In the Studio with Mike, Josiah, and Charlie

Legacies of Making

In our studio visit with Charlie Newton, the artist expounds on the legacy of everyday Black cultural production that has inspired his artistic practice. Referencing quilt-making among a plethora of other crafts and practices, Newton explains how the act of making provides a sense of identity, community, and purpose. What might it look like for you to make a creative action that is inspired by existing crafts, practices, or legacies from your own family and community experiences? 

Activity Supplies:

1. Blank Sheet of Paper

2. Pencil or Pen

3. Several Colors of a Medium of Choice

Activity Steps: 

1. In your home or living space, identify one object or documentation of an object that was made by a family member, friend, or relative. It can be as simple as a small craft or frame, or as grand and elaborate as a quilt. 

2. Sit with this object and on a blank sheet of paper, make a list of thoughts, feelings, memories, and responses you have when contemplating this object. You can write from stream-of-consciousness or with as much structure as you like. Try to write for at least five minutes. 

3. After your writing, gather your media in color and color your sheet of notes however you feel inspired. Use the curves and spaces between the text as inspiration. Work on this for at least 10 minutes. Upon completion, reflect. How do you see yourself reflected in the response to the object? 

Visit Clip:

About Charlie:

Charlie Newton began drawing at the age of five years old.  "I saw the light of God coming through the window when I saw a drawn picture for the first time in my life.  From then on I was hooked" he exclaims.  Having received his BA from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and his MFA from Old Dominion University and Norfolk  State University Newton also studied with the University of Georgia's Studies Abroad Program in Cortona Italy.   Since 1986 Newton has exhibited in London, Italy, New York, New Jersey, Washington, DC, Richmond Virginia, and numerous galleries in the South East including The Red Clay Survey, Huntsville Museum and Boundless Expressions, H. Lee Moffit Center, Tampa, Florida.   His work is represented in private and public collections in the US and abroad including The Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN, The College of St. Elizabeth, Morristown, NJ, Sun Trust Bank, Chattanooga, TN,  Wallace H. Kuralt Center, Charlotte, NC and  The Chattanooga African American Museum, Chattanooga, TN. In 2012 Mr. Newton and his wife painter Iantha Newton founded SPLASH a free art school for urban youth.  Mr. Newton maintains his art studio where he paints full time in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

https://artistcharlienewton.com/about.php

https://splashyouthartsworkshop.org/

ABOUT FOREVER PAINTING:

If all the paintings that have ever been made were compressed on to one canvas; every mark and brushstroke continuous, what would be its content, its sum total? What would this new, amalgamation say or describe or depict? This canvas would capture the past, the present, the future, as new marks are made they are added to the heap, an archive of perpetual presents. So Forever-Painting doesn’t care about asserting painting’s relevance, which signifies its importance, its gravity in that historical moment. Instead, these works attempt, move toward, and seek, totality, a genesis, that in its becoming defines both wholes and parts as not that what they seem, and definitely not what they are. 

In the Studio with Mike, Josiah, and Rontherin

Rosebud

Through his mobile-home work titled “Rosebud,” Rontherin Ratliff uses the process of deconstructing and reassembling a shotgun house to engage us to see and reimagine how our structures take up space. With a video that threads footage of multiple artists working in a 24-hour period, Rosebud invites us to contemplate our spacial needs and possibilities in tune with our creative professions and crafts. How might we reimagine our workspaces individually and collectively?

Exercise Steps:

Materials: Blank sheet of paper, Camera (the one that might be on your phone is fine), 2 colors of the medium of your choice (pencil, marker, etc) 

1. First, identify a room, space, or area in or outside your home that serves as a workspace for your art practice, craft, or hobby. Take a photo of this space as it is in its current state.

2. After taking the photo, sit with the picture and with one of your pencils (or chosen media), sketch the lines that emerge from the most prominent lines and edges that you observe in the photo of your workspace.

3. Study these lines that you’ve and the shape or shapes that emerge. What might this express about your work space, your work, and your body in this space at work?

4. With the second color of your chosen medium, replicate the original lines that you sketched, but draw the new lines differently. Try making some lines longer or smaller, add curves, improvise. Imagine this as a transformation of your space.

