Annette Brown

Heart of Still features faith-based and inspirational screen prints, paper goods, and home accents. Items are handcrafted from my home in Illinois. Heart of Still is a collision of my love for God, words, and crafting. It’s my belief that a still heart is grateful, grounded, and genuine. Inspired by nature and scripture, I use an understated color palette in order to place emphasis on each faith-based and inspirational message. Using eco-friendly supplies, like water-based inks and recycled materials, Heart of Still treads lightly on the earth.

Website:

www.etsy.com/shop/studio9thirteen

Pablo Bottari-Tower

Image: Detail of “Wacker View South” © Pablo Bottari-Tower 2013

“To sip life slowly in order to be fully present” is how I view my calling. This requires looking holistically at my surroundings. Trained as an architect, I enjoy reflecting that back on to paper using texture, color, orientation, line, surface, solids, and voids. My intent is to capture a cityscape moment emphasizing movement, excitement and grandeur.

Website:

pbottaritower.wix.com/pablo-art

Hannah Ireland

Hannah Ireland combines an array of drawing, painting and print processes to create enigmatic work inspired by her memories of experiences hiking and exploring natural places, most recently remote parts of Australia, Spain, and Portugal.

Hannah became a Spudnik member in 2013 and has represented Spudnik at Citizen Schools as a volunteer teacher and was the Artist in Residence during the Fall of 2013. Hannah has a BFA in Printmaking/Drawing from Washington University in St. Louis.

Website:

www.hannahirelandstudio.com

Residency Period:

Sep 2013–Nov 2013

Project Statement:

Hannah Ireland’s residency at Spudnik Press is based on exploring and creating around a hiking trip in Spain and Portugal in the summer of 2013 – specifically walking portions of the long distance hiking track the GR11, which follows the peak of the Pyrenees, and El Camino de Santiago del Norte, a pilgrimage route along the northern coast of Spain to Santiago de Compostela. “I’m interested,” Ireland says “in how recognizable imagery from nature and the actual locations I visited – which are tangible, real, and lasting – will combine with abstracted imagery from the subjective memory of my experience there – which is intangible, enigmatic and changes as time passes.” Using sketches, writing, postcards and photographs from her trip as reference material, Ireland will create a series of unique mixed media print/drawings that utilize engraving, etching, xerox transfer, monotype, pen and ink, and watercolor. Some of these prints will be cut up and reconstructed into experimental tunnel book structures.

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Nadine Nakanishi

I was born in California, though the sun drenched weather was short lived. My family moved to Schaffhausen, a small town North of Zürich, bordering the Rhine river, where I spent my childhood listening to the sounds of the Midwest (Joan of Arc, Promised Ring, Braid, Captain Jazz, Elliott, Rodan, Black Flag, At the Drive-in, the Sea and Cake, to name a few). After high school, I studied Asian studies at the University of Zürich but soon realized that I wanted to major in the arts. A graphic design apprentice followed culminating with a degree in typography from the Berufsschule Zürich. In 2003, an internship at Punk Planet Magazine brought me to Chicago. I would end up not leaving the city of big shoulders. Since 2006, I run a studio called Sonnenzimmer, with Nick Butcher.

www.sonnenzimmer.com

Website:

www.sonnenzimmer.com

Nick Butcher

I was born in Dyersburg, Tennessee. I spent my formative years skateboarding, drawing, recording music, and going to punk shows. At Middle Tennessee State University, I studied graphic design, where luckily the printmaking department was across the hall from the computer lab. This saved me. Screenprinting quickly became an outlet for my itch to create which led me to making gig posters for local bands. This fueled into an internship with poster artist, Jay Ryan in Chicago and later another one at Hatch Show Print in Nashville. I moved to Chicago in 2003. Ryan kindly sublet valuable space to me to experiment and to print after hours. This made way to my first attempts at painting. After some time, I established my own studio space, spending an intense time painting and making electronic music. In 2006, I combined forces with Nadine Nakanishi, to form Sonnenzimmer. I am currently a MFA candidate in the Print Media department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

Website:

www.nickbutcher.net/, , www.sonnenzimmer.com

Renee Robbins

While primarily working as a painter, her prints include intaglio, silkscreen, and woodcuts explorations. In Renee Robbins’ work, she pieces together imagined worlds that are fluid, morphing, and emerging. While she draws from natural phenomena and micro to macro relationships, her work also pulls from the diversity and range within molecular, biological, botanical, marine, and celestial systems. It is her intent that the work converges on a gigantic range both in and out of our human experience.

