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Alumni Updates
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Updated October 2010 - After HUB-BUB, I moved to Brooklyn. Peter and I had been apart for a year, and now I was living in a basement loft in Bushwick, a warehouse district full of artist lofts.
It was summer, and I got a job at Spaeth Design, where everyone was in full swing making the Christmas windows for the Times Square department stores. I spent most of my time slicing up latex dolls and stapling them back together very carefully the way Frankenstein would have if his monster was going to be dancing the Nutcracker Suite.
A lot of my friends from RISD were in NY too, and one of them, Adam Krueger, had just begun the planning of an installation-based show for the newly formed artist collective, 3B. Peter and I jumped on board, and began working on our pieces.
We shared the top floor of a dilapidated building in TriBeCa that was slated to be torn down, and we turned it into a temporary gallery. We got a full page ad in Artforum magazine, had crazy art parties, and licked Picassos.
The week after the opening, I was back in South Carolina to do another residency, this time in Sumter. It was brief, 2 weeks, but it was a whirlwind. The theme was sustainability, and I figured I would make a piece out of locally found objects, but I was having trouble finding materials, being allowed to use potentially unsafe materials (broken glass), but I ultimately used cotton left over from the last year’s season to make Lavinia and the Birdman.
The day of the opening in Sumter, I got an email saying the Christmas windows were finished ahead of scheldule, and not to worry about coming back until next season.
The 3-B show was having it’s closing reception the night I returned from the airport. It was snowing. Nothing had sold. I had no job. I lived in a windowless hole. I took a job doing construction.That lasted a month. However, I am now quite good at putting up drywall.
I became a craigslist junkie. And this is good, this has served me well. I got a job working as an Art Fabricator for KB Projects. I was excited that I would be making work for some of my favorite contemporary artists, the people who inspired me in college, who I basically idolized. And then I learned how little they had to do with their art.
Marcel Dzama, for example. His gallery commissioned us to recreate a scene from a Marcel Duchamp photograph for him. It was a complicated scene, involving a nude bodycasting of a man and a woman lying in a field with mountains in the background, and the man is holding onto a fox’s tail. All of this is viewed through a hole in a brick wall. This was my first time observing an artist seeing their work completed. Dzama and his gallerist came in, and there was this very false congregation where we all congratulated him on how great his artwork was. Then he quietly asked which of us painted the background. Why, you did!, everyone’s eyes seemed to say. Finally Georgi lowered his eyes and raised his hand. Haltingly, Marcel said thank you. To break the tension, Mark, who had headed the project, asked if there was anything Marcel would like changed. “Well, perhaps there could be a bit more blood on the man’s neck” Marcel said. “Ok,” said Mark, and offered him a pencil. “Where, exactly?” Marcel looked at the pencil in this incredibly frightened way and said nothing. “Maybe you better not”, his gallerist said. He looked relieved. “Everything looks great” he said. The piece was a big hit at his show.
But the whole fabrication experience taught me how to make things better than I had ever been able to figure out on my own. I learned how to make multiple part silicone molds, clay blanket molds, how to sculpt quickly and well on a large scale, how to cast chocolate, as well as learning the other side of gallery operations.
After Peter finished up at Pratt, the economy started to tank, and we could see the fabrication jobs starting to dwindle. When he was offered a job teaching and coordinating the fabrication shops at F.A.U., we jumped at the chance, and that is how we came to live in Florida.
We got married and bought a house in Ft Lauderdale, about 20 minutes north of Miami I started doing stage design for a local theatre company, and checking craigslist obsessively again. It was because of this that early one Saturday morning I found an intriguing ad from the owner of a downtown warehouse. I had met so many amazing artists between the folks at RISD, Pratt, 3-B, Hub-Bub, and Miami. I had also seen the gallery business from many angles. In ten minutes I had sketched out a business plan. I called the landlord, and when I told him my idea he said it was meant to be. We signed a lease the next day. 18 Rabbit Gallery was born.
