Adriane Herman studies accumulation and release in our physical and emotional landscapes.
She has had solo exhibitions at Adam Baumgold Gallery (NY); Western Exhibitions (Chicago), Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art; Center for Maine Contemporary Art; Interlochen Center for the Arts; Kiosk Gallery in Kansas City; Rose Contemporary in Portland and Ocean House Gallery in Cape Elizabeth. Group exhibition venues include The Dalarnas Museum (Falun, Sweden); Portland Museum of Art; The Brooklyn Museum; Chapel Street Gallery at Yale University; The Ulrich Museum (Wichita), The H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute and Paragraph Gallery (both Kansas City), Mount Airy Contemporary (Philadelphia), and the International Print Center New York.
Herman’s work is in collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; The Progressive Corporation; The Walker Art Center; The Ulrich Museum, and Sprint, Inc., and been written about in publications including: The New Yorker; Art on Paper; Art in Print; artforum.com; The Kansas City Star; The Portland Press Herald, and New Art Examiner, as well as the following books: A Survey of Contemporary Printmaking; Printmaking at the Edge; The Best of Printmaking; and Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall.
Herman holds a B.A. from Smith College, an M.F.A. from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Level II Wilton Method Cake Decorating certificate. She has been an artist in residence in Varanasi, India; Weymouth, Nova Scotia; Yarmouth, Maine; Kansas City; and Coatepec, Mexico, and has lectured at over fifty institutions.
Born in New York City, Herman currently lives in Southern Maine, where the local recycling center offers her inspiration in forms such as waxing and waning piles of discarded wood scraps that she likens to a compost pile rife with manifestations of human intention, aspiration, accomplishment, procrastination, and all the other stuff of life, including its completion.
Image: “Wreckage Salad (Blue High Chair),” 2021, monotype, 21.5 x 28.75 inches
Website:
www.adrianeherman.com/
Residency Period:
Jun 2022–Jul 2022
Project Statement:
I explore accumulation and release in our physical and emotional landscapes, suspending, amplifying, and readying for redistribution the infectious energy embedded in gestures of letting go while simultaneously struggling with my own surfeit of stuff.
My “Wreckage Salad” monotypes are inspired by the municipal wood pile and photos I take each time I release household waste, entitled “Towns Mounds.” Manifesting consistency through constant change, the pile witnesses perennial growth and loss, absorbing whatever visitors shuck, whether overtly broken or seemingly serviceable enough to lead the next “dumpster” to violate the facility’s no scavenging rules. The prints my “dump and document” ritual yield are themselves the products of scavenging. Due to the vast quantity and variety of items needed to simulate the pile, I invite others to hand color and cut shapes from tracing paper that collectively become matrices that transfer water-soluble pigment to rag paper. I enjoy the aleatory process of composing two prints at a time at the press under time pressure, and deciding which prints work and which go to the scrap heap as they emerge from drying boards. Five years into the series, my adrenal system requests a less pressurized process of decision making, the results of which will pay homage to not just an idea of, or reference to, a municipal woodpile, but instead will hopefully capture a particular moment in the life of this collection of specific traces of specific lives. Rather than hierarchize disparate ways of working, I seek cyclical change toward intentionality and unification of image, hopefully yielding at least a small stack of prints that compel both as objects and images. I plan to utilize monotype, collagraph, drypoint on plexi and Spudnik’s Vandercook to press images conceived as ink drawings of the woodpile into paper, enjoying the novelty of knowing what they may look like before coming off the press.
Susy Bielak is an artist and writer who draws upon encounters in daily life to speak to larger human concerns including history, migration, displacement, and the relationship between domestic life and disaster. With a practice centered in drawing and language, she works across media including installation, performance, photography, printmaking, and video. Bielak’s work has been collected and exhibited widely, including by the International Print Center, Museo Tamayo, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and Walker Art Center. Her artwork and writing have been published in Art Papers, Poetry Magazine, and New American Paintings. She was a 2020-21 BOLT artist-in-residence at Chicago Artists Coalition, and is a 2022 Spudnik Press artist-in-residence and Ragdale Fellow. Together with Fred Schmalz, Bielak is an ongoing artist-in-residence at Grand Central Art Center, with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Website:
www.susybielak.com/
Residency Period:
May 2022–Jun 2022
Project Statement:
Listening series:
Susy Bielak will use a residency at Spudnik to create a suite of portraits of people in the act of listening. This is part of an ongoing series that draws relationships between people and infrastructural and natural disasters.
Inspired by Pauline Ontiveros’ expansive understanding of listening as an act of meditation, tuning, and focus, and R. Murray Schafer’s concept of hearing as “a way of touching at a distance,” Bielak will photograph choreographers, musicians, and poets as they stage acts of listening in their homes. Bielak will translate the resulting images into a series of prints, with accompanying short texts based on conversations with the artists.
Jordan Martins is a Chicago based visual artist, curator, and educator. He received his MFA in visual arts from the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) in Salvador, Brazil in 2007, and is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and North Park University. He is the executive director of Comfort Station, a multi-disciplinary art space in Chicago. Martins’s visual work is based in collage processes, including painting, photography, video and installation, and he has exhibited nationally and internationally. His work has been featured in exhibitions at Goldfinch, The Mission, Evanston Art Center, LVL3, The Franklin, The Museu de Arte da Bahia, Zeitgeist, and Experimental Sound Studio. He was a resident in the Chicago Artists Coalition’s HATCH program in 2013. Martins is co-director of the Perto da Lá <> Close to There, a multidisplinary project with international artists in Salvador, Brazil and Chicago.
