Resident Spotlight: Jorge Palacios

Logan Rushford: So, tell me a little bit about your art. Did you grow up in the San Antonio area?

Jorge Palacios: I grew up in San Antonio. But my family is actually from Central Mexico, around Mexico City. Which is a little different because most people in South Texas are from that region or Northern Mexico. However, I grew up there and then earned two bachelor's degrees in Rhode Island. I moved around between there and here. I graduated in 2020 during the Pandemic. So I was back home for a little bit. And I worked in North Carolina as a glassblower for a hot minute. And some residencies. I've been in the academia grind for a while. I’m actually gonna be doing a PhD

LR: Very cool! What are you going to be doing your PhD in?

JP: Anthropology. Yeah, I came from doing this project in a Master’s Program about SpaceX and how the Starbase research site was affecting South Texas, around Brownsville. And now that issue has grown exponentially. 

 LR: That's really interesting so you talked to people around that area a lot?

JP: Yeah I talked to a lot of activists and Engineers. That's what I plan to do my dissertation on. It works kind of tangentially with my art practice. I still like going back to Texas, it’s where my family is. But I’ve mostly been bouncing around a lot. Especially since the Pandemic, I feel like everyone is trying to figure out some stability and make ends meet, especially as an artist. 

LR: I totally get that, that's why I’m pursuing a master’s in art, hopefully next year. Gotta stay on that Academic grind. 

JP: I totally get that. It's like you do that or you do something more commercial. But that ends up shaping your practice so much. 

LR: It really does. Guess you're on that academic grind as well. Tell me more about your art background.

JP:  Yeah. My artistic background is in glass blowing from undergrad. And I still kind of maintain doing glass blowing. It felt like it was the one opportunity for jobs I could have gotten post undergrad. 

LR: Yeah, it's a really niche job. I don't often see a lot of glass blowers.

JP: Yeah, it's a hard discipline. It takes many years to get right. And there aren’t many schools that offer it. So it is hard to train to do. In my undergrad, I feel like I did so much of it. But, in my master’s program, I took a step back from it. Recently, I have been making things with foraged plants.

LR: That's really cool.

JP: Yeah, I think there's still that craft element that's there. I’ve felt motivated by the environment and making paper out of grass. I made paper from invasive grass during my MFA, and I’ve been creating sculptures out of Willow branches.

LR: I love that.

JP: I’m trying to get a bit more familiar with the terrain here in Chattanooga. One plant that I think is interesting here is Kudzu. I've seen a lot of people trying to repurpose it since it used a lot in Southeast Asia as fiber and medicine. 

LR: It's definitely our most infamous invasive species around here.

JP: It's really interesting. When I started thinking about my practice with plants, it was a lot about history, settler colonialism, embodied memory, and land practices. I feel like after doing all the stuff with SpaceX and engineers, and how people fantasize about the future, I wanted to reorient and think about technologies that can exist in the far future, which would be things that are more land-based. I mean, this Kudzu is going to be here forever. It’s like culture will be shaped forever by it, just like it always has been… but, yeah, that’s how I got into grass paper, thinking about more organic futures.

LR: I totally see that. The environment in whatever form will be here after us as it was before.

JP: Yeah, and I feel like a lot of art practices become expensive and wasteful. Especially glass blowing, it is so expensive and is the most energy-intensive material. It’s been nice to de-scale and reinterpret what craft can do. I am just thinking a lot about how craft can inform a person's relationship to the landscape.

LR: I love that. I’m constantly thinking about similar things in my practice and how the landscape can shape our emotions.

JP: One thing about growing up in Texas and America is how western culture and suburbia is centered around alienation of the land you live on. Growing up in Texas, I had no relationship with the land because it's so hot and prickly. And, it’s so spread out, you're so car-dependent. The landscape becomes this thing you don't even know, which is so different than when I would go to Mexico. And a lot of people at least know what grows there. And how to eat things like cactus or use different plants for medicine. There’s so much craft there, and thinking about this disturbed place of America in comparison. It’s like, where do we go from here?

LR: I totally get it. America can drive me up a wall sometimes, especially with our land practices.

JP: Yeah, it's like Kudzu and all these harmful land management practices America does to the land are so alienating. I’ve been doing a lot of these social sculptures too. I also use forage materials and projection work. I do like these projected bonfires on the paper. I kinda want to do it here.

LR: I’d love to see it.

JP: Stove Works is such a cool space. There are so many areas I could use. Outside, there are all these romantic vignettes of nature and industry.

LR: I think it's so cool. I love walking around Chattanooga and looking at all these little corners, as if they're a mini-world. 

JP: I gravitate towards all these little worlds, like the puddles that form on the concrete foundation out there after it rains. They're so reflective, it's so cool.

LR: What are you currently working on?

JP: Mostly making paper. I just got done with the willow sculptures I mentioned. They are like the hoops I make into domes. They mostly fit like small children. But people can go inside and interact with them. I’ve also made the grass paper food containers. Thinking a lot about how materials can be used.

LR: I think a lot of product packaging goes to waste.

JP: Yeah, it's wasteful. I’ve also been doing a lot of writing here. I think this idea of alienation, especially connected to SpaceX, has inspired me to write a lot lately. I have all these things on my mind while I’m doing the foraging, and at the end of the day, I’ve just been thinking about what an alternative to that aesthetic could be, like Techno future. Not that it’s all bad, it's just not land-oriented in a good way.

LR: No, like none of it is sustainable.

JP: Yeah, it’s very short-term. I've just been interested in what a different kind of version of the future could look like. And more may be based on community and indigenous land practices. It’s been a process of healing for me, too, thinking about a more land-based future. Even with the invasive species like the Pompous grass I was working with. It felt like I wasn’t just transforming it, but I was transforming myself while making it. It's more about relation and community in writing.

LR: Nature really is a healer.

JP: Definitely! Nature is a social space. 

LR: Exactly! I really enjoy the variety and thoughtfulness of your practice.

JP: Thank you! It’s been exciting to combine technology with traditional craft. I love installation work like my bread and butter. I love playing with light, which comes a lot from my glass background. I made these game controllers out of blown glass and would put all the electronics in there, so they were functional. 

LR: I like how you combine these two worlds. It's really interesting.

JP: Thank you. I really enjoy thinking about these different versions of the future.

Jorge’s Artist Statement:

In my artistic practice, I explore foraging, digital media, glass, and installation to investigate discursive relationships between land, kinship relations, displacement, and decolonization. I am interested in unconventional forms of speculative technology, science fiction, and experimental new media to find what can be learned in ambiguous spaces for worldbuilding practices. This includes seeing where Indigenous futurity, traditional craft, and spirituality lie in an increasingly technoscientific world. My practice is process-oriented, involving ethnography, craft, physical computing, and video games. This nonlinear workflow leads to unusual connections, taking substrates such as soil, molten glass, grasses, and ephemera to be combined with intangible phenomena - light, projection, computation, and moving image. By combining these components in installations, I aim to sculpturally gesture towards ways of being with the environment thousands of years into the future. I often work in response to place through foraging, as it is my principle to treat land as a biopolitical and agential participant in art making. This can look like creating grass paper for projection or pressing molten glass into collected soil. I use location as an opportunity to recontextualize spaces and dismantle the concept of terra nullius and private property that is implicit in Western political frameworks. From these materials, my installations may look like playing with a meteorite-like game controller or exploring a past atrocity by embodying an interactive sci-fi historical narrative. Within this active participation, perhaps space can be made for curiosity and vulnerability that leaves viewers transformed, reconfiguring their perceptions and preconceptions of reality.

Jorge’s website

Resident Highlight: Kate Greenwell

Cam Clark: So, hi, Kate.

Kate Greenwell: Hi.

CC:  What brings you here to Stove Works.

KG:  I am a resident fellow, so basically I'll be here for six months instead of the normal one to three, like the typical residency. And I kind of am from Chattanooga, usually the resident fellow is. I graduated from the University of Tennessee with a BFA, so I get a studio while I'm here, and my main job is communication and scheduling between the residents, but it's also an opportunity for me to meet visiting artists while I'm moving into the next stage of my life after undergrad. 

CC: It's good to see that you have so much work up. I'd like to talk a little bit about your collage practice,

KG: Of course, as you can see, just from sitting in my studio, I've got two different paths. But as I'm working on a lot of writing, I don't feel that they're as disconnected as they might look. So at Stove Works, I've kind of started two new projects, one of them is text and image based collage work, and the other one is a very large and fragmented self portrait of myself, highlighting all of my tattoos. Originally they weren't connected in my mind. I was just kind of going on two different paths, one collage based, one painting based. But as I began to work on them in the same space, I realized a lot of my work comes from seeking out symbols, text or images, and just kind of saying, Look at this, look at this and what it means, and that can exist in the sense of me, just taking that symbol, taking those words, and putting it into a new environment. For example, the tattoo pieces. They’re kind of like awkward, cartoony expressions of my own body highlighting areas that you wouldn't normally see. I'm giving a sense of intimacy in them, but I'm also just highlighting the words and symbols that are on my body that highlight where I am in life in a contemporary world where a lot of young people are doing tattoos piercings, but it's also just a nod to, like the amount of ephemera I have scattered on my body, and creates a map of myself through self portraiture. 

 Then completely on the other side of the other side of my practice, I've got these minimal collage works that I combine with text, and I am often deriving that text from the image archive. So in my studio I've got this giant library. I call it my archive, which is just books that I source my images from for my collages. And I'm very particular. People are always asking about content, but it's less about that, and it's more about the type of image. I'm very drawn to a specific paper type. It's like, it's aged black and white, kind of has a matte texture.

CC: kind of like a newsprint.

KG: Yeah, it's like newsprint material. I just think it reads really well on canvas, and I think it reads really well with letterpress. Letterpress being like an older medium, an older manual medium, that was normally done on newsprint. So I think those two crafts kind of speak to each other well. But yeah, my large image collection, I take the picture that I'm going to use for the collage piece, and I create a poem for it based on the original caption of the image.

CC: So the image informs the text? 

KG: Yeah, the image informs the poem. For example, there’s this insane Hunter’s Digest book in front of me right now, but some of the captions are just incredible. Okay, so I’ll let you take a picture of this. But it reads: “Arthur shot this nice Montana mule deer after a long sneak that placed him directly above bedded buck on the rocky ledge.” Like, that’s kind of poetic. 

CC: It's kind of poetic yeah.  

KG: And the image is just gorgeous. It's jarring imagery, but at the same time, it's got that paper texture that I'm looking for that works so well on the matte linen. Yeah, I'll just let you take a picture of this, because it's an insane book. But, I let the book that the images come from influence the text directly. And usually I, actually, I do mount the original caption of the image onto the back of the collage piece, and I can show you that as well, but it's, it's like a hidden thing, and I it's either personal to myself because I know that it's on there, or I'll show somebody if they're in my studio, but it's something that's not meant to be seen, but I guess meant to be talked about.

CC: Is there anything that you would like to plug before we go?