5. When finished, use your drawing and refer to the real life perspective of your space. The one that you photographed. How might the process of your drawing inform and inspire potential changes to your workspace that could enhance your experience in the space?

A Clip from the visit:

ABOUT RONTHERIN:

Rontherin Ratliff was born in New Orleans where he currently lives and works. He is a self-taught artist whose work explores the relationship between aspects of architecture as analogous to the characteristics of the human conditions. He is a member of Antenna and LEVEL Artist Collective in New Orleans. Recent exhibition venues include the Elsewhere Museum (Greensboro, NC), Art Route 2017 (Groningen, NL), Xavier University Gallery (New Orleans, LA), Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University (New Orleans, LA), Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Deering Estate  (Miami, FL), Governor’s Island, (New York,NY), 516 ARTS (Albuquerque, NM), Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery (Worcester, MA), University Galleries, FAU (Boca Raton, FL) and The Ford Foundation Gallery (New York,NY).

Rontherin will be a participating artist in the exhibition Living Room which will run in our 2021 exhibition season AND in a two-person show with Rondell Crier in the Fall of 2021.

 www.rontherin.com

In the Studio with Mike, Josiah, and Matt

Work

In our studio visit with Matt Ager, both he and Mike spoke deeply and passionately about the meaning of life, work, and artistic practice, and what it might look like outside of the framework of commerce and the financial demands we have to meet. 

How might you imagine or reimagine the meaning of your work (whatever it may be, artistic or not) if it were not connected to sustaining your everyday needs? 

Try this exercise: 

Supplies needed: A blank sheet of paper or support, a pencil (any color), and an eraser.

1. First, on the piece of paper, draw a large shape that would represent your “day job.” 

2. Second, color the shape fully. Take your time doing this, and as you color, think of all of the things material and non-material that you take from this work. 

3. Third, within the shape, use your eraser to now erase what you’ve just colored, eliminating almost every mark except the original outline of the shape. 

4. Sit with this for a moment, and think of those things you identified while coloring...which of those things would come even if they weren’t tied to an economic resource or compensation? 

5. Write, draw, or symbolize these things within the shape. Add others that might come to you.
   

A clip from the visit:

ABOUT MATT:

Matt Ager is an artist based in London, making sculptures from ceramic, plaster, domestic materials, and found objects. He is particularly interested in fluidly composing works that address mimicry, design, and architecture. He believes that objects and textures carry particular identities which is continuously exploring through his practice. His primary focus is using making as a way of thinking. Through using a combination of existing materials alongside simple and sophisticated ways of fabrication, the work builds, nurtures, and embodies a social dialogue.

The work establishes a relationship with re-definition; it usually includes the use of the assisted readymade and builds narratives around social status and taste, constructing a crafted work out of something that may initially appear mundane. 

Matt will be a participating artist in the exhibition Anthropometry which will run in our 2022 exhibition season.

www.mattager.com
@matt.ager

In the Studio with Mike, Josiah, and Raquel // Connected // Connecting

BLUE

Raquel Mullins shares that working with blue has been an avenue in discovering her "artistic voice." Identifying with the color's role as representative of one's "throat chakra" and in her own journey in expression and healing, Mullins uses blue in a significant way in her drawings of past homes as metaphors for the body and settings for stories. What might it look like for us to explore the potential and power of our own voices within our personal spaces, especially in this time where many of us are spending more time at home.  

Supplies: 

1. A Blue medium of choice (crayon, pencil. ink, etc) 

2. A regular pencil or pen (preferably not blue)

3. Blank sheet of paper or something on which to color

4. Ruler or straight edge
   
   

Steps: 

1. First, with your regular pencil/pen and ruler, draw a "floor plan" of your home. Don't worry about it being exact in measurement, just focus on drawing the spaces that represent each room, including the kitchen, closet, etc. If your home has 2 or more floors, you can draw a plan for each floor. 