We transformed the space into gallery and studio and had the graffiti group, MSG Cartel, paint the building, making the first legal graffiti walls in Ft Lauderdale.
In the past year, we put on several group and solo exhibitions, partly modeling the structure on Hub-Bub’s, with poetry and play readings, music, events, and also weekly figure drawing classes.
Having a studio again allowed me to start sculpting on a large scale, combining my new fabrication skills with my love of installation, so since starting the gallery, I have made more artwork than any other time since Hub-Bub. I’ve been in several exhibitions, and have many more lined up..
Most recently, Hub-Bub contacted me to be a visiting artist and make an installation in the new Art Park. Together, Peter and I made the Peaceable Kingdom, which is currently on display.
On Oct 9th,18 Rabbit Gallery moved into a new space in FAT Village, Ft Lauderdale’s art district, where we will be exhibiting in two spaces, a small main gallery and a 10,000 sq ft project space that will be available for large-scale projects and independent curators with big ideas.
Visit Leah online at: www.leahbrownart.com and www.18rabbitgallery.com
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Updated December 2010 -
"Following my time at HUB-BUB, I relocated to Athens to attend Graduate School at the University of Georgia. I was fortunate enough to be granted a Teaching Assistantship while in school, and had the opportunity to teach drawing to Undergraduates for two years. Slowly but surely, my work transitioned from narrative, figurative assemblages to softer, more subtle abstractions, although it seems as though my content, place and time, has continued to remain the same.
Since graduating this past May, I've been working as a critic (gasp!) for a local newspaper, and working in a studio just outside downtown Athens. I also co-founded an literary and arts journal, Marco Polo Quarterly -- I'm currently the operating art director. Recently, I learned that I'll be teaching in the Spring at the University of Georgia and at Gainesville State College as an adjunct instructor, which will by far be the most enjoyable job I've had thus far (except, of course, being artist-in-residence at HUB-BUB). Some recent and upcoming exhibitions: ""Taking Part"" at ATHICA in Athens, ""Babylon Lexicon"" at Antenna Gallery in New Orleans, and ""From Point A to Point A"" at MOCA-GA in Atlanta. "
Find Brian online at: www.myinclementweather.com
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Updated October 2010 -
Dear HUB-BUBble and beyond—
Pulling my sister’s hair, tripping down the stairs, talking out of turn. Yes, as an adolescent these things frequently happened. And miraculously, just as quickly as these flawed actions were performed, they stopped and I was once again a “good girl.” But shortly after, I would be facing a corner in time out or dramatically screaming over a thin trickle of red fluid tickling my knee. The repercussions were far more detrimental than the erroneous behavior that incited them. Despite their vanishing act from the eyes of witnesses, the prior moments of misconduct prevailed.
I guess I’ve always been traumatized by the concept time. Because everything you do, everything you see, instantaneously escapes the present and documents itself in the selective archive of memory. But not before these actions and experiences lead you to the next line of the script, be it “ouch, I’m bleeding” or “yes, I accept the offer to attend “the opera/your residency program/this grad school/- - - - - -.” I’m still plagued by the inability to comprehend the continuum of time and continue to remain curious about where moments “go,” but I suppose I’m used to it by now and have a lot more to worry about than I did when the most exciting part of my day involved a sandbox and kool-aid. And now, thinking about where I am, I can only think about where I was that brought me here. Which is in my delightfully cozy studio apartment in Boston.