KG: Yes, so basically there’s this gallery. During my time at Stove Works, I've been working on this curatorial project inspired by a lot of my friends that I made in January who work for a gallery called Wraymour and Flanigan, which is another DIY gallery, and they just inspired me to create a place inside of Stove Works. It’s called above the water fountain because it is above a water fountain. It’s a little alcove where I let artists that I’ve been in communication with whose practices are really important or inform my own practice exhibit. We do monthly exhibitions, solo shows where I highlight people that are important artists in the southeast, important to me, important to Stove Works, and just give them a place to showcase their work that they have in a smaller scale, and also an opportunity that is hard to find in a town where there's a lot of Gallery galleries, and this is more of a DIY creative space. 

Instagram: @katesigridgreenwell
Website: katesigridgreenwell.com

Resident Spotlight: Hannah Hill

Hannah Hill in her studio at Stove Works. Hannah was in Residence from April through June of 2025.

Cam Clark: Hi! I’m Cam

Hannah Hill: Hi, I’m Hannah.

CC: So, you were born in Alabama, yeah?

HH: I was, yeah. I'm originally from Alabama, and I’m based in New York. I’ve been there about 11/12 years now.

CC: Awesome, so what themes inspire your practice?

HH: I would say, my family has been in Appalachia for about 16 generations, like a really long time. With that, there are a lot of questions I think, like, have they been poor the whole time? In that vein, there are a lot of themes of farmland and ecology, and familial rumors. Also mysteries, like this specific brand of like evangelical magic- you know, my great great uncle was like a prophet- that kind of stuff is what I like to call farm magic. A lot of that was really interesting to me, and kind of set me up to be a magical thinker. So, when I’m painting, I’m really compiling a visual story that’s not necessarily a story, not even necessarily a narrative, just something that feels like it could dismantle more about myself. Identity issues are really interesting to me.

CC: So it's sort of self-portraiture in a way as well. 

HH: Definitely, yeah, but a lot of the figures are faceless, or like more of a vessel. I don’t want it to be completely inaccessible to people, but I do want it to have a fun, interesting background. 

CC: Yeah, I think the colors and the figures you’re using, they feel very fun for sure. 

HH: Thank you! I used to be a little bit darker, yeah, and then, I don’t know, I think my own humor has caught up to the work in a way that's interesting.

CC: Are all of these paintings that you’ve done here at Stove Works?

HH: No, that would be a feat! I had to pick up a show that was being dismantled in my hometown. So my mom’s a painter too, so I did a dual show with her. It was so fun.

CC: That sounds really cool.

HH: It was really cool. So I went to pick up the work, and I thought like, I can never just have everyone out and looking at my work since in New York, the studio spaces are so small. SO yeah I thought, why not put them up on the wall. So really, I’ve only been working on this one at Stove Works. I’ll be here for three months, hopefully I’ll make more than that. I think, for me, one of the struggles of a longer residency is a particularly personal struggle right now. I’m having a really cool transition in my life where I can do creative work for my money instead of bartending. But now I have this problem of, like, how do I balance my time? And then how do I shift out of my illustrative style, like editorial illustrations and book covers and that kind of thing, back into my painting. I’m sure you’ve probably noticed that the paintings up on the wall, the older ones, are more painterly and this one has been sort of tight. I think that happened because I’ve been deep in my transition out of just doing illustrations because I haven't had a studio for like a year.

CC: So yeah, the scale really affects how you’re working.

HH: Yeah.

CC: So, what are you planning to work on during your time at Stove Works, do you have a specific body in mind? 

HH: I don’t have a specific body in mind, but I have a backlog of little prompts that I write myself that sort of end up being prose poetry. But they’re just little ideas that I write down that represent what I’m thinking visually at the time, and inevitably I forget what it was I was thinking about. Some of them come from dreams or something, and I just use it as a prompt later. So it’s like a cold prompt that I’ve written for myself in a way. So I have a whole lot of those I would like to act upon. I am also working on a graphic novel that’s sort of between the two worlds. My money making (illustration) world, and my practice world. I want to get finished while I'm here. It’s a young adult psychological thriller about cryptids and the South.

CC: I would read that.

HH: Thank you

CC: Is there any of it out?

HH: Yeah, the start of it. I’m publishing it chapter by chapter on global comics. It's an app. It’s really cool. Actually, there’s a lot of garbage, but there’s some cool stuff. It’s like Deviant Art. So, I’ve been publishing it in a scrolling format, just redoing things and adjusting them for a phone screen. 

CC: That’s really cool, I mean, that's how a lot of people are looking at art nowadays.

HH: Exactly. It’s so new, you have to think about the rectilinear frame and scrolling. Yeah, an interesting format we live with.

CC: I wonder if it's going to stay like that forever.

HH: Hopefully we’ll switch it up at some point and we’ll have round screens. 

CC: Oh my gosh, round screens, I love it. 

HH: Just an idea!

CC: I’d like to talk a bit about your new painting. Do you have a title for it?

HH: No not right now. This painting- I had this fixation on researching medieval religious iconographies. Stuff like that is just visually interesting to me, so I like to compile these reference images. I came across these Mary Magdalenes that were covered in hair. So I was reading about it. It’s apparently Mary of Egypt- who was conflated with Mary Magdalene- but she was a hermit in the desert, and her clothes were off, she didn’t care about clothes anymore. Then God protected her purity by like, letting her body grow hair, except for the breast. For some reason. I am really aware she reads like teen Sasquatch right now, which is totally fine. I’m fine with that as well, because I’m already cryptid adjacent.

CC: Very Appalachian.

HH: Exactly, so I’m just leaning into it.

CC: This is a really good painting.

HH: Thank you, I’m most excited about the smiley faces and her stickers.

CC: Thanks for talking to me about your practice! Is there anything you'd like to plug?

HH: Oh, yeah, if you want to check out my graphic novel, Snag, you can read it on Global Comix. 

More information on Hannah:

Instagram: @serious_moonlite
Website: hannahhillart.com

Link to graphic novel: https://globalcomix.com/read/251106e7-1cd4-4528-9aa9-d7b41d8b5511/1

Resident Spotlight: Sarah Wagner

Sarah Wagner talking about her work with other residents in an open studio session. (Photo by Evan Bruce)

Evan Bruce: So you are a sculpture installation artist? Right. Would you say that's accurate? 

Sarah Wagner: I would say that's accurate. That's how I have been for many, many years. Things are shifting a little bit.

EB: How are you thinking about sculpture and installation differently than you did ten to fifteen years ago?

SW: I'm still interested in many of the same things. Right now, I guess it's like how to tell a story the best, and so right now, I'm thinking about it the way things have shifted, is that I've gone into drawing and book arts and writing. This is really my kind of work, usually balancing between material investigation and conceptual investigation. I'm really interested in this carpet that I got for free in dalton. So, I'm like, what does this do? It's part armature, but not, and then I'm really interested in gravitational forces and forces like physics. How do you make things stand up? How do you make something that shouldn't stand up, like some kind of, you know, plainer? Because things that are planer tend to be, like, really flaccid. Not able to hold their own form. And so then how do you do that? Yeah. And what are the ways that you can intervene at least in whatever the material is.

EB: I think as an artist, there's a lot of meaning in material that sometimes gets looked past

(Photo by Evan Bruce)

SW: Yeah, I mean, I don't know what I'm doing here. I've been out of the game for a while.

I'm trying to find who I am. So, I'm not coming from a place of great confidence. I'm more coming from fun and play and try to see what manifests. You know, we only have so much time on this earth. What do you do? What do you got?

EB: So just kind of taking it as it goes. 

SW: Absolutely, that's all I'm doing here. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. No idea. 

EB: You said you were out of the game for a number of years. You know, go go into as much detail as you want, but like, what happened with that? 

SW: Okay. So we lived in Detroit. We sort of realizing that our parents were getting to a place where they needed care, and nobody else was really able to step up. So we started trying to figure out a move because we had our business, we had our studio practices. We did construction, we bought half a city block. I mean, there was a lot. You know, it's like, how do we migrate ourselves down here? So we did, or we tried to come down here but we are kind of dividing our time. We came here Covid hit, but we still had all these jobs up in Detroit. We went up for a two week job to renovate a bathroom and halfway through that, I had excruciating pain. I thought that it was like an accidental overdose. My friend was a doctor and He was testing some meds on me, because I was having these breathing issues. Anyway, it turned out that my colon was completely blocked. It ended up being that I had to have a colostomy bag for nine months where I was not able to process my waste. All of a sudden, I had to go through chemo, I had another surgery where they reversed and, eating, It’s a prayer. Because I don't really have control over my body. But we couldn't move here. We were stuck in Detroit for a year because my health insurance was there. After that happened, we still were needed here. So we had to drive back, things got into, pretty intense caregiving. That's what the gift of this is for me. This is an incredible gift because I just have not had that ability to have the focus on this part of me, which, which can very easily not be as important as, say, having to build an in-law unit for a mother. Or, you know, make sure water is working or, get my kid to the thing. There's a lot of stuff. Our world isn't really–There's not a whole ton of support. And so it's–I was able to do that. I'm incredibly grateful, grateful for the opportunity. Being able to, to see someone at the end of their life and hold them that way is a gift of a magnitude that I would never give up. Yeah. So it's not something that I resent, but it has been just interesting to have this, this, you know, alienation on my part from this.

EB: Yeah. Definitely. How far of a drive is it from Detroit? 

SW: Eight hours. Eight hours. You can do it in eight hours. Yeah. It took me as long as seventeen when my kid was a baby.

EB: So you were doing that trip pretty often? 

SW: Yeah, we actually pretty much moved here–We're fully here. Things just got too much a year and a half ago. It was actually a year ago when we made the decision to fold it, I moved my medical stuff here. Before that, I was going up and back, which was just really hard because I have to do a lot of testing now, but it's great. I'm in the medical system. 

EB: I think about you and how you were talking about being “out of the game” I had just thought that that's like a pretty dramatic stop. I'm sure there's a deep story behind that. I'm sure it feels really great to be able to go about it in such a casual way, not just like that, but to put a lot of things aside, at least a little, and just focus on what you want to make, right?

SW: What's interesting is that, you know, I have to work. I have to, because with all of the things that have happened, I had to take off so much. When I planned this, I thought I would be able to take time. It just hasn't fully immersed, but it's okay. Now I have certain abilities which are lesser, my hands start learning and I know that if I don't rest, then I will not be able to work. So when my hands start hurting, I need to take a rest. So when I was younger, there were certain things that I had to do in order to make my work, and it was a little easier, when my kid was like a toddler. I couldn't make it work, so what I did was trading plumbing for babysitting, which I'm not a great plumber l, but I traded being a plumber with a friend who needed plumbing, and she did my babysitting. Then, we had a house where the only room with the door was the bathroom, and so I would lock myself in the bathroom and make art. And then when she had to pee, we'd make it work, just so that I could keep working and then I, another thing that I did was that I would wake up at four and I would work from 4 to 8 until my family woke up, and then I would end up working. 

Widening Circles: Portraits from the Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Community at 25 Years (Photo by Reginald Eldridge, Jr.)

