Kerri Ammirata (b. 1983, Glencove, NY) is a painter and printmaker who believes in the magic and poetry in art. Trained as a landscape painter, her work is strongly influenced by nature, specifically its patterns and rhythms, and by the spiritual intensity created in Australian Aboriginal artwork. Her current work deals with the idea of creating as a human and how it relates to the moment. She is interested in meditation and how a heightened sense of awareness of the body and mind can inform and change a piece of art.  Kerri recently received her MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2010, where she was interviewed as the “Six to See” in the Boston Globe, reviewed in Artnet magazine, and a finalist for the Kahn Award. She received her B.A. in Fine Arts and Family Science from Anderson University in 2006 and studied for two summers at the Chautauqua Institution residency program where she was awarded full-tuition scholarship.


“If you want to know the truth you will know it.  The manipulation of materials in artwork is a result of this state of mind.  The artist works by awareness of his own state of mind.”
     -Agnes Martin, What is Real

My role as an artist is to perceive the invisible and to make it visible.  To perceive the invisible, I must believe in what I know.  I know the rhythm of my heartbeat.  My goal is to make visible that beat, and the pressure inside my chest that pulsates into my veins.

As I begin a work, I try to heighten my awareness of being.  I place my canvas or wood on the ground.  Hunched over it, and in a meditative state, I am one with the work.  I try to understand its being in relation to my own body.  I treat working as if it were a sacred ritual.  My inspiration always comes from Nature.  I use its repetition and patterns to articulate the regular pulsating tempo that I feel in my body.

I want viewers to experience a calm state of mind, to listen to, and to find, the rhythm of their own bodies.  I want them to see and to feel the undulating patterns of my pictures, and to allow their minds to relax into the movements of the lines and forms.  I hope that they will inhale with each color, and exhale with another, until the rhythm is inside them, too.

I know the rhythm of my breath.

 

 

 

 

Ian Shelly (b. 1983, Lubbock, Tx) grew up on the rolling plains of west Texas in the laboratories and offices of the chemistry building at Texas Tech University. As the son of a chemistry educator father and biologist mother, the languages and materials of the science world have influenced his life heavily. An upbringing around his scientist parents and his military minded brother has molded his interests in the fields of weapons manufacturing, scientific research and ceramic art-making. This atmosphere of influences is the core to all Ian’s imagery and thought. He began his formal art education as a functional potter and only within the last three years has incorporated the more stylistic narrative themes of his drawings into his world with clay. The immensity of the ceramic world and industry has made ceramic sculpture the ultimate testing ground for work that both exalts and deplores man’s inquisitive nature. Ian hold a BFA in Ceramics from Texas Tech and an MFA in Ceramics from u. Missouri.


In my work, a tangible place exists where the fields of art making, weapons manufacturing and scientific research converge.  This latest work is composed of these subjects existing in the same atmosphere, constantly crossing and colliding with one another as if part of the same charged electron cloud.  This work as an endless equation of variables, values, formulae and solutions.  Like the system and language of chemistry, these subjects are always around us and the characters, materials and scenarios of this equation and chain reaction are in constant motion.

In an effort to reflect on the early presence that these subjects have in our lives, this connectivity is expressed through a language specific to childhood and is punctuated with objects that reference my early education and play. The childish language in this work
comments on two conclusions that stoke the fires of my work; the omnipresent nature of science in our daily lives and the similarity between objects used to discover and nurture
and those used to destroy and capitalize.

I see this work as a mechanism to evaluate conflict as the direct result of two kinds of perennial human activities: misunderstanding – willful or otherwise – and the heroic yet flawed effort to understand through research and classification.  The activities in my work show the nature of human relationships as seen through the lenses of our societies researchers and artists.

 

 

Corinne Manning (b. 1983, Neptune, NJ) graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2005 and completed her MFA at UNC Wilmington in May. At UNCW she was a teaching assistant in the Publishing Laboratory where she designed books and broadsides. Before moving to Wilmington she co-founded the Other Means Reading Series in Brooklyn, NY; a monthly literary reading and fundraising event that supported a different non profit each month. She also teaches yoga.



I believe in work that has heart—by that I mean a life behind the words, a beat, a breath and a will. The writer can’t do that alone. It’s the reader that gives the piece of work the breath, the writer’s job is to prepare the piece fully so that when the breath comes the story can animate to its true self. I see my own work as a collaboration between me and the reader.

In my writing, my pattern has been to  paint situations that seem extraordinary as plain and common while taking every day situations and presenting them as bizarre; the way they might seem to a being from outer space. I am continually interested in how effective this switching can be, not only to push a plot forward, but to discover the intricacies that lie behind the things that we are often stopped by because of their seeming unfamiliarity.

I am affected by interactions, rhythmic sounds, and the grace or clumsiness in physical movements. My characters lie and cheat, fall in love, lose their money, and find magic rocks. Before they come to life, I need to understand them from all angles—to understand and forgive them even when, as the writer Joan Silber puts it, they do unspeakable things. My hope is that the reader can feel this in the current under the text as they make their own choices about which characters are unforgivable and which ones are worth loving.