Jennifer Peel

Wall Explorations
Jennifer Peel
2008
top image - latex paint on wall
lower image - graphite on wall

Valleys

Valleys

Lauren Vanni
2008

Porcelain

28" x 27" x 21"

My work is a continuous process that involves tactile, meditative, and repetitive motions. Whether an entire environment made up parts or intimate objects to hold in your hand, most of my work possesses a sense of place, of landscape, and of belonging in their stillness. Forms are reduced to their essential shape, free of decoration and with limited surface treatment. Simplicity of form allows for subtleties to be explored. The work often involves visual contrasts. It is soft and hard, solid and hollow, identical and different, heavy and delicate, accidental and deliberate, playful and serious, representational and abstract. It cannot be easily categorized or named. Some work looks as if it emerged independent of human touch while other work reveal traces of human mark making and process. The clean interior of these organic forms contrast with the marked exterior from objects that created the form. For me, these forms can become containers of landscape: valleys, ledges, cliffs, rolling hills and plains. They are at once organic and geometric, places of security and spaces of freedom. In their material, scale, and repetition, they create a peaceful environment. “ . . . [W]hen my art is moving it is out of order. Stillness, silence, and peace are treasures which our mass culture is endlessly trying steal from us…If my work offers a sense of order, peace, and stillness to anyone, then it has succeeded.” -Carl Andre

A Collection of Dreams and Objects

Right now I am searching for an edge between what is real and what is unreal. I am challenging the spectator to work a little bit, to reap the reward of using his or her imagination. My intention is to capture the experiences that move me in and out of reality as I work, and to share these experiences with my audience. The plaster towers can be all at once rigid, structural, and familiar. At the same time they are strange, precarious, and potentially fragile, having no armature and balancing on top of one another. Their active qualities lie not only in the tension created by fragility and balance, but also in an activated surface texture adorning live sculptural lines that trace space without the restriction of an armature.

Mark Donohue

2008