Website:

reneerobbins.com/

Nicole Kita

Nicole Kita is a visual artist who works in drawing, painting, printmaking, and installation.

Kita presently lives and works in Northern California, as a gallery curator and educator for artists
with developmental disabilities: The Studio Online.

Website:

nicolekita.com/home.html

Residency Period:

Sep 2011–Nov 2011

Project Statement:

The structure of my work takes multiple forms: acrylic paintings, graphite drawings, silkscreen prints, and di-cut vinyl installations. Each process begins with a thorough investigation of form through a highly detailed drawing. By prescribing to the clinical aesthetic of the instructional diagram, my process is meticulous and time consuming.
The taxonomy of images begin with conventional signifiers of self-preservation, survival, fear, mortality, and loss, including life jackets, inflatable rescue boats, water wings, and surgical masks for public health protection. I investigate the belief in these objects in contrast to the shortcomings of the actual, physical object. Despite the fallibility of the objects in the event of true crisis, there is tremendous comfort in knowing that one is taking incremental measures against disaster; the life jacket under your plane seat actually is reassuring. Don DeLillo wrote in White Noise, “The more we rehearse disaster, the safer we’ll be from the real thing.” Akin to the representational icons of safety, I am currently investigating the mimetic qualities, transactional symbols, and legitimizing practices of ritual, or symbolic healing. A healer evokes symbols or metaphors in dramatic action and aesthetic performance that provide a material language through which a patient can express, understand, or transform the personal or interpersonal conflicts underlying his or her illness. The mediating symbols align the inner experience of the subject with the objective structure of the rite.

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Nate Cubeta

Nate Cubeta is a print artist from Boston, MA. He received his BFA in Printmaking from Maryland Institute College of Art. His recent work comments on the sensation that role is sports in our society, with a visual focus on both the architectural and cinematic. He has interned at Spudnik in 2011 and taught a class on screen printing with photos in 2013.

Sofia Leiby

Sofia Leiby is a visual artist and arts writer living in Chicago. She is also the co-founder and editor of Chicago Artist Writers, a web-based platform for artist-authored criticism of alternative spaces in Chicago. Sofia graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in painting and printmaking in 2011.

 

Website:

www.sofialeiby.com/

Kevin White

Hello internet! My name is Kevin White. I do a bunch of stuff – stand up comedy, graphic design, acting, screen printing and writing.

Website:

kevinwhiteisnotfunny.com/

Daniel Greenberg

Daniel was born in Baltimore, Maryland and comes from a line of artists. At first resistant to art making, in high school Greenberg invested in a Nikon D70 to take pictures for his myspace page. As a gay male, freshly out of the closet, the Internet offered an opportunity to test his identity through a virtual environment by posting self-portraits and making connections previously unimagined. Greenberg will begin a fine art graduate studies program at Cranbrook in the Fall of 2012.

Website:

cargocollective.com/danielgreenberg/About

Residency Period:

Jun 2012–Aug 2012

Project Statement:

Walking is the best way for me to think. Walking in nature allows for a temporary repositioning from our daily lives. But I more often find myself walking on a city street, or meditating while surfing the internet. For me, both the internet and nature operate as an escape from reality.” says Daniel. Working in the form of block prints, drawings and monoprints, and using imagery found online, Daniel depicts the detail and expansiveness of green forests on or with materials made from wood. He hopes viewers can get lost in the details of the natural world, and at times, utilizes technology as a means to this end. In the past months I have archived photographs of men in nature from the internet. The men are mostly alone; mostly men I see as beautiful. Certainly, a homosexual gaze enters this work. But by erasing and abstracting the figures I hope the viewer can, for a moment, occupy their bodies, gestures, and perhaps even thoughts. Sometimes I go a step further, extenuating varieties of ugliness in the figures, or at times the impressions of figures left behind in nature. Footprints in snow or mud represent a mark of a person left behind, and a desire to see him. Together, these works investigate not just the the homosexual gaze, but the human desire to see ourselves in others.  

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