Xueni Zhang (EMU)

Long Life, 2007
Paper and thread
Seven Ropes, 2007
Brown Paper
(Both Suspended nearby)

My name is Xueni Zhang, and I’m from China. My creation process is like the goddess Nüwa of ancient China, who created people with her hands. I use my hands to mold and build pieces out of my life story – always what I see, I feel, I think, and I experience with the people that I love the best, and the events that make my life splendid and full of joy. I use paper as the main material for all my work, because it is organic, it comes originally from a living thing, and it shares qualities with human beings. In my work I explore the potential of paper, using paper art techniques to give life to my personal experience.

My early work was focused on traditional graphic design. I did a lot of work on books, posters, and so on. Since I came to EMU, little by little, I changed my concentration to paper art. I have been fascinated by Chinese paper art since I was a little girl, so naturally I like using paper art techniques with my work. My advisors introduced Hollander’s (in Ann Arbor) to me, it’s a great store and also a school with a lot of beautiful paper and paper art workshop. They also showed me a lot of work made by paper artists. I think one of my biggest achievements I made since I came here, there was a way, a new language, to communicate with people through my work. I’m from China, and there are quite some elements in my work that can be identified of Chinese origin. I want to share my culture with people who are not from China.

My study as a graduate student at EMU helps me find a new language to better communicate.

Sadie Wilcox (UM)

ICU Dialogue, 2008
Video

My name is Sadie Wilcox. I’m originally from Western Massachusetts, and I joined the graduate program at the School of Art & Design in the fall of 2005.

Although I’ve always done art throughout my life, from my teenage years on, I was not an undergrad an art major; I was studying international relations, international politics. So I always thought of my creative practice as something I did outside of the rest of my life. I’d come home from work and I’d work on my creative practice at home. And it wasn’t until I was injured and in physical therapy, and I wasn’t able to work, that I began to shift into a more serious pursuit of my visual arts practice. So it was a kind of unexpected change. But I was eager to pursue it, and I spent several years, during the time in which I was in physical therapy, developing my portfolio and beginning to really work more seriously in the painting and drawing media. And so when I applied to U of M, it was all works on paper in my portfolio. In the first semester as a graduate student, I was also working on paper. And yet throughout all of the creative work all of my focus was on the movement of the body and the relationships of the physiological movement of the body. And so it seems appropriate to move toward video as a means of representing movement of the body and representations of physical mobility and adaptive mobility and non-traditional, or multiple forms of mobility.

For the past five or six years, my art practice has really been focused on the documentation of my recovery process from a severe third-degree burn injury. I had an art practice prior to my injury, but after being burned and spending multiple months in the hospital and several years of recovering through physical therapy and rehabilitation, I became increasingly fascinated and interested in the human body and the ways in which the human body functions, both on a physical level – burns effect all layers of the body, not only just the skin, but the muscle, the tendons, the circulatory system, at times even the bone structure. So there’s a really interesting physiological effect of burns that I’ve studied and explored through my art practice. And then of course there’s also the emotional and psychological healing process from trauma and from burn injury. In my case it was an incident of violence as well. So there’s a really interesting dialogue that begins to happen between the physical body and the emotional body.

And my creative practice has really been the means by which to explore these various systems. I started out primarily in painting and drawing, I was working in two-dimensional media, mostly on paper, and I was documenting the physical recovery process over the course of about two or three years. When I joined the MFA program at the University of Michigan, I had the opportunity to take advantage of the facilities here and the resources that are available to grad students. So I learned video editing and began delving into an exploration of the topic through video and through digital media. So it’s been a really exciting and enriching journey. And I’m looking forward to what new directions it takes me in.

Adrienne Vetter (UM)

Camper Video, 2008
Video


My name is Adrienne Vetter, and I am currently a grad student at the University of Michigan. I grew up in the state of Wyoming in a very rural setting, small town. I guess a lot of my work is about exploring representations of rural culture and the American west and trying to challenge stereotypes of that.

I guess I believe, in terms of medium, the medium should match the content of whatever it is I’m trying to get across. So if I’m working in cast metals, then it should relate to the idea that I’m trying to get across. Or if I’m doing a giant inflatable sculpture, it’s about inflated value in terms of the content. It means I work in a lot of different media all the time.