2. Make sure to label or note the rooms in your plan if you need to. 

3. Take your blue medium and begin to color the space of the floor plan for the space in which you're currently sitting. When you color, let your marks represent how comfortable you are in expressing your voice in that specific room or space. What actions or aspects affect this dynamic? The volume of your voice? Instruments in the room? Other people or objects? When finished with one room, go to the next and color that corresponding space to represent how comfortable you feel with your voice in that space. Continue this process until you've finished coloring your plans. 

4. After your floor plan is fully colored, sit with it and the possible shades or dynamics of blue. In what rooms does your voice appear the strongest or most authentic? What about the opposite? What might be the things about these spaces that empower, stifle, or haunt your voice?

Clip from Raquel’s visit:

About Raquel:

Raquel Mullins (b. 1989) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Chattanooga, TN. Her drawings, installations, paintings, writing, artist books and other creative works are inspired by an uncanny intertwining of dreams, memories, and fantasy. Her work confronts questions of contemporary domestic life by archiving autobiographical experience. She illuminates wonder by highlighting small, everyday objects, spaces, and phenomena. Like the bowerbird, Raquel treats her artistic practice as a ritual act of nesting, collecting, archiving, mending, and homemaking in response to a personal history of instability. Memories of dwelling spaces serve as a rich breeding ground for her investigation of the meaning of home and belonging in the 21st century, and the role of architecture and collected objects as a locus of memory and identity.

Mullins received a BS in Art Education from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2012 and an MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. She taught elementary and middle school art for five years in the Chattanooga area. She now exhibits her work nationally and is an adjunct faculty member in the art department at UTC and Southern Adventist University.

@raquelmullinsart on IG
https://raquelmullins.com/

Resources:

Earlier Event: May 8

In the Studio with Mike, Josiah, and Klypi

Later Event: June 5

In the Studio with Mike, Josiah, and Shane

In the Studio with Klypi // Connected // Connecting

The New Stage:

Klypi has shared that as a musician and performer, it is particularly difficult to realize authentic and creative connection with audiences in a time where public health requires social distancing. Without concert venues and shared physical spaces, it can be difficult to perform and to realize energy similar to live platforms, especially when the current spaces and presentations of performance lack the design for such engagement. How might we re-imagine our current spaces in ways that better support our performance with these limitations?

Activity: Setting up an intentional space of performance in one's shelter and documenting it via camera phone, etc. 

Steps:

1. First, identify a space in your home where you currently or could potentially use for your zoom meetings, video posts, etc. Try to pick a space that you specifically would use to create and share/stream a performance.

2. Next, imagine that this space will be a "stage" for you to perform for an audience that you engage virtually. Even if you're not a practicing artist, what might you perform on this stage? A song? A reading of your or another's poetry or prose? A dramatic monologue?

3. Once you've chosen the nature of what you will perform, sit with your "stage" and make 3 changes to customize it specifically as a space for your performance. Focus on the following three elements:

4. Light: How might you alter the light (naturally or otherwise) to properly serve your performance?

5. Curtain: What object(s) might serve as a "curtain" to conceal and reveal elements of you and your performance?

6. Backstage Request: What treats, indulgences, or demands would you make for proper preparation to perform? All green M&Ms, crustless bread sandwiches? Choose one and place it in your stage space. Remember though, you have to fulfill this request.

7. Once your stage is set, take a photo of it and share it with us!  

Clip from Klypi’s Visit:

ABOUT KLYPI:

Klypi will be a participating artist in the exhibition Music.Video. which will run in our 2021 exhibition season AND will be one of our first Artists-in-Residence.

Klypi is the alt-pop musical persona of AC Carter: artist & curator currently based in Athens, GA. Klypi's music is based on trauma and heartbreak, hoping to express these emotions through humor, gender deviancy, and being "a-little nasty". Previously known as Lambda Celsius, AC has self-released 2 full length albums, a noise compilation through Phinery Records in Denmark, has performed at numerous venues and art openings such as Vesna Pavlović's Mixtape, has performed at Big Ears Festival, Athens Popfest, and Secret Stages, and has opened for artists such as Molly Nilsson, John Maus, of Montreal, and Girlpool.  Currently, AC is finishing up Klypi's first full length with musical artist Precious Child, a much needed turn in AC's personal quest for growth and identity. 