SW: I really love art. I love it. It's also the work of the spirit, you know? I end up having a lot of feelings about the importance of this. Is it important? That was also part of what got me not working. Is this important? What is the importance of the world, the things that are happening? Like why are we doing this and for whom. The market aspect of art is really hard for me because I don't really–I don't like that. I do feel like in some ways, we as artists, We are the court jesters for the wealthy, and so do I want to be a court jester. How much am I participating in this “court jesterness”. So I'm not really sure. How do I make work for the people, and who are the people, you know? So that ends up becoming really challenging. If we are making work of the spirit, then this means that we're holding the Spirit. How do we hold the spirit? The academic system prepares you in some ways, but where is this path of training for the holding of the spirit? And I don't know. So how do you exist and how do you survive? To some degree, make it work with used carpet or carpet squares that would be garbage. [Sarah is currently creating sculptural work with used carpet squares] This is literally garbage. So they throw this away because the pieces that I'm working with, they're too small to use and they throw away vast quantities. So that feels kind of good because at least I'm not extracting. I'm contributing in some way. It's so great. How do we make the work of the spirit in this environment where it's all about the work of the dollar. We're still in the world. We can't separate ourselves. So how do we navigate that boundary of not wanting to be in this world? Because there's so much in this world that I can't get behind. When I was in grad school, I did this work called The Invisible Healing World. Lets just make a world, lets just make it. Man making a world is really fucking hard. Who makes worlds? God, Walt Disney. Who are the other world makers? 

EB: It's hard, I also have those revelations in life when trying to figure out how to get by, but also do what I love to do, and also not be complicit in an economic system that is actively working against me and my peers. It's hard because there really isn't one solution to it at all.

SW: The forces are big and powerful. The violence is big and powerful. Yeah. And, and so, you know, like, I mean, and honestly, that's what a lot of this is about. [referring to her studio work] 

EB: You mentioned work of the spirit. What do you mean by that? 

“The WorkSkirt with all the bells and whistles workers need. Made from overstock yardage. These skirts are custom made to you.” (sarahwagner.net)

SW: I don't know–part of it is trying to figure out a term for what it is. So, I have work in galleries. I’ve had people come and say that they only buy old masters or they only buy blue chip pieces, because they own their value, so to speak. It's because they're speculative investors. They're not they're not buying work because they love it. They're not buying the work because it moves them to the point that they feel like they need to be a part of it. They're buying it because they're trying to play the system. Art is an unregulated market. The value doesn't make sense. There is no sensibleness in valuation of whatever it is. What is it? Why is it that I'm appalled by that and similarly, that's the best language I can come up with because I'm not really great at that. I'm really interested in the expressions of the spirit. People who run churches are people of the spirit, they're trying to navigate that energy. How do people come together? If I'm going to make a product, I'm going to make a skirt or pants. 

SW: I really have no interest in making products for the market, you know? But then it's weird because I still have to survive. So I’ll do construction to survive, or I'll make curtains, or I'll–I'll do whatever I have to do.I have my hustle that pays the bills, then I have what I work on in the studio that is really important to me. But that's really weird. It's like the market’s always in. No matter what, the market's always in. Right? People who don't have the same adoration for materially rendered ideas; you don't really care. The work of artists have just sent me into–have explained things to me that I haven't ever understood. I talk about Richard Serra in the way that his tilted arcs just give you this physicality of like, whoa, like I'm here, there's gravity. It's this experiential strength, you know? it's like, all of a sudden, like, you understand something, and then also the revulsion, I feel like while looking at. I think it was the Karen Walker snake's piece. Yeah. Where she made a giant mountain of sugar in New York, and then having people come up and pose with the sphinxes “hoo ha”, how that reveals so much about who people are. I would hold that, that piece in such reverence. That's the work for the spirit, what is that experience of being collapsed.

EB: The idea of making art for a purpose of participating in a market. Like, “I want to make something that is going to be sold”. Would you say that’s the opposite of working for the spirit?

SW: I think that you need to have–I'm interested in livelihood. I'm not really interested in, like, anything else. There are those practical concerns, I mean, I live in the world, I have to buy food, you know, which is very expensive these days. 

EB: It's the experience that we all share. 

SW: Exactly. A bag of peanuts was like three and a half dollars. It's crazy.

(Photo by Evan Bruce)

EB: Lastly I wanted to ask, a couple of other artists here are working on stuff that is intended to be a show, right? So they have, like, this goal that they're working towards, producing x amount of work for x show. Do you have a goal that you're working towards with your time here? 

SW: I’d like to have something that I can take pictures of and post by the time I'm done. I have four things that I actually like spelled out. I would like to get this piece that I'm working on with the carpet resolved to the point where I feel good about it and then I can document it. I would like to get that book that I'm working on resolved and possibly printed here. I want to get enough stuff done so that I can send out the things and do it at the press. I've already had the pots thrown because I make pots. Ceramic pots. Years ago, I was at studio potter right out of college. I want to make some slabs, which I'm going to be working on today. I have wanted to do frescoes and I have gotten all the materials. So I want to make some fresco paintings. If I get to do those four things, I will be beyond ecstatic. Yeah, I mean, that's a lot. I was writing this all out this morning and was like, “I'm a little ambitious” 

EB: You’ve got to be ambitious as an artist.

SW: The fact that I got this, I got two months is like complete frickin miracle for me.

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Sarah Wagner is in residence at Stove Works Feb - March of 2025.

Sarah Wagner is a sculptor and installation artist whose work renders the frailties and strengths wrought by the dynamism of invisible forces on an increasingly unnatural world. Her investigations and renderings of the ecological systems has inspired her to explore exhibition venues as unnatural environments within which to create models for parallel worlds. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally at Projekt 0047 (Berlin), Homie (Berlin), Muskegon Museum of Art, de Saisset Museum (Santa Clara), Museum of Craft and Folk Art , YBCA , Southern Exposure, New Langton Arts (San Francisco), 21 Grand (Oakland), and Revolution Gallery (Detroit). Wagner’s work has been reviewed in Art Week and Art Papers and is in the Microsoft Collection and Muskegon Museum of Art. She received a Pollock/Krasner Grant in 2009 and a Joan Mitchell Fellowship in 2014. She currently divides her time between Detroit MI and Chattanooga TN and BFA, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; Resident, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; MFA, California College of the Arts.

https://www.sarahwagner.net/

Resident Spotlight: Dave Kube

Dean Azzouz: In the most open-ended way possible, who are you?

Dave Kube: My name is Dave Kube. I use He/Him pronouns. I consider myself a queer photo-based artist, and my practice is about pushing boundaries. I use photography to create installations within gallery spaces.

DA: I do see a lot of vinyl work. A lot of things that are up on the wall. There's a few different cameras here. A big printer.

DK: Yeah. I'm a technology person, so I need my technology to make work. I like to play with space, and push a viewer’s eye to different places, as opposed to just the standard gallery format.

DA: Yeah. Kind of just that eye level.

(here we started discussing work Dave has on display in his studio)

DK: Yeah. I want people to look around. I've been playing around a little bit with movements in space. For instance, this thing right here where there are beads hanging right when you first walk in. It stops you as you enter, which I like.

DA: You're forced to take an adjacent step.

DK: Right. And then that circle on the floor is like an entryway. I’m Interested in pushing the gallery experience to be something different. I think with photography in particular, there's somewhat of a question of going to a gallery to see the same photo you can see online.

In Dave’s studio at Stove Works.

DA: Yeah, for the average person, there is a bit of an argument there: well, why would I, right?

DK: I really like this idea when I install a show. I want viewers coming to a show to leave with an experience that's very different than something that you would experience on a computer or phone. However, it does present a challenge when it comes to documenting this work because you don't get the sense of scale and how the work looms over you.

DA: So it’s position in space?

DK: Yeah, that's a big goal of mine to really push that interaction within the space.

DA: Was there an exhibit or gallery you were part of recently that you think you were able to hit that kind of goal?

DK: I’m always trying to figure out new ways to push that goal even further. The work is always evolving.

DA: The goal of one project or even where it ends up after the initial impulse is often very different sometimes.

DK: Right, and since being here I've been thinking more about pushing the viewer to different directions, and now it’s also thinking about this doorway entrance and how it pushes people into a pattern of how they move in the space. That’s becoming really interesting to me too. I like working in 2D format, but there's this sculptural element such as putting something on the floor but flat. How do you reconcile that, right? Whereas if it's a sculpture on the floor you clearly walk around it, but if it's flat you walk in it,

DA: Or are there people worried about stepping on the image itself? Or does somebody even notice?

DA: Right, maybe because it's on the floor it’s not that important. In this room right now there's two vinyl things here on the ground: there’s the circle at the door you're talking about. And then I see these crystal shapes of pink and purple. A little trail coming off the base point of the wall. And for me, sitting in this space right now and looking at that circle, walking in, I would not hesitate or have some sort of bad reaction for stepping on it. That one (pink crystals) does not feel like I want to step on that. Right?

DK: Well, the circle feels like it’s meant to be stepped inside. There’s a white paper in the middle right now that is actually going in my sketchbook at the end of the residency. That paper is just the documentation of people walking into that circle. The purple pieces feel much more avoidable where you are supposed to walk around it.

DA: What kind of art education, if any, do you come from?

DK: I have an MFA in photography from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. I graduated about 15 years ago.

DA: Okay. So, since then, you've just been practicing?

DK: I'm also a professor, I teach photography at a place called Commonwealth University. That's also in Pennsylvania. I've been there for ten years.

DA: How long are you going to be here for your residency and how has your time been so far?

DK:  I’ve been here for the month of February, and I'm here until the end of March. So far, it’s been a nice mix of productivity and socialization. I don’t think I was expecting to build the type of relationships I’ve built in such a short amount of time with the other residents. We’ve all bonded in a supportive way. I’m also just really impressed with how dedicated Stove Works is to creating an environment that supports the arts and its residents. There have been so many community events in the month since I’ve been here which has really helped my practice in significant ways.

DA: Ok, we get another month of Dave. Perfect.

DK: Most of what you see in my studio has been created over the month of February. I'm actually trying to take things down because I’ve filled up the space, so being in the studio space sort of feels simultaneously complete and simultaneously overwhelming too. There's so much everywhere. I've been able to move one piece out in the hall, and I'm starting to take stuff down so I can start fresh for March; have new things to work on.

DA: Do you think there's anything in here right now that you will keep up?

DK: The ones on the floor will stay for sure. And quite a bit of stuff might go out in the hallway, so It will still be up. Just moving things around and playing. That’s my goal at the moment.

DA: Can I ask about some of the work that's in here? I cannot stop looking at this elastic, I don't even know what it is; is it underwear?

DK: It’s a jockstrap.

DA: I am so locked in on this jockstrap. I cannot stop looking at it. Can you tell me a little bit about this?

DK: You're looking at my wall of unresolved or failed stuff. The whole idea of the work I'm doing is about queer spirituality. I scanned those in, and I thought that they looked almost like those angel wings that you stand behind. I was playing with it, but I could never really get it to do what I wanted it to do. I printed it off, so I’ve kept it up and it kind of looks like a heart now. But I think it's probably dead in the water at this point, but it might evolve into something.

