Installing the Show!

This past weekend Craig, Hannah and I were in Cedar Rapids to install our show at Mt Mercy University.  Thanks to Andy and Heidi for all their help and hospitality.

Andy helping with the floor piece

The show is open now and though I wasn't able to take any finished photos, I have posted some                     installation shots. 

Thank you student workers!

There will be an Artist's Lecture at 4pm, October 11 and a Reception from 5-7pm the same evening at the Janalyn Hanson White Gallery at Mt Mercy.

These took up most of the time

Porcelain rods or 'leaves', cages and objects

The first in a set of 4

The work is up now and as soon as I get some finished images I will post them.  Thanks to everyone for their help.

Upcoming Studio Works and Other News

I have been running around all summer traveling, but am now back and ready post again.  Craig and I completed a residency in Alpena, Michigan at the Alpena Wildlife Sanctuary.  It was a great experience and many thanks to our wonderful hosts, Marcia and Avery as well as Karen and everyone else associated with the Sanctuary.                                                                                                                  

The Sanctuary is mostly wetlands and I have posted a few images from our many canoe outings

We have almost finished a body of work for our exhibition at Mt. Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, inspired by our residency.

Here are some studio shots of our work this summer in preparation for the show and I will post more once the show is up.

These are our unfinished floor installation pieces that Craig has painted with underglaze.  When finished whey will be integrated with  wood bases.

 These are porcelain leaf forms or rods that will be strung together with wood and other objects like the cage forms below.

 These are part of larger clusters of repeating forms that bring together nature forms and found objects.

 This September Craig and I will be showing at the Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.  The show opens on September 20th.   Here is a blurb from their website about the show and the hours and days. Here is a detail of our piece.

Echo/ Mississippi

Widely regarded as the state’s most prestigious showcase of contemporary Wisconsin visual art, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s Wisconsin Triennial returns September 21, 2013. The Triennial presents active Wisconsin artists and reflects a broad range of art representing current directions in contemporary visual art.

On September 20 at 6 pm, an opening night reception for the 2013 Wisconsin Triennial will be held as a part of an MMoCA Nights event. Join the artists and other art supporters at this celebration of Wisconsin contemporary art. Enjoy music, refreshments, and hors d'ouevres on the rooftop sculpture garden. Admission is free for museum members and is $10 for non-members.

We made this short video about our work together.  I think it is also available on MMOCA's website.

I will be posting more in the days to come before we head to Iowa. But I leave you with Midwest roadside attractions.........

 

 You have to love cement dinosaurs and man eating giant snakes!

NCECA Exhibitions and stuff

Craig and I had a busy NCECA, with two exhibitions to curate and organize and the Archie Bray Foundation Exhibition, it was pretty exhausting.  Craig is still a bit tired since he spent his whole spring break driving to Houston and setting up the shows with Peter Morgan.  I just have some gallery shots for now and some images of my work, but I have to begin with this image as a shout out to Peter and his awesome endurance with making these all come together.  This is from the Location exhibition at the Spring Street Studios in Houston, TX, curated and organized by Craig Clifford.

Philly Cheese State of Mind

Craig Clifford, Blackfoot, Detail

Gallery view of Location with my work on the left and Benjie Heu on the right.

 It was a crazy week so these are the images I have with the new wall sections of this piece, but I hope to create a work for a larger space.

Debbie Kupinsky, Landscape Memory

Detail, Landscape Memory

The drawings are from the Fox River path in Appleton, WI where the industrial and the paper making past come together with the landscape.  Here is a more general shot of the show, but I will post more tonight as well.

Location

The Biota exhibition was curated by myself and Peter Morgan and was at the Motherdog Studios in Houston, TX.  It was a very 'raw' space, but was a great experience to work with a great variety of artists.  Here are a few shots of the show and my piece, Echo/ Mississippi with motion activated sound.

Location

Location 

This piece is about memory, landscape and objects.  It also is an investigation of the transformation of the ordinary through the process of making.  The piece consists of original knick knack objects, mostly birds and then their replicas in porcelain.  There are not fully formed in some way, but are left to carry the marks of the hand and the idea of incomplete memory. This has been an ongoing piece that I have bee altering and adding to over time.

Echo/Mississippi

Detail

I am going to add image of the rest of the work later tonight, but have to get home right now.  

Echo at the Caestecker Gallery

My current exhibition is up at Ripon College in Ripon, WI at the Caestecker Gallery.  The show consists of 4 installation groups and deals with the theme of memory and states of being.  Below is a link to the review in the Appleton, Post Crescent.

http://www.postcrescent.com/article/20130209/FON12/302090074/Kupinksky-showing-Ripon-College-s-Caestecker-Gallery

February 1 through March 1, 2013GALLERY HOURS:
Tue – Fri: 1-5 p.m. & 7 – 9 p.m.
Sat – Sun: 2 to 6 p.m. and during evening performances

In this piece, Artifact, I wanted to play with objects as metaphors in a way that got them off the wall so that the light and shadows become part of the piece.  The wooden parts are made from broken apart furniture and scrap wood.  I like how the piece has a sense of movement as ceramic 'drawings' of ordinary objects come to life.

