $10,000 (and finalist awards of $1000) as direct support to individual artists in recognition of artistic excellence.

The current eligible categories are Crafts, Film & Video, Music Composition, Photography, Playwriting, and Sculpture/Installation. Deadline is December 5, 2008.

You may be interested to know that the program has been around, almost continuously and in one form or another, since 1974. Hundreds of artists, many of local and national prominence, have received direct support.

Recent fellows include Rania Matar (Photography Fellow ‘07) one of four finalists for the ICA Boston 2008 Foster Prize; Jane Gillooly (Film & Video Fellow ‘07) whose documentary Today the Hawk Takes One Chick has shown at ICA, MFA, and numerous film festivals nationally and internationally; and Shirish Korde (Music Composition Fellow ‘79, ‘01, ‘07) who has received commissions from Boston Musica Viva, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and the National Polish Symphony Orchestra, among others.

Check out these and other past awardees at our Gallery@MCC.

More about the Artist Fellowships Program.

Image: Still from a video of Ariel Kotker’s ongoing installation HIS ROOM AS HE LEFT IT.

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As we mentioned in the October Fellows Notes, Boston Cyberarts Festival founder/director George Fifield has curated Act/React, an exhibition of interactive installation art at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

So if you’re planning on being in Milwaukee sometime before January 11, go and see and re-, inter-, or otherwise act with it. The show is worth another mention here not just because it was curated by the brain behind a groundbreaking arts and new technologies festival, and not just because it looks, in the modern parlance, massively righteous (or was that modern 20 years ago, back when I was?), but also because it features an artist from these parts: Brian Knep (who’s appeared on this blog here and here). Brian is premiering his piece Healing Pool, a project of Creative Capital.

George and Brian are both contributors to an exhibition-specific blog called, forthrightly, the Act/React blog. Commenting on why he’s excited about the show, George writes:

Being director of the Boston Cyberarts Festival exposes me to other intersections between art and technology including electronic music, digital literature and dance and technology. But the growing use of interactivity in the arts has always been a main interest of mine…

… in many ways, this is my dream exhibition. I’ve followed the field of interactive installations for many years and have known and supported the work of most these artists before. Many of them are friends of mine. It was fascinating to watch the seismic shift that occurred when artists moved away from techie interfaces to allowing the audience to intuitively interact with the work with their own bodies.

His description “allowing the audience to intuitively interact with the work” is such a good description of Brian Knep’s installations. In his own post, Brian writes of some of the practical challenges of realizing such an intuitively interactive piece.

Anyway, good on ya, gents. And how massively righteous is it to know that when an art museum elsewhere in the country puts on a cutting-edge, interactive exhibition, innovative folks from our fair land are called on to participate?

Image: Brian Knep, HEALING #1 (2003), Computer, custom software, video projectors, video cameras, vinyl flooring. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

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The October Fellows Notes page is up, flush with tales of the daring artistic exploits of our fellows/finalists in near and far-away places, including:

• Kristin Bock’s adventures in new-book-land
• Brian Knep’s actions/reactions on the shores of Lake Michigan
• Caroline Knox’s intrigue with the KGB

Read the full Fellows Notes to see how it all ends!

Image: David Moore, FLIGHT I (2007), oil on linen, 72 in. x 72 in. David’s paintings are on exhibit in two shows this month: he’s part of “Blur the Line” at Clark Gallery in Lincoln (October 4-31) and has a solo show at Robert Steele Gallery in New York City (October 7-November 8).

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