https://www.klypi.com/
Spotify
Youtube
Instagram
Website
Bandcamp

In the Studio with Ash Eliza Smith // Connected // Connecting

On Friday, April 24th, Mike, Josiah, and a group of virtual attendees spent the better part of two hours in the Studio with Ash Eliza Smith. Ash will be a participating artist in the exhibition Music.Video. which will run in our 2021 exhibition season. Mike, Josiah, and Ash will be continuing their conversation about how her work and how storytelling and the ‘virtual’ play a roll in her work. Of particular captivation was a conversation surrounding how we see and perceive ourselves in those ‘virtual’ spaces.

Activity: "The 'Me' is the Message"

"I am all things to everyone
I may be idle, but I don't know
The situation's really quite unique
They all believe every word I speak"

Radio Stars, "The Real Me" 1978

In our last studio visit, Ash Smith spoke with Mike about the unique opportunities to push the boundaries of our platforms of digital communication as we prioritize public safety while continuing to engage. Ash imagines opportunities to shift from the regular "talking head" platforms of zoom meetings and such to explore how we can engage with tools in VR and other media. This thinking also invites us to explore how our current practices lead us to interpret and reinterpret ourselves as we exist and communicate between the physical and digital spaces. 

Materials: 

Writing/drawing tool of any kind (pencil, pen, etc)
Sheet of paper 
Optional: Access to a mirror 

1. On one side of your paper, draw or sketch an outline of your profile (facing toward the center of the paper) to the best of your ability. Try posing in front of a mirror to see your profile as best as possible while you draw. 

2. On the opposite side of your paper, draw or sketch an outline that faces and mirrors your profile. 

3. In the space of the original profile, write a message of any kind. It can be a quote, an instruction, a question, etc. It could be a regularly used phrase you might use in the course of a zoom meeting or a facetime conversation.  

4. Now, focus on the space between your 'faces.' Imagine that this space represents the gate between your physical self and your "avatar." As Kent Clark enters the phone booth to transform into Superman, how might we transform (intentionally and unintentionally) when we enter digital spaces to ultimately re-emerge and create things in physical space? 

Within this space, use your drawing tool to make marks to represent a gate or portal between your selves. When satisfied, imagine your message in the original profile passing through this portal. What happens to it? Does it change in text? Tone? Purpose? 

5. In the space of the "avatar" profile, write a re-imagined version of your original message, after it has passed through the portal. What is the message? Is it any less or more reflective of you than the original message? 

CLICK HERE FOR Josiah’s Example

Clip from Ash’s Visit:

ABOUT ASH:

Ash is an artist-researcher who uses storytelling, simulation, and worldbuilding to speculate and activate futures—to shape new realities. Utilizing multiple platforms from immersive role-play performances to location-based experiences, Ash works across art+science, between fact+fiction, and with human+non-human agents to re-imagine systems, perception, and embodiment. Ash has worked as an actor, performer, musician, producer, director, and writer for various media platforms and is currently an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts in the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln where she has launched an interdisciplinary lab focused on story, worlds, and speculative design. 

https://www.projectblanksd.org/ash-eliza-smith

ABOUT MUSIC.VIDEO.

What in the past was considered two distinct entities; divided by presentation platforms, legibility, perceived intellectual rigor, class associations, etc. have become a swirl of interdependencies, mutual mimicry, and genre bending. So-called High Art and Low Art have both maintained these characterizations as facets of their composition, but have also taken on board their inverse. Increasingly, both Low and High explore a hybridized middle, neither rarefied art object nor pop cultural production, but more something simmering between.

In the Studio with Sarah Tortora // Connected // Connecting

Last Friday, Mike Calway-Fagen, and Education Consultant, Josiah Golson, spoke with in the Studio with Sarah Tortora. Sarah will be a participating artist in a 2-person exhibition with Mike Holsomback, which will run in our 2021 exhibition season.

Sarah and Mike spoke deeply about the theme of "love and trust" as things that we aspire to in our day-to-day and our practice. But how do we each hold the emotional spaces for those powerful themes and maintain the spaces where we make the things we make?