Artifact, porcelain, wood, flocking

Artifact, Detail

Landscape Memory is something I started working on with my husband, Craig.  I wanted to get the images off the wall and onto the floor in a way that surrounded the viewer.  The drawings are the intrusion of the man made and industrial world.  These are drawn from the industrial buildings and forms down by the river where I walk.

Landscape Memory,  ceramic, wood, bricks and pen and paper drawings

Landscape Memory

Echo Mississippi is a wall installation in progress.  Found figurines, ceramic birds and their hand sculpted porcelain replicas sit on shelves.  Some of the birds chirp when you approach as a homage to the bird song in the Mississippi, but not as good.  The piece is about how we mediate the world through objects.  The birds are a primary memory for me about a place, but how to we filter that as time goes by and how to the objects we surround ourselves with act as metaphors and markers for memory.

Echo Mississippi, porcelain, found objects

Echo Mississippi, detail

Echo Mississippi, detail

Right now these are the best images I have, but I am going to post some better ones on my site, www.debbiekupinsky.com once I reshoot.  This last wall installation is called the Clock Cycle.  The figures and approach to color are symbolic for how we transform at different times in our lives. 

Clock Cycle , porcelain, flocking

Clock Cycle 2, porcelain, flocking

Clock Cycle 3, stoneware, flocking

 I promise better images soon.  This has been a busy month needless to say.  

Craig Clifford at Pewabic Pottery

Craig's solo exhibition opens today at Pewabic Pottery in Detroit, MI.  New Work: Polychromatic.  This work focuses on color and the transformation of functional objects and materials.  Most of the molds used to make these pieces are basically trash, given away from garages or storage buildings.  Check out the show if you are in the area.

January 18- March 17,  2013, Opening, Friday, January 18th, 6-8pm

10125 E. Jefferson, Detroit, MI, 48214

313-626-2000

Gallery Hours- Monday-Saturday 10am-6pm

Sundays 12pm-4pm

More images to come!

Kurt Anderson Visits with Bootsie

Potter Kurt Anderson stopped by on his way from the Archie Bray to the Hudson Valley in New York State.  He has 10 boxes of pottery is his truck and pots stuffed into every nook and cranny.  I forced him to take this picture of himself for the blog.

Look for some of the best pots at the Clay Studio of Philadelphia.  Kurt's imagery is inspired by cartoons, street art and advertising logos.  Folk art is a big influence for him and his work really reminds me of cartoons and the way they illustrate simplified narratives.  He has a rule against putting narratives into the images and randomly assigns images to his pots.  I get the idea that he wants whoever owns these to create their own narrative.

Just in time for the Abraham Lincoln movie.

The pots with the black figures are new and come from incorporating a past process but updated with color.  They are carved slip or scrafitto and oxidized in the soda kiln to cone 11.  After the residency Kurt is going to continue using the scrafitto and color along with his incising process.

When Kurt gets back to New York he will be cleaning up from Hurricane Sandy.  I would write more, but midnight is approaching and I have to get up early.  Kurt will be doing a demo and a talk at UW Oshkosh tomorrow morning.

Collection- A Collaborative Exhibition

Thanks to Siena Heights University, Klemm Gallery, the art faculty and especially Natalie and Tim for having Craig and I as visiting artists in conjunction with our collaborative exhibition,  Collection.  We started this work at our residency this summer, 2012 at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana and though we didn't come away with many finished pieces, we were able to work through the collaborative process and begin working out ideas we developed further at home in Wisconsin.

Collection, Gallery View

Both of us are interested in how objects act as intermediaries between our lived experience, memory and transformation.  I think that we ultimately found ways to respond and elaborate upon object images in an improvisational way that allowed each of us to follow that pathway to wherever it led.

Collection, Gallery View

Collection, Gallery View

Two of the three pieces in Eden? were really the only finished pieces from the summer.  We made some of the flowers in Floriculture, but never saw it complete until Craig assembled part of it in our garage before we left for Michigan.  We had to assemble the work in the space to really see it finished.

Eden?, stoneware and wood,  2012

The collaborative process forced us to work in a different ways and allowed for the pursuit of ideas that didn't directly correlate with what we had been doing in our individual work.  Eden? was an extension of an idea I had started with in the winter of 2012 that explored color and image as symbol as well as allowed me to play with using the plastic quality of the material instead of subjugating it through craftsmanship.  This piece was a starting point for our collaboration and allowed us to begin working together and thinking out how our various processes and images might function together.