Because I’ve already used almost half of my allotted word count for this update, I’ll have to be succinct. And what better way to get a point across other than making a list? I assure you, list-making continues to be one of my favorite hobbies. So, since I’ve left HUB-BUB, which was a little over a year ago, I’ve learned and experienced a few things that have brought me to the place I sit now:
TIPI TOUR
The week I left Spartanburg, I drove directly to my place of prior residence, Elsewhere Artist Collaborative in Greensboro, NC. For the proceeding six weeks I worked with my collaborative partner, Ian Gamble, preparing for the expanded edition of our public tipi installation in downtown Spartanburg. To be concise, we bought a school bus, packed 10 of our recycled plastic tents and Jonas Criscoe into the vehicle, and drove around the United States for a month, pitching camp in urban spaces. We call this arduous trip “tipi tour.” With the help of myriad institutions, art organizations and a fluctuating onboard crew of 8 artists, we publicly intervened the social fabric of our country’s industrialized, corporate landscapes. It was a pretty remarkable trip. 6000 miles that sluggishly started in the sweaty south, withstood a Mississippi coast hurricane, glazed eyes across the desert, quietly rambled onto desolate planes in states whose name I don’t even know, landed next to elitist academic institutions and floated to an island off the shore of New York City. It’s hard to summarize, but when I reminisce I’m usually smiling. At not only the actually humorous or joyful incidents, but the ones that were stress-inducing at the time In retrospect, everything is funny. But besides the chuckle-inducing memories like losing the water tank from our bus in Texas, waking up next to real, live buffalo in a sunny Nebraska reserve and mistakenly picking up a hitchhiker in Chicago, I learned a lot. Mostly politics. And not only pertaining to regulations and legality issues of setting up 20 foot tents in cities, but of the art world and living in tight quarters with people who haven’t had the chance to bathe in a few days.
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT (isn’t defined by pollution.)
So, after producing “tipi tour,” a project dedicated to environmental advocacy, I assumed it would forever be my argument. I’d be creating work based around trash and the justice of this planet for the rest of my life. Wrong. I went to grad school instead. I enrolled at MIT, where my inevitable encounters with technology carved my current research interest, which is a performative investigation of humans as they embody and resist constructed environments. To be more specific, these constructed environments refer to systems that influence and determine the methods and degree to which humans perceive and interact with their surroundings: physical boundaries (architecture), socially imposed behavioral expectations (communication), enhanced or debilitated sensory input/output (technological devices and applications), and other tangential paradigms of structure that are largely implemented in our digital culture. Taking a critical, dialectical stance, my thesis challenges the paradoxical position of our species as we approach hybridity, operating as both biological organisms and progressive, computerized beings.
NEVER GIVE UP ON BEING A PROFESSIONAL DANCER.
In Spring 2009, I was hired to perform in a minimal, contemporary dance piece by MIT visiting artist from Berlin, Xavier Le Roy. After 4 weeks of going to my classes, preparing for a group show and attending intense, daily rehearsals with Xavier, I found myself not only exhausted, but naked on the floor in front of an audience of 200, pretending to be a computer printer and grazing carpet like a lion. It was a great experience.
SLEEP IS IMPORTANT.
I decided I needed a paid vacation this summer because my teaching assistant positions haven’t been lucrative enough and I was pretty tired, so I called up the study abroad office at MIT and went to Berlin to do an internship with a former MIT student and rest. I finally learned a few German words that haven’t come in handy since, but adopted the practice of somnolence, which has made this semester more tolerable.
NOW (is soon to be later.)
Today, I have to build a circuit board and write a program. I haven’t decide what the function will be, but maybe it will have a button you can press that sends a thank you message to all the people who have helped along the way. With this is mind, I’m forever grateful to the people in the HUB-BUB community!
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Updated November 2010 -
"When I left HUB-BUB and Sparkle City I headed up to Boston for the summer. There I had a chance to reconnect with familiar faces and landscapes, as well as take a Sculptural Weaving class (aka basket making) at MassArt. Weaving Baskets in the summer is the best, but when the season came to an end I packed up all my stuff and moved to Michigan to attend Cranbrook Academy of Art. Grad school is intense, and Cranbrook's program, particularly the Fiber department, is structured a lot like a residency program- mostly free studio time with the community around you serving as critics, collaborators, and sounding boards. After 11 months at HUB-BUB, this way of living and working felt familiar to me, which was nice in the unchartered waters of Michigan. In between my two years at Cranbrook I headed back down south for an extended stay at Elsewhere Artist Collaborative. A friend of mine from Cranbrook, Casey Droege, was there for two of those weeks and we collaborated on an installation on the third floor, in the wall paper room. If you are ever in Greensboro, NC you should totally check it out! When Casey left I wiped away my tears and got to work on another installation on the third floor. In the Southern summer, on the top floor of a 100 year old building with no ac and little ventilation I can safely say I sweat out any potential toxins stored in my body up to that point. It was a pretty amazing, at some times an out of body/ out of mind / attitude altering experience, and in that readjusted frame of mind I headed back to Michigan for round two of Cranbrook.