DA: The material that you scanned in has an extremely delightful visual texture to look at. The textile, the elasticity, and just all of it. I can feel the stretching. I know that feeling very well. Obviously the content of it, before I knew it was a jockstrap, feels very undergarment.

Do you have a teacher or an artist you look up to?

DK: There are so many artists that come to my mind. I will say, it's not an artist, per se, but I was in San Francisco recently, and there was this museum called Pier 24. They were a large photography museum and recently closed. However, the way that the shows were laid out was super inventive, and it wasn't this linear format. They have these big vinyl photos that were attached to the wall with framed pictures on top of it, or pictures were grouped into little categories on the wall and in different places like down low or up high. The formatting of how they curated the shows were really interesting. I found a lot of inspiration from that. I think Wolfgang Tillmans is also a good example of playing with the gallery experience and photography.

DA: Thank you. Now, we get to the fun questions. If resources were no limiting factor, what's a dream project you would like to work on or accomplish?

DK: I'm a technophile. As much as I use technology, I don't necessarily understand some stuff. I’m not very proficient in audio/video/electronics. Especially installations that involve audience reactions, like LIDAR. They’ve been doing some LIDAR installation where things change as you move. I don't know if I would want to do that specifically, but stuff like that where it's using this interesting, cutting-edge technology to create installations or experiences.

DA: Like another input. Like live modularity, I guess.

DK: Exactly and resources are not just physical, but it's also mental and understanding how that stuff works.

DA: If you were an instrument, what instrument would you be?

DK: I would be a drum machine. Not the actual drum.

DA: Like an 808.

DK: Right. Yeah.

DA: Are you familiar with the Linn Drum. It's one of the oldest drum machines, I think it came out in the 80s or late 70s. It’s got some iconic sounds on it, and it's this huge machine. I always really like the font they used on it. It's this yellow with a red outline. It's kind of a serif. I don't know, it's this really old school looking font on the machine, it just says Linn Drum real big. Maybe you're a Linn Drum.

DA: Are you a dancer?

DK: I am a dancer! Not a good one. This morning, I was dancing on that little roof chimney platform.

DA: It’s covered up, right? Did it feel sturdy? Did you feel like it was going to fall in?

DK: I mean, I’m pretty small. I was more worried about falling off, than falling in.

DA: So, companion question to are you a dancer: what's your favorite dance song? Or I think for me I don't have a favorite dance song, but I have a favorite genre or, artists, or DJ that I find myself listening to a lot.

DK: Probably contemporary pop divas.

DA: Can you give some examples?

DK: I've been listening to Ariana Grande or Sabrina Carpenter in the studio regularly.

DA: Did you watch the music awards that just went down a while ago?

DK: I watched some of the performances. Sabrina Carpenter’s was good, and I loved the humor in it. I don’t know if you saw it?

DA: No, but I heard about it on the news. I heard it was really well-produced, the whole performance.

DK: There were little tricks on stage to make it look like things are going wrong, but they were all planned and cleverly done.

DA: Tuesday or Thursday?

DK: I think I'm partial to Tuesday.

DA: Dark chocolate, milk chocolate or white chocolate?

DK: So I'm mostly vegan, so dark chocolate.

DA: What's your dream blunt rotation and your nightmare blunt rotation?

DK: I would probably choose the people here. Most of us have been here for just a month and we've bonded really well. Nightmare? I don't know, maybe completely hard-core conspiracy theorists. While it might be kind of interesting in some ways, it feels like it could quickly turn.

DA: When I ask this question people often say, I don't want to be in a room with Elon Musk or Alex Jones, stuff like that.

DK: I think it’s this inability to take in new information that terrifies me.

DA: Yeah. It's kind of a weaponized rhetoric in a way. Like an impenetrable wall. And especially the people that perpetuate it are the sentinels of that rhetorical wall. They will not let anything pierce that ideological wall. Which does sound like a nightmare to be stuck in a conversation, especially being the odd one out.

DA: Sweet. Well thanks, Dave. That was awesome. I appreciate it.

DK: Thank you.

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Dave Kube is in residence at Stove Works from February through April ‘25.

Dave Kube earned his MFA in Photography from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. His work has been exhibited throughout the country including Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Chicago, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, California, and Florida. Kube has curated and juried a number of exhibitions related to themes of sexuality and identity. He was the recipient of a month-long residency fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center. He currently serves as an Associate Professor of Photography at Bloomsburg University.

Dave Kube was interviewed by Dean Azzouz, SW Spring intern ‘25.

Resident Spotlight: April Childers

April upstairs at Stove Works. Photo taken by William Johnson

Resident Interview:
April Childers (Sept-Oct 2024 Resident)

Interviewed by Olivia Tawzer (Programs Fellow)

April Childers (born 1979) is an American artist, curator, and educator. She is known for including humor and craft in her work. She combines a variety of art historical, and popular cultural references that accentuate an inherent despondency in their merger. 

Childers’s work has been presented in an exhibition at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), NY., VSOP Projects, Greenport, NY., CR10, Linlithgo, NY., Vito Schnabel and Bruce High-Quality Foundation, NY., White Projects, Paris, FR., Imersten, Vienna, AT., Kurant, Tromsø, NO., The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center, KY., Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL., Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA., The Mothership, Woodstock, NY., and many others.

She lives and works in Strawberry Plains, Tennessee.

INTERVIEW

Olivia Tawzer: In your talks, you've mentioned altering objects by enlarging, replicating, or combining them with other things. And I was thinking of this “Follow Your Dreams” rug that you found downstairs that you incorporated into that wall hanging piece. You call them “junky little things”. How do you source your objects, and what draws you to the commonplace, “junky” things?

April Childers: Hmm. How do I say this? I think it comes in a bunch of different ways, but I think what first comes to mind is usually there's something wrong; well, wrong is usually understood as a negative thing, and I don’t mean that here, but usually there's something “off” about it, or it's been overly used. 

Like the rug I found downstairs here at Stove Works, it has just been used to death. But what solidified by attachment to the rug was the out-of-context phrase that it proclaims. And the rug itself has been just used to death. The backing on the rug is gone so you can really tell how it's made, the edges are all worn and tattered– it's falling apart. FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS!

I’m always asking ‘what's wrong?’

So I like that discarded kind of love. Finding a little treasure and thinking of how to reappropriate its original context, but have it still retain its thingness of the life it previously lived. I often reincarnate, reanimate, and reappropriate. 

Photo by William Johnson, depicting an in-progress work by April Childers. Stove Works, October 2024.

OT: You mentioned loving the Dollar Tree in your artist talk, and that stuff is made to be used once and thrown away. They're these plastic things that fall apart and are flimsy. Things can only get that “used to death” feeling if they have some kind of substance or quality to them so they can endure time versus these Dollar Tree kind of things. And you use both types of objects in your work. 

AC: Well, now it's a dollar 25. 

OT: I know, yeah. Inflation tree. 

AC: Inflation tree. Let's get a tree on fire. That's pretty good. It's about the price at the Dollar Tree or other similar stores. Items are more attainable. Having a mass of objects has always felt really good, and it's something that I've explored in my previous sculptural work. However, I am always questioning myself and trying to strain things out. I try to make the shortest sentence possible, as opposed to something like a giant rotted tabletop at a flea market on the side of a highway. Piled up, but less piled up. It's about finding a place for things– that was a title of an old piece. A place to put things. And it was just this mass of objects that I had organized on this table– there's a coffee maker percolating, a dead bluebird preserved in a jar, a Trump board game, and all of these in-process works and materials from the studio. So much stuff. All odds and ends, or maybe I should say odds with no ends. It was just a piece of plywood that sat on two sawhorses that I had made to look like they were built like Oreo cookies. It reminded me of an outdoor flea market on the side of the highway. I used to go to those all the time growing up and still do, if I can find them.

April Childers, Detail of “A Place to put Things (Whose Fault is it for Livin Anyways?!)” 2013, various materials, 125x64x132″

OT: You also have a curatorial practice, and if you view other artists' work as objects that you're putting together, it’s pretty similar to the way you combine objects in your practice.

AC: Yeah. There are a lot of similarities to that. The exhibitions that I have curated have absolutely been pretty much rooted in that intention. I just don’t have any other way of doing it. And I've always been pretty direct with the artist about that. But sometimes, no matter how direct you are with artists or how direct I think I’ve been, it can be a little off-kiltering to take their work and place it, or at times shove it, into a different context or contention. Like, “We're going to do this show, and I really want for this work to be included, but I'm going to cover the entire exhibition space in aluminum foil, there’s gonna be a wall with a person-sized hole through it, and I’m gonna write about buttholes for the exhibition text.” These are the things I think I convey and try to convey to the other artists involved, and sometimes, I get too caught up in the making to remember to do so. I am grateful that all of these people have rolled with me through these ideas and haven’t come for me yet. Hahaha (nervous laughter), I can’t say that I would have been as cool in similar situations. My need for them to trust me overrides reality sometimes. Also, working and functioning within any sort of institution, big, small, for-profit or not, is a whole other tangle. To be clear, everyone is great forever and ever! I’m laughing at myself right now. 

Details from exhibition at Take It Easy, Atlanta, GA., 2022. Full Circle, curated by April Childers. Artists pictured L to R: Natalia Kraviec (hanging) , Zack Rafuls (wall), RB Erin Moran (floor), and Vabianna Santos (hanging).

OT: It can be displacing. 

AC: Displacing is a good word. 

OT: I feel like a lot of artists think about the space that their art is shown in as neutral, so when you're changing up the space the narrative shifts. It can be exciting and also confusing for artists to have their work be, not misinterpreted…

AC: Used as material. Used as material in another artist’s language. Absolutely. And I think pushing that even further with the last couple of exhibitions that I have curated was good, at least for me. I hope for the other artists as well. All of the curatorial work definitely came from a spot of just not having a space to curate and understand my own studio practice. Not to mention being frustrated by previous interactions with large institutions and whatever the status quo was or is. When I did the curatorial project in North Carolina with artist Maria Britton: LOG (Low Occupancy Gallery), we knew we wanted to work together in a curatorial way, but we didn't have the means or even just space. We did, however, have an old shack on the property in the farmhouse that we were living in at the time in North Carolina. The situation was hilarious (in the true sense of the word) and really great in a lot of ways. Maria actually fell through the floor of the shack at one point. The structure basically sat on two toothpicks and was scotch taped to the side of a small mountain overlooking a creek just above the James Taylor Bridge in Chapel Hill. We did nothing to the space but throw up some clamp lights. We were putting art in a shack in the middle of the small wooded area where the elements, bugs, the opossums, and raccoons, anything could come in and be involved with it.  And oh, they did, so it was a forced context in that way. I really liked that. The process of staging something outside of its traditional context to create an environment that has never existed before and do so for actual, real-life purposes with meaningful intention. The conversation about getting out of the white cube…I think it is an old one now, but it will always be important, and it doesn't get done a lot of times in that sort of off-kiltering way. 

L: Entrance to parking area for L.O.G. circa 2015. R: April Childers and Maria Britton inside the L.O.G. exhibition space, circa 2015.

