Rachel Jackson

Studio Fellow 2021

Rachel Jackson graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in the spring of 2019 with a degree in Communication Design. Her practice is largely guided by principles of collectivism and accessibility, and reflects a personal attempt to decentralize the elitism she feels is ever-present in Western design aesthetics. Rachel is most interested in the application of design when it comes to democratic, household objects, including t-shirts, zines, and mass-produced prints. She’s often drawn to appropriating imagery from found materials, dually as an investigation of what factors led to its disposal and as an effort to reinvigorate visual languages of the past.

Image: Rachel Jackson, Guided by a Communal Spirit, hardcover, perfect bound, 160 pages, printed on Mohawk Superfine Ultra White Eggshell 60lb, 12″ x 8.5″, 2019

Mariah Joyce

My artistic practice is a tool to process and attempt to understand the world around me utilizing repetitive action as a form of meditation. I have an academic background in philosophy and a professional background in journalism, and both of those influences are evident in my visual work. Pieces typically start as questions about or attempts to understand a place I’ve been or experience I’ve had. Image and text are then combined and layered into a visual meditation, and serve to catalogue the experience and whatever feelings it evoked without attempting to make any solid determination about what it meant.

Mariah joined Spudnik Press as a teaching artists in our inaugural 2022 Teaching Artist Cohort.

Website:

www.mariahellenart.com

Kelly Kaczynski

Kaczynski is an artist and educator. While rooted in the language of sculpture, Kaczynski’s practice is across media.

Millicent Kennedy

Millicent Kennedy’s art practice collaborates with materials and time through performance, fiber, and print. The themes explored in her work often pivot on the tension between labor, and impermanence.​

Kennedy serves as the Curator of Exhibitions at the Fine Arts Center Gallery in Northeastern Illinois University and teaches classes and workshops in and around Chicago, where her studio is located.

She received her MFA from Northern Illinois University where she was awarded the Helen Merritt Fellowship. She’s received solo exhibitions from Belong Gallery, SXU Art Gallery, Roman Susan and Parlour and Ramp. 

Millicent joined Spudnik Press as a teaching artists in our inaugural 2022 Teaching Artist Cohort.

 

Website:

www.millicentkennedy.com

Alex Belardo Kostiw

Alex is a graphic designer, artist, and educator whose work is rooted in storytelling. She has an MFA in visual communication design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in English literature from the University of Chicago. In her own projects, Alex deals in poetic, adapted, and iterative elements, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms. Her work explores primordial and personal forms of knowledge, investigating the complex ways that the self and reality interact.

Services Offered:

  • Exhibition Opportunities
  • Graphic Design
  • Illustration

Website:

www.alexkostiw.com/

Residency Period:

Sep 2016–Dec 2016

Project Statement:

Reading is both encounter and empathy, an act in which we are given another place or perspective and allow ourselves to mistake it for our own. My practice explores reading and its potential through books of experimental comics and short fiction. I think of books as mysterious containers or knots in our reality—small, yet holding a remarkable density of experience. My books are typically slim and light and have an interactive quality, opening for the reader in unusual ways. They require the reader to twist or turn or peek into the work to unravel its content. The physical form reflects the story’s twists and turns; creates opportunities to surprise and entrance the reader (say, with a mark hidden in a fold, or recombining images); and moreover, suggests that what we see is just a trace—an idea that is tied to comics’ structure. I am fascinated by the gutters in comics, the gaps between panels where much of a story lives. This white space is rich with implicit moments that the reader knows reflexively. It locates the story, its environment, and its characters are existing somewhere between the book and the reader’s imagination, but not wholly in either place. To explore this notion, my comics and writing play on and push how little I can give to a reader while still establishing the sense of a substantial narrative. While the sculptural book form creates literal hidden spaces, sparse visuals and brief text invite the reader’s careful attention and realization that the gaps are not empty, but home to an invisible world. A great influence on my practice has been Anne Carson’s if not, winter, her translation of the poet Sappho’s work, which survives only in small fragments. The result is disjointed lines consisting often of short phrases or even just single words that, despite being incomplete, feel incredibly loaded with meaning. The full, original meaning of the poetry is inaccessible to the reader, but the poignancy of its fragmentation makes what remains potent. I parsed out some of my thoughts on the book in an essay comic [Sappho], but haven’t shaken its hold. My illustrations are also informed by traditional comics, which usually render things simply to make the story easy to inhabit, avoiding the static feel of realism. Economic use of line and color allows me to shift between figurative and abstract, making illustrations almost open-ended, hinting at specific characters, objects, and settings with restrained detail, and activating negative space. My narratives also put the tangible and intangible in tension, posing questions of what is real, what isn’t, and to whom. They put emotional and physical distances between characters, and point to them as a realm of misunderstanding. Some pieces create that kind of distance for the reader as well by introducing a recognizable subject, then skewing it into something unfamiliar. My work seeks to complicate the reader’s understanding of reality by fostering the sense that there exists more than what they can see and comprehend. Reading becomes a kind of magic that actives a narrative and grazes its invisible world; and, with the work relying on the reader’s physical and imaginative efforts, my aim is for the magic to be carried in them beyond the page.

Classes by this Artist:

Relief Printmaking: Book Projects
Risography Foundations (April 2022)
April 2 | Risography 101 (1 Day)
Risography Explorations (4 Weeks)
May 21 | Risography 101 (1 Day)
May 10 | Beyond the Folio: Experimental Zinemaking (6 Weeks)
June 28 | Risography 101 (1 Day)
June 17 | Risography 101 (1 Day)
June 24 | Risography 101 (1 Day)

David Krzeminski

My fine art is mostly an exploration of high-contrast abstract drawings. Free-form lines, dots, and shapes are combined with ridged grids and geometric patterns to create pieces that are randomly drawn, yet highly structured compositions. Most of my pieces are created as black and white ink drawings, and then select pieces are reimagined by screen printing them with high-contrast, fluorescent, and vibrant colors.

David Krzeminski. Artist/Graphic Designer living in Chicago. Graduated from Northern Illinois University with a BFA in Visual Communication (2009). Currently working full time as a Graphic Layout Specialist for Freeman Decorating since 2013.

Services Offered:

  • Exhibition Opportunities
  • Graphic Design
  • Illustration
  • Printmaking Commissions

Website:

www.davekrz.com/

Products by this Artist:

Nicolette Lim

Member

I am a Malaysian born artist that is currently based in Chicago. I work across mediums with a core in drawing and print. My work seeks to expose the inherited myths of inevitable violence created by the colonizers in Malaysian history, and how it has affected the queer community, women and the environment in my home country.

Services Offered:

  • Illustration
  • Printmaking Commissions

Website:

www.nicolettelim.com

Nicolette Lim

Studio Fellow 2021

Nicolette Lim is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus in installation and a core in drawing. Originally from Malaysia, she moved to the states in 2014, and graduated in the Fall of 2018 from the University of Kentucky with a BFA in Studio Arts. Working across different mediums such as printmaking, animation and sculpture, her work depict queerness in the context of her home country Malaysia, where violence is an inherited norm from its colonizers. She investigates these affects on the queer experience today and the false norms that have been taken as inevitable. Nicolette currently resides in Chicago.

Image: Nicolette Lim, Twelve Canes, Graphite drawings, twigs, yarn 7ft x 3ft, 2018

Website:

www.nicolettelim.com

Ariandy Luna

Fall 2021 Intern

Ariandy Luna is one of the new college interns for the fall 2021 term. She is currently attending her first year at Harold Washington College, and plans to transfer to art school after she earns her associate in arts. Being Latina, a lot of her art consists of different cultural themes that stem from growing up in the Southside of Chicago. 

Services Offered:

  • Illustration