Website:
www.jordanmartins.com
Products by this Artist:
Cameron Mankin makes prints, artist’s books, and sculptural installations that investigate the role of reason and rhetoric in the arrangement of public space and personal identity. Working primarily from found archives (news site banner images, apartment floor plans, and grainy security camera footage), he employs traditional print and bookmaking techniques to approach delicate systemic problems with a tongue-in-cheek rigor. The material properties of paper and ink set measurements and catalogs to collapse under their own unwieldy weight. The resulting projects vibrate between love letter and biting rebuttal – both addressed to vernacular image-making that goes unquestioned in our day to day lives.
Mankin received his BA in Studio Art (Printmaking) from the University of Virginia in 2016 and his MFA from the University of Chicago in 2020. He currently lives in Chicago, IL, where he teaches in the Media Arts and Design program at the University of Chicago.
Website:
www.cameronmankin.com/
Residency Period:
Mar 2022–Apr 2022
Project Statement:
In 1633, printmaker Jacques Callot made his Miseries of War - a series of 18 etchings depicting the invasion of his home, Lorraine, that would go on to inspire the works of artists like Francisco Goya and Otto Dix. At the same time, he was developing an incredibly rigid system of etching, preserved in Abraham Bosse’s Manual of Etching. In Covid after Callot, my goal is to produce a series of copper etchings, applying Callot’s etching system to news images circulating today - using the precursor thought-technology of Callot’s work as an archeological tool through which to examine the system of design that informs today’s imagery.
Collage and techniques of transference are integral to my multidisciplinary practice. As an immigrant female artist, my work deals with acculturation, hybrid identity, and ideas about gendered labor. Using solvent photo transfers, painting, embroidery, and crochet, I create colorful compositions where figures and ornamentation intermingle to complicate identity, formal domination, hierarchy, and the value assigned to women’s work. Influenced by Islamic ornamentation, my visual language references a mixture of coded symbolism such as oya (lace edging that traditionally contained meaning in the patterns on a headdress) and kilim rug symbols.
Website:
www.hale-ekinci.com/
Residency Period:
Jul 2022–Aug 2022
Project Statement:
As a resident at Spudnik Press, I plan to continue my mixed-media works on textiles and add printmaking to my visual vocabulary. I have a range of processes I would like to experiment with to expand my mixed-media mark-making. I plan to use silkscreen printing and transparent inks instead of solvent photo transfer, which would allow me to layer and play with colors while reducing toxic exposure. I will also use linocut motifs to create repeated patterns and textile materials to make impressions for monotypes. I have a collection of textiles, mostly from thrift stores and my dowry* that I want to use to translate onto surfaces. After printing on fabric and/or paper, I will layer embroidery and hand painting as I typically do in my work.
Aimée Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago. Beaubien reorganizes photographic experience while exploring networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal in cut-up collages, artists’ books and immersive installations. A photographed plant, interlaced vine, woven topography merge into fields of color and pattern and back again expanding the ever more complicated sensations of reading a photograph and experiencing nature. Beaubien’s work has been included in national and international exhibitions including Demo Projects, Springfield, IL; Gallery UNO Projektraum, Berlin, Germany; Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX; Marvelli Gallery, New York, NY; The Pitch Project, Milwaukee, WI; Virus Art Gallery, Rome, Italy. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Aimée Beaubien is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL where she has taught since 1997.
Products by this Artist:
Studio Fellow (2022)
Xingyi Zhao is a Chicago-based artist. She creates prints and handwoven textiles that investigate our relationship with domestic space and everyday objects. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of the 21st century, her work deals with memory, privacy, and a sense of forced optimism with a subtle minimalistic approach. She is currently in her final year as a BFA student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an emphasis in printmaking.
Website:
www.instagram.com/dedetcan/
Studio Fellow (2022)
I am a graduate of Northern Illinois University working with relief and lithography. I moved to Colorado for four-ish years, working as a commercial screen printer and doing some studio work on the side. I also spent time there learning 3D and animation. I recently moved back to the area and am trying to get back into print fully. I am an LGBTQ+ artist exploring ideas along that vein with newer work while also using my knowledge of 3D to create mixed media projects.
Website:
loganwoodbury.carbonmade.com/
Studio Fellow (2022)
I am a multimedia artist and a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in Printmaking and Visual Communications. Much of my artwork deals with the combination of mediums to process and re-contextualize memories and emotions. I often tie in my multicultural background to my pieces as a way for me to come to a better understanding of my identity. Since graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I have primarily been working at Fulton Market Kitchen as the Marketing Director and Art Director where I have organized a number of gallery shows and live painting events with Chicago artists.
Website:
alekstzander.com/
Studio Fellow (2022)
I am a cartoonist from Skokie, IL. For the past five years, I have been teaching people how to create using technology in public libraries and academic spaces. I started making comics as a teenager and after, as an Orthodox Jewish schoolgirl, I read all of Love and Rockets haven’t been the same since. I went on to study comics and technology at the University of Michigan and have been living in Skokie since I graduated with my tiny, bossy Pitbull, Matilda.
Website:
franniemiller.myportfolio.com/