Eden?, detail

Floriculture was an exploration of working with the material in a more direct and playful way as well as a way to define a space without the heaviness that often comes with clay.  Craig, our former student Elyse and I made the pieces together over a period of time and I like the idea of various hands and experiences being brought together under the umbrella of the same idea.  

Floriculture, stoneware and wood,  2012

Sometimes I would cringe at the flowers they were making, but I just had to go with it and once they were finished  we saw how the variation of touch and form in the flowers really made the work more compelling.  The colors act as a counterpoint to the lack of color on the walls and is something that we are interested in expanding as a more participatory element in the work.

Floriculture, detail

Plush has a relationship with Replica/ Echo in that the individual pieces are things in themselves and the shadow of these things.  Most of the materials are stuffed animals that we bought in bags from the thrift store.  These things were sad and bittersweet and seemed to be in the same category of sad miniature teacups left behind in the antique mall.  The dipped and imbedded pieces are really the shadows of the things as the original item is destroyed in the making, while the real bundled objects are the obscured counterpoint to these images.  The undipped pieces are bundled and obscured with yarn and other bric a brac some of which are repeated in Replica/ Echo.

Plush,  porcelain, fabric, mixed media and found objects

I do think that being surrounded by a toddler and their fixation on stuffed animals influenced this work. They carry an emotional weight that is eventually cast away until the animals themselves end up in a big plastic bag in the thrift store.

Plush, Detail

Replica/ Echo started with Craig's coke bottles and other common images from mass culture, like gremlins, gnomes and other objects that are often imbedded in his pieces.  He wanted to use them in the work, but I was hesitant to say the least since a coke bottle seemed to have no gravitas. Once I began to think about it in relationship to drawing, I began to see the possibilities in incorporating and transforming objects that announce their ordinariness.  Craig's individual work is an investigation of the transformation of images, so working with this idea in a different way seemed fitting.

Replica/ Echo, porcelain and found object,  2012

I was struck how these objects that seemed so banal were the same objects I often put together to create a still life for my students.  I thought about how the process of drawing can force the investigation of the mundane object and through that process transform it.  We decided to create a grouping of ordinary objects in a series that explored the thing itself, the cast image and the 'sketched' copy in porcelain.  Craig wanted to use forms from the hardware store as presentation, but instead decided to make tactile replicas that were cast to create multiples.

Most of the objects are from the thrift store or are figurines and images we have used in our work.  I've always had an interest in the idea of ordinariness and was able to incorporate objects that didn't really seem compelling at first, like the coke bottle or the furby, but that become compelling during the process of repetition and drawing.  

Collection, Gallery View

Reclamation Series 3, porcelain,  2012

This way of creating collections and forms with repeating shapes informed much of the other work as well.  The sculptural forms in the Reclamation Series were created with cast found bottles, objects and ceramic waste material from the studio.  The individual forms echo some of the pieces in Replica/ Echo and also play with the idea of function in that they and almost all the other objects in the exhibition share a relationship to the body and need the body or an action to animate them.

Tangible 3, porcelain and string,  2012

These are images of the Tangible Series and for me all of the pieces have to do with touch and the animation of objects.  In my own work I like to use objects that carry implications, such as keys or locks, but Craig has also made tools and other implements that are like extensions of the hand and these can also carry multiple implications.  I began by making the hammer and moved on to the ax or hatchet while Craig cast these images from found objects, I sketched them out in porcelain.  

Tangible 2, porcelain and string,  2012

Tangible 1, porcelain, string and ribbon,  2012

This last piece, Garland was a three way collaboration between myself, Elyse and Craig.  I have been making flower rounds in my own work and Craig and I created a collaborative flower form at the Bray, and though we never used it, it acted as a starting point for these pieces.  They allowed me to veer away from the 'crafted' image and rather explore the direct influence of the hand as well as give over their finishing to someone else.

Garland, porcelain,  2012

Garland,  detail

I think of the work and exhibition as a work in progress and a way to open myself up to different ways of seeing and working.  Teaching drawing and foundations has expanded my interest in materiality and the presentation of objects.  Although all of the pieces are 'crafted' in some way, I am not necessarily interested in craftsmanship and facility with material being the focus of what I am making and am gravitating towards letting the images and material speak for itself.

I will be posting more work on my website after the school term is over in mid November at www.debbiekupinsky.com and you can view Craig's work at www.craigcliffordceramics.com.  His solo show goes up at Pewabic Pottery in Detroit on January 25th, 2013.

Thanks to everyone at the Archie Bray Foundation for all their great support and being as wonderful as ever.