Activity: Love and Trust

On a blank piece of paper, draw a 2-circle Venn Diagram, allowing the circles to overlap in the center. Draw them big enough so that you have plenty of room to write within the spaces. 

Imagine that the space (or partial circle) to the left is the studio or office for your work.

Sit with this place and contemplate the work you do, the things you make, and the mindset you hold when working. Write a real or imagined schedule, agenda, or day-in-the-life description of what it's like to practice and work in this space. 

Imagine that the space to the right is the studio for your Heart.

Sit with this place and contemplate what it is for your Heart to have a studio space in which to practice. Write an imagined schedule, agenda, or day-in-the-life description of what it's like to have a studio for your Heart to develop its practice of love and trust. 

Imagine that the center space that both circles share is the intersection of your work on things and your pursuit of love and trust.

What do both studios share, what do they not share? Are there more ways where you can connect the work of one space with that of the other. Writing this part is optional.

Clip on Love and Trust

About Sarah:

Sarah Tortora (b. 1988, New Haven, CT) received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and served as a Lecturer of Contemporary Art at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia while in attendance. In 2016, Sarah mounted solo exhibitions at GRIN (Providence, RI), Reynolds Fine Art (New Haven, CT), and CAS Arts Center (Livingston Manor, NY). Sarah has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Ox-Bow School of Art, among others. She was the 2015-2016 Alice C. Cole '42 Fellow in Studio Art at Wellesley College, and currently is a yearlong artist-in-residence as the Visual Arts Coordinator at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont.

https://www.sarahtortora.com/

Resources:

Sarah Tortora // The Grid Book // Rene Descartes and the Cartesian Split // George Simmel: The Stranger // Wabi Sabi // From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual // The Box Man by Kobo Abe // Dangerous Emotions by Alphonso Lingis // Die by Tony Smith // Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau // Collapse by Jared Diamond

In the Studio with Morgan Mandalay // Connected // Connecting

Last Friday, Mike and Josiah sat down (virtually) with Morgan Mandalay in his studio. Morgan will be a participating artist in the exhibition Combover, which will run in our 2021 exhibition season. Mike, Josiah, and Morgan continued their conversation about how his works reflect and draw out the themes in Combover.

In his practice, Morgan Mandalay mines narratives, mythologies, and different histories, “for some sort of personal resonance.” Let’s explore and mine our own personal narrative like Mandalay through the activity below...

Steps: 

1. Find a photo of yourself. It can be physical or digital and from any time in your life. 

2. In one sentence, write a description of the photo based on your best recollection or understanding of the moment it presents. 

3. In a second sentence, write an imagined description (or myth) of the photo and its origin, inspired by a work of fiction or art.

4. In a final, third sentence, compose a description of the photo that combines the first sentence and the second sentence. 

Send to us at friends@stoveworks.org, if you’d like it to be posted for viewers to explore and to try to decipher myth from reality. 

Example:

Josiah Golson, Chattanooga, TN

Fact: My friend and collaborator Roy took this photo of me by an electric box with a wrap of my art shortly after it was installed.

Myth: A stranger took this photo of me standing next to my art after they observed me painting this electric box.

A stranger named Roy took this photo of me standing next to my art shortly after it was painted on the box.

A Clip from the Visit:

Questions to think about:

Which description was most difficult to write? Why do you think so? 

How did you choose your fictional inspiration for sentence 2?

In our collective histories and storytellings, do you think we’re able to determine whether our narratives fit into one of the above categories like the exercise provides? Why or why not? 