When I told people in Spartanburg, and even in Boston and New York that I was moving to Michigan for Grad school, every single person questioned my decision to participate in the cold snowy unrelenting weather. What they clearly didn't know is that the snow in Michigan is very beautiful which almost redeems the season. Unlike the heavy wet snow of the Northeast, Michigan snow is dry and light and fluffy. It not only closely resembles the fake snow sold in bags at Hobby Lobby, but sparkles when it catches the light in that fake snow way. These sparkles though visually entrancing, do not detract from the long gray daze of winter time, and most of my time in Graduate school is a blur blanketed in dank clouds. Though details are muted, I know that I made a lot of work and a lot of good friends. I am pretty sure the Fiber department took a class trip to Las Vegas in January. I know for sure that my class showed their work in Detroit's Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCAD), which was a blast. I also know that I had the pleasure of sharing my graduate show with two of my fellow A.I.R.s, Rachel and Arielle. Being able to show them how far my work has come since our time up on the 3rd floor of 149 Daniel Morgan meant a lot to me, and highlighted the formative importance of my time in Spartanburg.
After graduating in May, I stayed in Michigan for the summer (which is beautiful), participated in a juried show at Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia, and headed out to Seattle for a week long vacation/ pilgrimage to early 90's rock 'n' roll. At the end of August, I moved to Maryland to teach at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. I am teaching Introduction to Fiber for the fall semester. When this class is finished I have no idea where I will be going next. I do know that I want to keep moving, seeing different places, meeting new people, making things. I guess I will just keep you posted.
Find Derya online at: www.cutslikehanife.com
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Updated December 2010 -
"Since leaving Spartanburg for the North Carolina coast, I’ve been teaching in the UNC Wilmington Department of Creative Writing and directing its teaching press, The Publishing Laboratory. For students interested in a career in book or journal publishing, the Pub Lab, as it’s known at UNCW, offers a foundation in publishing arts by intensive work in editing, designing, and marketing literary titles with our own in-house press. Among other books and journals, we publish the award-winning magazine Ecotone, for which I’m now art director.
Recently I co-founded a new literary imprint, Lookout Books. The boutique press will publish poetry collections, novels, and books of stories and essays, beginning with our debut title, Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision, in January 2011. Through the imprint, co-founder Ben George and I plan to publish emerging and historically underrepresented voices, as well as works by established writers overlooked by commercial houses. Our second book, due in October, will be a story collection by Steve Almond.
I spent a magical few weeks at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts last summer—a rare, uninterrupted return to my own writing. Worried I wouldn’t have ample reading material, I packed a trunk full of books, including a box of monographs by Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, and William Christenberry. The iconic photographs quickly found their way into my poems, and my poems into a new manuscript, on which I continue to work every chance I get.
As time allows I design books for the inspiring folks at Hub City Press and in 2010 began directing their summer conference, Writing in Place.
I’m in search of a good used kayak. "
Find Emily online:
"I post writing and publishing news, as well as random musings on poetry, pedagogy, letterpress, photographs, pimento cheese, hiking, music, small press publishing, book design, alligators, indie bookstores, boiled peanuts, typography, and the occasional melt-your-heart mutt in need of a home at www.emilylouisesmith.org.
Check out The Publishing Laboratory at www.uncw.edu/writers/Publab and Lookout at www.lookout.org. Become a fan: www.facebook.com/lookoutbooks."
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