OT: Looking through your work, one of the first things that comes to mind is humor and playfulness. I'm thinking about the Chick-fil-A piece that you did. It stirs up multiple feelings in me because, in one way, I almost feel bad for people because of this false hope, but also there were signs it’s not real. Like ‘original’ being spelled O-R-G-I-N-A-L. I also just like people on Facebook calling it like God's chicken. 

AC: Oh yeah, Jesus’ chicken. And meaning it. Yeah. 

Image: April Childers, “Coming Soon”, paint on canvas, originally installed in Strawberry Plains, TN., 2022.

OT: It also makes me think about the discourse of the far right and fake news. If you look at it and actually pay attention, you could see the things that show itself to be not legit, but at a quick glance, just the recognizable font of the Chick-fil-A registers. There's a lot of humor there, but there's kind of this darker undertone. So, I guess my question is: What do you think about humor and sincerity? If you want to talk about the Chick-fil-A piece, we can.

AC: We can start there. I think that there is absolutely deviancy in it. And when I made that piece, some of my friends who are artists were like, “You're just poking them.” At first, I thought, who is “them”?! And how dare they (my friends) simplify this effort! Hahaha, jeez. In that reaction, I was (now) obviously trying to deny my assumptions about the location to which I had just returned after 20+ years. I’ve since come to terms with most of my assumptions being validated in those and similar ways. However, that did cross my mind…right? I, rather quickly, came to terms with that part of my intention. But for 0.01 seconds I did have a negative emotion for giving as you stated “false hope”. That emotion ran faster away from me than I can describe. It makes me really dismiss any sort of bad feeling for someone believing it. There are jokes, there is humor, and there is a comedic presentation in my work through nods, gestures, and misplaced references. None of it comes from a pleasing state of being. I won’t go much further into it than that it has really gotten a lot more complicated over the past 5+ years. 

OT: I was thinking about how after Hurricane Helene, there was this AI Trump image that was circulating of him in the water saving this man, wearing full riot gear, and he had a crab hand. And it was posted. And then some people didn't realize it was AI at first, and when it was brought up.

AC: Like a crab from the ocean?

OT: No, it was like a human hand, but you know how AI can't do the fingers? So it was the same thing as the Chick-fil-A piece, where if you looked at it, you could see that it wasn't real. It had signs of its fabrication, but some people still believed it. But even when it was pointed out that it was fake, I saw people saying, “Well, it doesn't matter that it's an AI image because he actually went there, and the meaning behind it is still there.” 

AC: That goes back to humor as a tool for disarmament, right? But in the midst of being disarmed, hopefully, that gives a gap or a space that can allow for even, just even, a little bit of time for the opportunity to process things differently or reconsider something.

I've been avoiding teaching my whole life, but when I moved back to the southeast, I was like, “Okay, this is what I can do, and hopefully, it won't drive me as nuts as working a nine-to-five” or whatever. I'd always had assumptions from reports while I was living elsewhere, but I quickly realized firsthand the lack of arts education and education period really.

Arts education should be mandatory (although I might take issue with that word, haha) from an early age on. It doesn't matter if you want to be an artist, work in the arts, or anything directly related to the arts. To be introduced to different ways of thinking and thought processing is the root of all. It allows you to see all things from multiple views, to consider and question, to problem solve, to be able to exist in various types of environments, to evolve and communicate. I don't care what job one has or what job or life someone wants or has, it is imperative. A scientist, a dog walker, a laundromat owner… it is absolutely relevant to every existence. This education doesn’t even have to take place in academia. Ya, I think it can solve all problems. So, a scientist, a dog walker, and a laundromat owner walk into a bar…. just kidding. Follow your dreams?

Miranda July has this video about workers in the city whose job is to paint over the graffiti and how artful that is. Have you seen this? 

OT: Yes, like painting a white square over a brick wall where it's not a restoration of the original wall. It's just covering the graffiti.

AC: Yeah, I love that and I try to show that to all my students. It's all there.

OT: What made you want to be like an artist or showed you that was a path you could take?

AC: A long time ago, I heard somebody say, “If I could do anything else, I would.” I can't really even imagine it. When I was in elementary school, the teacher one day went around and –this is kind of messed up now that I think about it–  the teacher went around and told each student what she thought that student was gonna “be” when they grew up. She got to me, and I was cutting something out with some scissors, really zoned in on it, and she said that she thought I was gonna be an artist. And I leaned into that and was like, okay, what can I do with this? This feels right. I wanted to question everything as it was anyway. I figured things out as best as I could because nothing made much sense then to me, and it still doesn’t. And as you know, you never  “figure out” anything. It’s just attempts at figuring stuff out, finding answers but with more questions, feeling closer, and new mental architecture and languages to convey. Finding what might not exist. I should have just said “Aliens”.

OT: What do you think is the best and worst thing about being an artist? 

AC: The best is the same as the worst thing. Going up against something. One thing is that you are always having to defend yourself, or I am, at least. That sounds really stressful, but you do find answers and new existences within that. You know, “Why are you doing that, April?” Or, “It's not worth your time, energy, money.” That it's not worth it. And I've heard that a lot in my life and have always been able to navigate those statements with little to no question in regard to my being. Unfortunately, I feel like I have been listening to statements like that a little bit more in the past 2-3 years since moving back to where I grew up. My attention has been pulled away from where it usually resides to take care of some necessary things. In this, I’ve positioned myself in an odd state. This is why I am so thankful to have been at Stove Works for the past two months. I've realized how much that kind of thinking has snuck in. I’ve realized how harmful that way of thinking has become to my practice and just overall state of being. Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out who you really are*...sometimes you’re just an asshole, but I hope that's not my case.

I've also known people who are artists who stop making art once they get out of an academic system or even just later on in life, and they say, “It’s too hard.” I don't know if I ever really understood what that means. Don’t get me wrong, it is hard. It’s really hard, but everything else seems too hard for me.

*nod to artist Paul MacMahon

RESIDENT SPOTLIGHT: JUAN-MANUEL PINZON

JUAN PINZON, INTERVIEWED BY EMMA WOMBLE

Photographed by Jo Silver for the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation

STATEMENT - My practice centers around objects that have fallen away from their original use. The sculptures of varied scales relate pedestrian materials, focusing on the way they engage and distort each other and our preconceptions about them. The forms defamiliarize the familiar materials and evoke a sense of otherworldliness, awe, and reverence for things that would otherwise be overlooked.

Informed by new materialist theory, ecological and scientific research, and a practice of receptive observation, each piece emphasizes the subtle vibrance inherent to matter. The use of discarded organic and inorganic materials engages the tension between the short-sightedness of human actions and the longevity of their impacts. Currently, I am investigating the narratives that emerge when bivalves are considered beings that have borne witness to and been objects of our consumption throughout human history. Bivalves are masters of alchemy, their incredible filtering abilities are critical components to their ecosystems. The dissolved minerals they filter allow them to build their shells, which eventually appear in our cities’ materiality, such as food and limestone. I have been working on a series of vertebrae and wing-like formations made from cut and stacked clamshells that, through their form and material relationships, create a sense of myth around these creatures in pursuit of a renewed relationship between the viewer and the things that surround them.

Emma: In your artist statement, you talk about evoking a sense of otherworldliness. I am curious about what that looks like through your lens. 
Juan: It's both about trying to identify something that is unfamiliar but is still rooted in the things that we know. So it's both otherworldliness and very much of our world. That is the quality of the objects I am finding and the point in time and the decomposition they are in. They are frozen to the point of going from new objects to fossils almost or dirt. That in-between stage is something that we don’t tend to look at, and it is unfamiliar because it is very much of our world.

photographed by Jo Silver for the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation

E: So you are looking more at giving it another context in which to view it? 
J: Yeah, like in the objects that I am finding and trying to retain that in the work that I make. Let the objects still be that strange thing that first struck me so that I was like, what is that? Trying to present them in a way that also does that for the viewer. Instead of being like here is this explained nice and tightly fit thing now. That has been an interesting line to try and figure out.

E: Research, materialist theory, and observation feel like key components to making your work. Is there any specific literature or media that influences those ideas? 
J: Yeah, definitely, there are three very important books. The first one is a materialist text that most people know about, “Vibrant Matter” by Jane Bennet. She talks about matter as this vibrant, agentic force that engages with other things and has power or as she calls it “thing powers”. She talks about this puddle of pollen and a few other dispersed trash objects that created this atmosphere, which is exactly what I am going for. I'm trying to describe it in a way that isn't animistic, but at the end of the day, all materialist theory is animism. So, I am trying hard not to be, but she is really important. 

The receptive observation comes from Jenny Odell who is an artist and author in California, but she might be around anywhere. Her work is great, and she wrote this book called “How to Do Nothing,” where she talks about birdwatching as an example of a non-goal-oriented activity. The goal is to see birds right, but you have very little control over which birds you are going to see or at what moment. Your job is maybe to go to a specific place and then just have an open, receptive stance to the world and be ready to hear them, see them, see any little movement, and then focus. The way she describes the granularity of her attention becoming more and more refined. Bring able to discern from just general birdsong, which it was at first, into Oh, that is that bird. Being able to do that, but my birds are this trash stuff you know. Then it's much bigger, and it's something that I can’t bring home with me that sticks. She is super influential, and her artwork is cool, too. She has a couple of projects that do this thing where she is showing you something and stripping away some of the context or adding more context that gives that thing more presence in a particular way. She has this one project at this residency at this place called “the dump.” I forget what it’s called, but it is in California. Basically, you do a residency, and you can go collect things from there and find incredible stuff, from Eme's chairs to an old cell phone. Her show was just a bunch of shelves with these objects on it, and she would do intense meticulous research on them, and you could use your phone to scan a QR code. You could see the factory where they were made and instances of them in culture. She had this one cell phone that you could see in use in movies, and it was like, that is that cellphone right there. Or that type of cellphone and that way of making this mundane thing have a full life was really interesting. The other stuff I like that she does is landscape images of Google Earth of big infrastructures like water treatment plants, waste management, that kinda thing. They are usually secluded and removed from our day-to-day. You know they're usually behind a bunch of trees. You don't want to see them, but they're like so critical to the way that we exist in the way that the city's run. She takes that image and then strips away all the green. So you just see this network of like a power plant and they're striking and huge in a way. They almost

look like I think she calls them satellite landscapes or something like that. But they almost look like constellations also. And there's this funny project where she took a road trip on Google Maps, and it was just like frame by frame going to places on Google Maps. But her ability to connect things to their history or place and stip that away so you can kind of see them more nakedly is an interesting thing for me, too.

photographed by Jo Silver for the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation

E: Using bivalves in your work seems significant. Can you talk about that initial influence, if there was one? 
J: Yeah, I've been trying to figure that out. The shells, and I'm just going to be more general because it's been these clam shells more recently. The beachy shell has been in my practice for a few years now. At first, it was just something that I had. I was doing a lot of this, like nesting stuff, at first, and it wasn't as intentional as it is now. I've seen them collect and collect and collect in my studio. I've been reading about them a lot more and just starting to establish a structure of what these objects are doing for me. 