About Morgan Mandalay:

Morgan Mandalay, along with being an artist, is the founder and director of the itinerant exhibition project SPF15 and co-organizer of Fresh Bread Gallery in Chicago, IL. Morgan has had solo exhibitions at Klowden Mann (Los Angeles, CA), Everybody (Chicago, IL), Cat Box Contemporary (Queens, NY), BWSMX (Mexico City, MEX), and Et Al Gallery (San Francisco, CA) among others. His work has been included recently in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Flag Foundation (New York, NY), Sibling (Toronto, CAN), Bahamas Biennale (Detroit, MI), DAMA (Turin, ITA), Kimberly Klark (Queens, NY), 0-0 (Los Angeles, CA), Galleria Acapella (Naples, ITA), Left Field (San Luis Obispo, CA), LVL3 (Chicago, IL), and Yautepec (Mexico City, MEX). He was a 2018 Fellow of Shandaken Project's Paint School in New York, NY. In 2017 he completed his MFA at University of California San Diego, and holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His works has been written about in Artforum, Hyperallergic, Autre Magazine, Beaux Art Magazine, Artillery Magazine, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Times.

 https://morganmandalay.com/

About Combover:

The main point here is, despite your earnestness and best efforts, you’re not fooling anyone. But we’ll play along. The social contract must be upheld, I guess. Is this a moment where we both recognize the awkward mortality that reveals itself in each of our bodies and the frail attempts at defying death? Do these subtle gestures of subterfuge make folks more human, or are they less due to their having augmented reality?

The Stranger

My last name, Calway-Fagen, was an initial and essential indication, to me, that I wasn’t only one person. Further evidence emerges in the presence of the hyphen, tying the two together, a bridge between, an umbilical. I find it strange now, my parents having divorced very recently, that those two names remain mine, determined to return them both back to the body of the one.

This more than likely would not be a thought I would share publicly except that a great many of us are now thinking quite feverishly about bodies, your own and those of others. Just as, if not more critical is the analysis of one’s proximity to the bodies, others.

Similarly structured and equally as unpredictable is an undertaking of Taiwanese-American artist, Tehching Hsieh. The enterprise: Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984 (Rope Piece). The misleadingly straightforward title masks its own tautological complexity. Hsieh wants the simple to be the complex, and it is, it’s both.

The most direct path between two points is a straight line, and when those points are people, Tehching Hsieh and his invited collaborator Linda Montano, that line becomes a rope. For an entire year these two artists were bound together, forming one inconvenient organism.

Parameters set forth were few, but decisive. They had agreed that the 8-foot length of rope would remain fastened around each’s waist, that although they would never be further away from one another than the rope would allow they were never to touch, and that for the duration of the performance, one calendar year, they were forbidden to leave the single room they occupied for any reason.

(pause for effect)

Montano and Hsieh had only cursory interactions prior to their tying the knot, so to speak. They were strangers by normative cultural standards, but they quickly and voluntarily bucked their individuated autonomy opting instead for fusion and dependency. They had engineered each facet to render their new shared presence immutable. This seemingly inert state was in fact the exact conditions to enable a broad interrogation of fixedness, of stability; as those qualities define me, you, everyone, and everything.

Even as it all shapeshifts.

We all become kin.

- Mike Calway-Fagen

CONNECTED // CONNECTING // ALWAYS AND ESPECIALLY NOW // DAY 14

A Thought:

“To live our lives based on the principles of a love ethic (showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate), we have to be courageous. Learning how to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Our fear might not go away, but it will not stand in the way. Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethic, allowing it to govern and inform how we think and act, know that when we let out light shine, we draw to us and are drawn to others bearers of light. We are not alone.”
― bell hooks, excerpt from all about love

An Action:

Day 14: Based on LTLYM Assignment #44: Make Your Own Assignment

Today marks the final day of Stove Works’ daily thought and action.

“So for this assignment we are asking you to think up a LTLYM assignment and then to make one example of how it should be done. Stay within the realm of the website: assignments that bring people together and give them a new way to feel something.”

D O C U M E N T A T I O N >  “Write down your assignment idea as clearly and simply as you can. Include an example report that you produce for the assignment. The example can be a piece of text, a photo, video, drawing or sound piece, whatever makes the most sense for your assignment. “ Email to friends@stoveworks.org

/////////

We will continue posting “Connected // Connecting” actions but on a weekly basis. All of the actions will remain on our blog and we encourage you to rummage through them and do them at your own speed. Any action at any time can be sent to our “friends” email account, and we will post them. Thank you. And stay safe and stay connected.

xo Team Stove Works