There's another important book for me called A Time for Everything, a novel by Carlo Van Huskart. It traces this guy's life who became interested in angels because he saw them in his youth. It was like this shocking moment because he had just done this terrible thing. He'd been like poking at an ant hill and was overcome with that feeling of both guilt and destroying it but also being unable to stop. Then he gets lost in the woods, and that kind of does it. So, throughout the book, the narrator kind of retells some classic bible stories, like Cain and Abel or Noah's Ark, and the characters are really complex and interesting, but the stories are much more nuanced. I was interested in the way that the angels existed in this story, especially in the beginning. Where they are supposed to be removed from people and enacting the will of God. Over time, instead of just observers and actors, they start to sympathize with people and indulge in a lot of human consumption. At the end of the day, that's what leads to the fall, right? So they end up stuck on earth and become more dependent on people. I mean, these are all kinds of spoilers, but they transform the way that they look, and they can't go back. As they become more and more dependent on people, they start turning into chairs, this kind of cutesy thing, gets them invited to the home. Then people start getting annoyed with them, sick of them, so they have to take a step out. Eventually, you get to this place where seagulls are contemporary angels, and they're still around as they eat their food. They're always like circling a human boat. I tried to extrapolate that framework for what these angels are doing, their relationship to people, and their consumption of these bivalves. Trying to create a similar sense of reverence and history around them.

My interest now in bivalves is their ability to filter entire bodies of water and how it is critical to a healthy ecosystem. Whatever they're filtering is an incredible alchemy that turns it into this hard shell, right? As that hard shell deteriorates, it turns into limestone which is an important ingredient in concrete that builds all our cities. In some ways, all our cities are built on clamshells. We have a very close relationship, and they're so mundane and looked over that if we could just look at them, just that slight little switch is exciting. Formally, the way that they stack and all these little details in them, when you look at them closely, start to emerge was exciting for me. I've tried to skew away from scallop shells or oyster shells just because scallop shells are overtly beautiful. It's the shell that Aphrodite emerged from; they got their own thing going, and they're fine. Oyster shells are just like, I don't know, kind of sexy, you know? Whereas these clam shells are just like the leftovers of food. It's what you find on the beach, and they become staples. To be able to push them out of that into something a little bit more intriguing. In some ways, what I'm doing with the shells is what I'm hoping to do with all the other stuff. I would like to look at it closely and differently because these have a real affinity to them. I think they're just beautiful, especially that little cross-section right in the middle. 

E: I mean, they're gorgeous. I'm a big shell collector, too, whenever I go to the beach.
J: What kind of shells do you collect? 

photographed by Josh Blankfield

E: I've found a lot of spiral little shells, those are cool. I'll usually like go in the water and look through like the sand and stuff to like find them. 
J: Have you ever cut one in half? 

E: No. Most of the ones I think I've found are already either like one part. Do you have any specific sites or areas you lean towards in, like sourcing materials? 
J: When I started this practice, I was in Richmond. I've learned Richmond has the perfect amount of trash because you would always find something. It wasn't an overwhelming amount and stuff. I had just started this journey, away from being broken off its original body and now just tumbling through time. I would always collect, but even in Richmond, I started to gravitate towards specific sites. There's this place called Belle Isle, which has a lot of history, and now it's a park. When people go there, they go swimming on the James River, but it has been a bunch of things throughout history. Among them, it was a small town for a little bit and had a small community and school. It was also a water treatment plant or maybe a hydroelectric plant. Even before that, it was an internment camp during the Civil War, and now it's just a park. It's been growing and reclaiming

spots, so you have all these places where nature is like growing, but the human infrastructure is becoming nature. It's that tension. There are all these stimulating moments that you'll find. My northern star object is this little piece of barbed wire driftwood from there. That was striking because I just found that sticking out of this fallen tree. What was cool is that it clearly showed this extended life of something after an original human action that's completely out of the logic of that action. I don't know if this story is about someone wrapping a tree in barbed wire, and then that was it. But that was the whole point. Or the tree grew around the barbed wire, then the tree fell into the river and was eaten away by termites, and 80, 100 years later, we end up with this perfect object. That's become the connecting point that makes that place special. I don't go there very much because I'm in New York now, but since moving, I've been walking around a lot and have been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of trash. It's all fresh, and it's too much. Bit by bit, I'll find little neighborhoods where the walking feels right, which works. In New York, I've been going to this place called Deadhorse Bay, which is relatively well known. It is similar to Bell Island it has a pretty good history to it, and it brings a lot of energy to the objects that are there. But, it was once a glue factory, hence the name. Then after a while, they turned it into a landfill, I think in the early 1900s, and they covered the landfill with topsoil. Now that the topsoil eroded you get all this 100-year-old trash that's been rolling around in the sand and the ocean washing up on the shore. You get these incredible objects that are human-like because they're all manufactured, so there's a lot of plastic, metal, and shoes. Since they've been tumbling and cleansed by the ocean and the sun they start to become organic. I have a couple of pieces of like that, PC or rubber. There's a piece over there that just looks like a bone, but it’s a big hook that's plastic. 


E: It's plastic? I was about to say it looks like wood. 
J: You'll also get these pretty amazing things like this newspaper rock. It is just a newspaper, and you can get little bits of comics or text that are different. 

E: That's crazy. I never knew objects could transform into that. 
J: Right. It's just plastic. 

E: Plastic is one of those materials that I have never thought about eroding. 
J: Right. Nicely, it is eroding or a forever material. That's a bit of my interest with the silicone stuff. These things are making their way into our waterways, the food we eat, and our bodies. They're now becoming part of the material makeup of the planet. There's a lot of climate anxiety that comes with it. It's a process of becoming part of the

earth, which is exciting. I was talking to someone recently about this idea of there being other intelligent species on Earth before humans. Thinking about how long it would take if people were to just disappear. For all of this to just really disappear and become a thin layer of sediment. You'd probably find a couple of incredible little things, but at the end of the day, it might be hard to identify. At some point, we'll have this little Anthropocene strip and then there will be something else that emerges after it, right?

photographed by Josh Blankfield

 E: Do you have any, favorite materials you've found, or worked with? I know that's, might be a hard question, because all of them have their special qualities. 
J: Yeah, they're also special. I mean, that piece of barbaric driftwood has made its way into some works, and I was reclaiming it afterward. The wax has been exciting just as a base for these things. At the end of the day, my background is in woodworking. Woodworking, just being really precious and considerate with this material, I think, was a perfect place to start this path. It's something that I still hold very dear. Wood is important because it has an obvious form of life as a living, breathing organism. Even in its non-living tree state, it still expands and contracts. You have to consider that when you're working with it and allowing for it, so it doesn't bust out of the panel. Every hand plain stroke with the grain it starts to shift a little bit, depending on the way that it's going, so it has this infinite depth that I've come to appreciate. I’ve been able to extrapolate to other things that aren't as immediately obvious, like more uniform materials, wax, and metal, and I recognize that I am shifting things with these qualities. Wood smacked me in the face with that. It was a good starting place. 

E: Were there any specific projects that you wanted to do while you were here at Stove Works? 
J: There were a few. I was interested in working on these wax panels because they felt like a step towards making something that was frozen at that point of thinking. I haven't made many of them. I made a couple of pieces with wax or a lot of work with wax. But not in this way, so trying to see what it could do and the different ways to push it was exciting. 

This summer, I'm a fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park, which is exciting for us. That's a big thing to work towards. There's been a lot of technical problems to figure out. I learned how to cast some of this stuff in meta as a mockup to see what these clam fronds look like. Because they'll be cast in iron and be much bigger, three or four feet long. Being able to get my hands on it and trying to see what these things do and how it's gonna work was an exciting thing being here.

E: What are your plans after this? Because I know it's coming to an end.
J: Yeah. 

E: And you just said you're a fellow at the Socrates Sculpture Park. 
J: That's my most immediate plan. I'll be at Socrates, an upper sculpture park in Queens right on the water. It's beautiful, I like that place. I'll be there all summer. We start the fellowship in early June and work through the whole summer. Then, in early September, the opening will occur, and the work will stay up from September through March. You’ll get to see the work through the seasons, which is exciting, and I like being able to play with some of that seasonal change and what becomes visible when the leaves drop. When things become a little bit more gray adding a little pop of color will just make that a little bit brighter. That's my main plan, but besides that, just get back to my life. 

E: Yeah, I gotcha. That sounds exciting. 
J: Yeah, I'm stoked.

RESIDENT SPOTLIGHT: HARRISON WAYNE

Harrison Wayne interviewed by Kate Greenwell

Harrison Wayne in his studio. Photo provided by De'De' Ajavon, 2022.

Harrison Wayne, INTERVIEWED BY KATE GREENWELL

Harrison Wayne is a working artist from Atlanta GA, with a degree in chemistry. Harrison uses his background as a chemist and his experiences emerging from the South as a guiding hand to his artistic practice.

Kate: Harrison, you’ve described yourself not only as an artist but also as a chemist and a poet.

How do you feel these three identities form your practice?

Harrison: Yeah, the longer that I practice, the more I develop this understanding that having a creative output or studio practice is ultimately taking the skills that you've learned throughout your life and applying them to whatever obsessions or preoccupations you have naturally. And so, for me, these mixed identities of poet, chemist, artist, and even southern woodworker are all tools I gained throughout my life experiences. I try to coalesce them in the studio to tackle whatever problems I'm confronted with or whatever objectives I want to complete in the studio.

For me, they're identities, but they're also positions that give me a unique set of tools.

Chemistry gives me a perspective on material interactions, and it gives me a unique body of informal knowledge that I can draw on whenever I have ideas for sculptures or concepts that I want to express with those chemical materials. The identities of the poet and southern woodworker are similar. If I had a concept in my head, I intuitively would have because I have those experiences in my life that have given me these tool sets, gone to those identities, and tried to figure out how to tackle these concepts.

K: I feel like poetry and woodworking come together in your cross pieces a lot. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
H: For me, crosses involve the methodical action of joining two pieces of wood at a perpendicular intersection point and repeating the process hundreds of times to make hundreds of crosses. My practice began with the cross in the traditional form of the Christian Baptist faith, a cross with two intersecting bars, but it began to expand into batches of more expansive cruciforms.

Creating these crosses started to have a rhythm to it and that rhythm reminded me of poetry. At some point throughout the process of making these wooden multiples, I started assigning them poems.

Two images from: Untitled, (Bulgakov, 1917) label on cedar, 60” x 14”, 2023.

K: Are these cross-installations site-specific?
H: No. I like to install them very intentionally on outside sites or field installations. The pieces aren't conceptualized or executed with a particular site in mind. Usually, I'll make the piece, and I'll carry it around for a while; sometimes, my trunk is just full of them. And then, when I'm out and about, if a site calls to me and it resembles a certain poem, I do an installation and document it. I consider them sculptures. But, like a lot of my sculptures, they usually don't exist in a gallery context. I try to take them to other places.

Untitled, label on cedar, 70” x 5”, 2023.

K: It seems like a part of your process is to live with the works and let them develop alongside you.
H: Yeah, 100%.

K: Another work that seems to relate to them developing alongside you is the wedges. Can you tell us more about that? I know that it began with your time at Stove Works.
H: Yeah, it did. I came here with a very emotionally charged project that I wanted to start, but I was hesitant to begin developing it. I began to notice that this building was beautiful, but so many of the floors were uneven by the nature of being old and a renovated building, so I started making shims, just very simple wooden shims that I had seen my grandfather make for cabinets over the years, just to level out the furniture in the room.

K: And your grandfather is a carpenter, right?
H: Yeah. My grandfather learned the basics of carpentry from my grandma's father and has been teaching himself and learning from different sources for the past four decades. When he was 35, he and my grandmother owned a house, they had my mother and my uncle at the time and they had to repair things around the house. He would pick up skills along the way to solve the problems at hand, essentially.

I've seen him make shims to balance furniture, for antique sales, or for whatever it is over the years, so I started making shims. Then, my door in my studio wouldn't stay open properly, so I scaled up the shim, but I recognized that it was the same object. Similar to the cross pieces, it became an obsession with multiples, especially wooden multiples. The landscape of the material is comfortable to me, because of my woodworking background, it's definitely a preferred material.

Harrison Wayne and his grandfather Wayne Meers in Meers' basement workshop in Stone Mountain, GA. Circa 2011, photo taken by Wendy Meers.

H: The more that I worked with the wedges, the more I realized they were initially intended to be purely structural stability for my swinging door and my wobbly nightstand, but they also have a second life. Objects that can be played with and rearranged on the workbench. I started leaning into the poetic aspect of a wedge being the archetypal shape that drives things apart but also stabilizes things. A close buddy of mine commented on the wedges, saying that “they keep doors open,” and I started thinking about the poetic quality of the wedges. Ever since then, I've been obsessed with making them. The process is incredibly simple; it is very similar to the cross in that it’s made with one repeated action. Once you get that action down, you can iterate a plethora of forms. For the wedge, it’s just a single cut in lumber, and because it’s so simple, it becomes a vessel to project into emotionally or narratively.

Wedges in Harrison's stove works studio - lumber, latex paint, various collected objects in built box on top of built furniture dolly, 2024.

K: Back to what you said about the wedge as a form, it can open up doors and separate things. I think a lot of your practice has to do with reflection but also destruction, in a way.
H: These two ideas of preservation or destruction are present within a lot of my projects, including the wedges. The wedge does divide, and the other side is keeping the door open. They have a similar double life to the chemical jars in that way.

K: Yeah, can you tell us a little bit more about the chemical jars, how they function, and how you make them?
H: The jars that I've been creating for the past year and a half are typically antique canning jars. I fill them with different objects, objects that have personal sentimental value for me or for my collaborators. Then, after I fill these cannon jars with these objects, I'll fill the remaining volume of the jar with industrial hydrogen peroxide at various concentrations. Then, I situate the jars carefully and set them up to allow for pressure regulation as the oxidative process progresses.

The performance evolves for however long the jar is sealed. Typically, any kind of object that goes into the jar, the organic component of that object will be oxidized violently but very softly at the same time over an extended duration of time. Oftentimes in gallery contexts, these jars exist for two to three months at a time, they're full of say flowers or photographs, and those objects evolve very slowly, day by day. For me, I think that these performances do emulate these ideas of preservation and destruction because a lot of the objects that go into these jars are objects that typically someone would want to preserve or save or hold on to. But I'm trying to explore these notions that the act of holding on to the object is maybe less important than the energy of the object. This idea is that you can have an important family photo. You can hold onto that for the rest of your life. It has important values, but I like the idea that instead of centering the object, you can have a moment of monumental importance by destroying the object or getting rid of the object very intentionally. I think that just comes from the Southern American identity of hoarding and collecting.

Untitled (Collective Telling), January 2024. Industrial Concentration Hydrogen Peroxide, canning jar, images shared by exhibiting artists. Dimensions variable.

K: It seems like you're not only collecting things to make your art, but you're collecting a community while you make them. There's a specific project where, and this is the first time I have ever met you, you asked me to sign a piece of paper.
H: I think that what's crucial to that project is realized by anybody who goes through a monumental loss. The networks of social relations that we exist within often feel very permanent or very steadfast, but they can dissolve very rapidly. People move on, people move away. The project started when I realized that a lot of my friends in the emerging art ecosystem in Atlanta were constantly talking about moving to other places to seek opportunities where their practices would be better supported. I became very aware of the fact that the network of relations that I exist within as an emerging artist in Atlanta is very tenuous. It could change at any time. So, the sentimental artist in me and the sentimental person in me wanted to capture these very imperfect recordings of moments when we're all together.

The project is organized by a very simple rule. Whenever I'm in a room with peers, I ask anybody in the room to sign a sheet of paper. I like the fact that it becomes a drawing, and I'm just setting the conditions for the drawing to happen. It's a way of collecting, but I like that it has an unbiased nature, a very flawed and imperfect way of collecting. There's no context as to why we're together, and sometimes people don't sign the paper. There's no record of where you were or when you were there, but it is a sentimental way of trying to document the relational networks that exist within the art ecosystem of Georgia. And now that I'm in Chattanooga on residency, the project has shifted to be a representative of the networks that I find myself in here.

Four excerpts from Qualitative Observations, created during Harrison's first month in residency at Stove Works. 2024.

K: How has your time in residency at Stove Works changed or furthered your practice?
H: I think it's important to say that I'm somebody who has had to nurture my practice alongside a full-time manufacturing job for the past five years. The opportunity to come to Stove Works and be here in a phenomenal environment and practice in this studio and to have access to these workshops and this incredible equipment 24/7 has completely shifted the way that I create. I've never before in my life had an opportunity to wake up, walk into my studio in the morning, and work on a project and not be interrupted by regular day-to-day routines of life and work. Being in a community where I didn't know anybody coming into it and being surrounded not only by the thriving arts system of Chattanooga but also by artists coming in from across the country and across the world has been such a phenomenal experience. I think it's really important for artists to experience what it's like to work with peers, have studio neighbors, or even lose mentor figures in my life. As somebody who's somewhat of an outsider artist, it's been a phenomenally enriching experience and has also just given me a way to improve myself and my practice.

Harrison and the rest of the February Stove Works cohort enjoying a gourmet dinner, photo provided by Waffle House Employee. 2024.

K: Is there anything exciting coming up with your practice in the next few months that we should be aware of?
H: I will be wrapping up my residency with an exhibition at Stove Works called A Joy That Could Not Be Replaced on the weekend of April 20th. Open studios are also on April 20th, so it's a phenomenal day to visit Stove Works.

Harrison Wayne Self Portrait, Taken on Galaxy S21, 2024.

You can follow Harrison’s practice through Harrisonwayneworks on Instagram or www.harrison-wayne.com

RESIDENT SPOTLIGHT: NANI LEE

nani lee, INTERVIEWED BY emma womble

STATEMENT - Emanating as sculptures and collaged airbrushed paintings on both paper and canvas, my work investigates socioeconomic status. By personifying teeth, I demonstrate the individuality of people within various social statuses, exploring the inequality of dental care throughout history. My work is contemporary and surreal, as I revisit and critically analyze the residual impacts of my childhood experiences with being unhoused, domestic trauma, Latin heritage, and sexuality, as well as reimagining moments of my everyday life and fuzzy memories that have lingered. I have explored the narrative of feeling small due to childhood trauma and have come to understand the lack of resources within mental and physical healthcare, education, economics, and race that have perpetuated this hierarchy in Western Society. Through my work, I am becoming more aware of the complexities in my experiences and creating a new narrative that invites class consciousness. In particular, I focus on exploring the nuances of the Latin diaspora and its relationship to classism, in addition to examining the systemic oppression and marginalization experienced by minority communities. I am passionately exploring my understanding of society through my personal experiences and inviting others to gain insight into my humorous ways of digesting the past and present.

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Emma: In your artist statement, you mention the idea of “creating a new narrative that invites class consciousness.” Could you elaborate on what that looks like for you?
Nani: A lot of it has to do with background and upbringing, making my passion and drive very personal. Inviting others to look into and be aware of their surroundings. The economic state and social state of everything at the moment. To realize things aren't as equal or black and white as they seem. There are many different levels to the pyramid of socialism and where everyone fits in our Western society. 

E: Is it more about bringing awareness? Because it seems very personal?

N: Yes, it is mainly about inviting others. I want to approach a series topic or series statement to make it light-hearted and digestible. Through my paintings, I aspire to achieve that as well as inspire others to think critically. My teeth paintings have to deal with environmental surroundings and what it is like to live in our Western society. And how that fits into different places in the social hierarchy. Like living in our Western society and living in a lower-income or a higher-income environment, working to contrast that and dissect it. A Lot of times I will place my teeth characters into these settings. Because I want people to look at the details and really think about what it would be like to be put into that environment. As I dive deeper into that series of work, I want to get more serious about it and approach heavier topics. I am approaching it at a slower pace because it is heavy for me to dive into. 

E: Teeth, specifically, seem to be a common theme in your work. Do you find any other imagery as an inspiration source? 

N: Yes, I draw a lot of inspiration from weaponry and everyday objects like trash cans for some reason. I really like painting a trash can. I like teeth, obviously, because it is a thing that a lot of us have. I started a different series recently with these star bodies. Taking the shape of a star and compacting the human body, mainly the feminine body, into this figure has been fun. I really like anything that is appealing to me, specifically the outline and shapes of weaponry. I tend to focus on that and include that in my work. Even though it doesn’t necessarily tie into the narratives per se. A lot of times, it is for fun or to contrast. 

E: After reading your Stove Works application, there was a question about listening and its importance to you. You had an intriguing response. So, how are listening and social interaction a part of your practice to get other perspectives on class? How do you think this has shaped your practice? Do you pull from any interactions for inspiration? 
N: Absolutely, I find most inspiration from human experience. The experience of my peers, close friends, and loved ones, as well as strangers that I meet. Sometimes I pull from random people I bump into or not even people I bump into but I observed. I view myself as an observer of people. I tend to go out into environments and watch what's going on. That inspires me a lot because observing how people maneuver daily life will tell you a lot about them without necessarily talking to them. I also talked with them and heard their backgrounds to see how that has influenced where they are today. I pull a lot from that, probably the most. Because I think that's the beauty of being alive. We have had different evaluations of different lifestyles and things that we have been through. That is what inspires my work the most, besides my own human experiences. 

E: You work with both sculptural elements and two-dimensional paintings. I am curious if you lean towards working with one material over the other?
N: I felt like I had to focus on one thing because I have a genuine love for everything art-related, not even art-related, but making-related. I love just making things. When it comes to painting or sculpture, it's whatever I feel drawn to. If I have an idea or something I really want to make, I will go for it. Recently, I have been working on combining the two. To the point where my paintings have a sculptural element to it. Like actually putting texture on the frame to bring it out more. 

As far as the storylines, I am telling or building up layered pieces. I feel like there is more freedom in sculpting because I do not do it as often. When I work with sculpting, it’s very peaceful. I try not to apply a lot of pressure since I don’t know what I am doing as far as sculpting. As far as painting goes, I think it's more mentally taxing because there is more going on. I feel like I put a lot of pressure on myself to where there are certain elements that have to be displayed in a certain way for me. But that is just me being picky. 

I think it can be more freeing for sculpture, but I love both so much, too. Which is why I am trying to combine them. I have been working on pieces that are on a wooden panel, and then I will create an image, sculpt over the image, and pull the image out of the panel. That's been really nice because I got to sculpt and paint for the same project. I really like how that's been playing out. 

E: That tooth painting behind you, which is popping out from the canvas, is really nice. 
N: Yeah, I really like dimension and texture, but I am really particular about them. They have to be a certain way. There's a fine balance in my head between clean and messy or grainy and sharp. 

E: So, there are certain formal elements that you want to be included in your work? 

N: Yeah, so when incorporating sculpture, there can't be too many sculptural elements, or everything will be washed away and won't stand out. I am aware of where I want the image to come out. So, in the tooth painting, the background is very flat and composed together. The other elements are on canvas, so they will be layered on top of each other. It's like a collage, but it also adds a little bit of shading that I don't have to paint, which is nice. Especially the texture and how it feels like it is coming towards you. 

E: Is that mostly airbrushed in your tooth painting? 

N: Yes, so the foundation of my paintings is always airbrushed. Once I finish the image or feel like I have painted as much as I can, I will go in with last-minute decisions. With a colored pencil or trying to etch something with a blade and scratch into the painting itself. Which is kinda nice, because it’s like I am destroying something which is risky. I will also take paint pens or colored pencils to do small details. Those are my favorite things to go over with. 

E: Do you have any specific ideas or projects for your time here at Stove Works? 

N: Yea, I came here with a specific idea of what I wanted to do, and I feel like artists always say that and it changes when you get to the point of doing it. I thought it was not gonna change and it did. I started having so much fun with my star characters and portraying the feminine body in very grotesque but pretty ways. I am leaning into feeding more storylines of them right now, playing around with them and seeing where that goes.

I have held back my focus on the heavier topics that I wanna speak about, but then I got here. I was in a really good headspace and having a nice time here. It can be a little taxing to focus on the heavier topics especially when you are in a good headspace, because it feels draining. I am trying to go a little more lighthearted, and then revisit the heavier topics later. 

Check out more of Nani’s work -
www.bynanilee.com
@sudokuintheclub

Resident Spotlight: Jules Jackson + Will Sutton

Will Sutton and Jules Jackson, interviewed by Kate Greenwell

Will was a resident at Stove Works this past February, and Jules is a former resident (2023); each of their practices involves identity, expression, and masculinity and how they explore those aspects in today's world.

Will Sutton

Jules Jackson

Kate: Will, you just started your residency here at Stove Works, but you've been involved with them in the past. What are you gonna do with your time here in the next month?

Will: I think before I came here, I was feeling a lot less energized. And I think the Chattanooga Arts scene is kind of supported by Stove Works in a really strong way. As far as the city's art culture, I was feeling isolated, and Stove Works is a place that I align myself with and can successfully work within a community-based practice.

Jules: I agree; I think the community really helped, too. There is time here when you're receptive to the thoughts and perspectives of others. And if you play by yourself too much, I guess, in the studio, then you can get in your own head. There are certain things that you're not thinking about or considering, and you just don't know how to think about them. There is a kind of osmosis that takes place when you're in a group with other artists where you can influence each other in unsuspected ways and can see a different viewpoint of your work.

K: Will your work largely deals with identity and how that stems from community. I feel like you're largely integrated into the skate scene of Chattanooga and the art scene of Chattanooga. Do you feel like it's hard to blend those two things into your everyday practice?

W: As I'm working now, I'm personally interested in what people and artists do outside of their art practice. I think when I was in college I separated my identity as an artist from that of a skateboarder, or a music enjoyer, or as part of the local music scene.

It was not until I finished my senior thesis that I ultimately started combining those identities into my work. The aesthetics of skateboarding, the aesthetics of graffiti, and the aesthetics of aggressive music are the things that brought me into art-making. Those are the things that pushed me and formed my identity into becoming an artist. And then the fine arts provided me an opportunity to express those interests in a way that I think was academic. So I started in this skate culture, and then I ended up in fine arts. It's been about my journey to becoming who I am, what is my work about, what is my community, and how can my work exist in my community.

K: in your artist statement, you talk about young men struggling against masculinity and patriarchy in that skate community. How do you consider largely gendered activities in communities around you whenever you're making your works?

W: I think one experience that has changed me a lot is when I started working at the public library. I think I'm the only guy on the floor, and working in a space where I'm around troubled kids, the way that I respond and the way that young men respond to me, I was able to understand, or maybe kind of think more deeply around what are the reasons that cause those situations to arise, problematic behaviors of, you know, young men in general.

It's a difficult spot to be in because I love skateboarding but every culture has this kind of bad end and good end. Hardcore music, graffiti, and skateboarding all attract people that have a few screws loose. And being at Stove Works, working with other young artists, I feel like we can all relate to having a few screws loose.

The generation we’re in right now, we're all kind of working towards something together and I feel like with young men right now, it's a critical moment to try to think about what's going to happen to the future. I hate to bring it up, but you think about all the Andrew Tates and how young men are ingesting that media, and as the future of masculinity and gender changes, I hope there is a political pushback from the scenes of the hardcore world and music and graffiti to celebrate the disassembledge of gender norms.

Will Sutton, Boardslide, 2023, graphite on paper

K: Jules your work discusses masculinity as well, transmasculinity specifically. How are you processing those ideas through your practice?

J: It started from a place of wanting to make work about my own experiences as a trans man and looking to my own life to inspire the work because I feel like art is in dialogue with the rest of your life. As Will was saying, you have everything going on in your life outside of practice too. I'm interested in the bodily aspect of transition and making work about that and that ties in with my interest in cartoon forms, the cartoon body. I feel like this is maybe a little cliché to say, but I've always loved cartoons.

Jules Jackson, Foreshortened Jules, 2024, oil on canvas

J: It's been relatively recently that I have figured out the connection between my interest in cartoons and my interest in making work about my embodied experiences. Because during transition, you're autonomously taking the lead on the destiny of your own body and what happens to your body. If you're doing things like hormone replacement therapy or having surgeries, you're playing an active role in the kind of creation or recreation of yourself. I feel like that connects to kind of cartoon forms because the cartoon body is very round, it's very like, you know, bends and stretches, it occupies this unreal sort of place where it can be transformative, and that's one of the major ways that I'm exploring transmasculinity in my work. It's interesting to compare and look at the two of us and our work in dialogue because I feel like your work [Will] engages with some of the cultural signifiers of masculinity.

W: I think a lot about your [Jules] thesis work and how the werewolf was a signifier for masculinity, almost this Jekyll and Hyde, or werewolf aesthetic of American masculinity. This thing is so relevant to our social sphere; it has such a violent presence in American media. I think about my work through the lens of an adolescent teenager; how a teenage boy sees through this environment, and that’s where the claws come out, the werewolf comes out.

J: grrrrrrr

W: I think I lean towards cartooning as well because it’s a vessel that oversimplifies something complex.

J: Exactly. It has a flatness, and that flatness brings out a lot of complexity. By simplifying complex ideas, I feel like you can connect with people on a different level. And I think Scott McCloud's work and how he talks about the masking effect, how when you see a cartoon character that's more realistic, his theory is that you relate to them less because you perceive other people in those terms. You see other people as a sort of fully-fledged, realistic, three-dimensional being, but from the inside, in your own perspective, you kind of see yourself as a simplified entity, more of a conceptual entity. By simplifying the body, I want to give people an inroad.

K: Yeah, just like what you talked about earlier, leaving viewers to imagine their own identities.

J: For someone to be able to put themselves into someone else’s position, that's a path towards fostering empathy. In my case, foster empathy for the experience of undergoing gender transition. It's an unfamiliar kind of perspective for a lot of people to consider. So people have, at times, this reaction to seeing these images of surgery or bodily alterations. They almost cringe away from it a little bit at first. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think that that's a natural reaction to people; by bringing it out in the open and having a conversation about it, people can come to an understanding of the experience of going through a gender transition in surgeries. Talking about using the werewolf symbol as a symbol for masculinity and transmasculinity. It is a complex cultural symbol and often has violent connotations with media, like horror movies and popular culture. So, I wanted to bring it in and address that by getting away from its violent connotations and leaning more into its spiritual and transformative aspects.

W: The spiritual and emotional part behind the rebellious culture within skateboarding, graffiti, within heavy music. People are looking for expression and escape, looking for a way to speak and make their presence known. I think it goes back to transmasculinity and how you deal with moving into a masculine space that can be seen as violent and that is uncomfortable. The basis of masculinity is uncomfortable, the way that emotions are cramped.

J: I appreciate what you said about the problematic ways that masculinity exists within our society. I think that in my work, as well as my life, I want to imply a masculinity that doesn’t have that and to show that it can be done. I want to discharacterize traditional masculinity. There is a kinder way to live.

K: It seems like both your art practices have to do with a healing process and a reflection of your past.

W: Figurative social expression can respond to the world. I think within the language of visual arts, you can express the inutterable. A lot of the work I make, I do not have the words for it; It captures a specific idea. I think my practice has been a way of thinking through this complicated social sphere that we live in. In the end, we’re all just trying to cope.

J: I’ve always admired your [Will] ability to deal with change. I feel like your work entertains multiple possibilities at once.

W: I feel like my drawings are maps of experiences, maps of future, past, and present, and how they all happen within the same space. It’s about a visual residue that can be captured by drawings. This is a space I have struggled with in painting, there's something about drawings where I can stack and stack, and through that layering, I encapsulate the properties of honesty in my work.

J: In painting, when the image starts to become believable, you lose a lot of your plausible deniability; you have to make a decision and stick with it.

W: I think your work offers a really interesting, weird spot ….

J: Are you saying I'm a weirdo

W: haha, yeah. Your work is really cohesive in its cartoon style yet deceptive. This traditional American approach to a cartoon representation but it's painted under the guise of realism.

J: The work kind of mirrors something that I think about in other aspects, which is the ability to make a decision, and then you just kinda have to stick with it. It connects to the subject of transition. If you decide to do hormone therapy or gender replacement surgery, you're taking a bold stand. You're in it, and you're occupying a different place in society than you were before, and there's no real walk back. You're taking a bold, decisive stance within your society that gives society opportunity to define you as queer. Boldly and visually queer.

K: Thank you guys for letting me have the opportunity to have this conversation. Is there anything we should be looking for from you guys in the coming months?

J: I will have my work on display at Stove Works on May 3rd, and I will have my work at Coop Gallery in Nashville on June 1st.

W: Keep your eye on St. Andrews Center; we are trying to build some new art spaces in Chattanooga, so look out for that space.

Jules

Jules working in Stove Works studio space, 2023

Will working in Stove Works studio space, 2024

Jules and Will both help to run a collage workshop at St. Andrews Center, for more information visit exquisite_corps_ccc on Instagram.

You can follow their practices through
Willsuttonstudio on Instagram or www.willsuttonstudio.com
Julesinspace_ on Instagram