I went to the University of Wyoming for my undergraduate education. It was a pretty traditional program in terms of providing me with a background in drawing and painting and printmaking and object making, in a pretty traditional sense. I guess I never take anything for granted in terms of how visual imagery or an object can communicate. Since coming to the University of Michigan, I’ve changed quite a bit in thinking about how time-based media, such as audio or video and interactive technology, can really influence my content. My work today is also really influenced by literary sources, like creative non-fiction, authors like Annie Proulx or Dorothy Allison, writing about the South and social class issues. If my work can visually communicate people’s individual stories in the same way as a good novel can, then I’m pretty happy with that.

Before I went to school, I think I had a really narrow conception of what an artist was and limited to painting and drawing, and big bronze cowboys –which has a lot to do with where I grew up! So when I started, I pretty much thought that I was going to work in two-dimensions, in drawing and painting, and portraiture, and life drawing. One of the huge shifts that happened was that I had a mentor who was a female sculpture professor in my undergraduate institution. Since she was new to the program, she brought a lot of new ideas and sort of revamped the program. Started doing iron casting out in the sculpture yard and really transformed my ideas about even what I could do as a female artist. Got me over my fear of power tools. Made me realize that a lot of the way that I work has to do with working with my hands and that comes from being from this strongly working class family.

Thinking about coming from a two-dimensional surface on the wall that people just look at, to an object that comes off the wall and interacts with the viewer in that same physical space, was a totally different way of thinking for me. I think I’ve always been concerned with art that engages somebody physically and emotionally at the same time. Three-dimensional sculpture, and then getting into installation, where it’s sculpture that envelopes the person looking at it, like their entire body in the environment, seems to be much more effective in terms of communicating the way that I’d like to communicate. It was a huge shift. And then coming here with the idea of even using interactive technology and then time-based, where somebody’s experiencing the content in the moment versus looking at a static object, was really important for me.

Mark Sengbusch (Cranbrook)

Untitled, 2008
Bungee cord wall weaving installation

My name is Mark Sengbusch. I’m originally from Rochester, New York. My work has changed a lot over the past twenty years that I’ve been making paintings. I started off as a kid making mazes a lot. It’s funny how you notice in your later life that things come back to what you did when you were younger. I don’t know why I was really interested in mazes; it was just something that I did. So now I’ve gone into weaving.

To go into a more chronological thing: after I graduated from the College for Creative Studies in 2002, I started a gallery in Corktown, where I made 101 paintings a week for 20 weeks, because I thought that quantity was very important. I learned that from this book, “Art and Fear.” And also from Mitch Cope, who I had a great class with at CCS. How I like to put it is, if you dig enough holes, you’ll find gold – eventually. So I think that that happened.

Now that I came to Cranbrook, what I figured I would do is, why dig so many random holes, just go right to the mine. So I’ve been working on single pieces a lot more. The piece behind me is a reverse Plexiglas inlaid in the wall, which happened after thinking a lot about the art object and the importance of the physical art object. And I’m thinking more about the context or about the architecture, so I kind of scrapped the whole art object thing and went into that. Video games have always been a big thing for me, I’ve been playing video games for a long time. My high score in Tetris is much higher as a child as my adult career. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to beat that – 810,000! And so I’ve been using that as a parallel with weaving. I got a nice big loom, and I’m trying to make this parallel between video games, or more specifically computers and early weavings, because the computer is a loom, it’s based on weaving techniques. So that’s where I’m at now – I’m weaving and playing Tetris.

Gypsy Schindler (EMU)

MTV Family – Papi, Shorty, 2007
Materials
(Suspended throughout the space)

My name is Gypsy Schindler. I’m from Michigan, I grew up in a place where there weren’t very many people in the middle of nowhere. So I think that’s why I’m interested in people. I’m a figurative artist, mostly with oil paint. Large-scale, life-sized, figure painting is pretty much what I do.

I’ve always been interested in the figure ever since I was little, I drew comic book characters, and stuff like that. When I went to college I started out doing self-portraits, just because I’m a readily available model, and then moved onto work that was about self-reflection. I accidentally took a picture in front of a mirror one day, which gave me a double image of myself, which led to ideas about of course self-reflection, but relationships. From there on I moved into work that was more about relationships, about personal relationships, talking about gender issues, and identity issues, and gay issues. From there on I worked into family, the larger domestic setting, scenarios dealing with the roles of family, from traditional roles to contemporary roles, and how we receive information when we’re growing up, and how that forms identity, and what kind of role models we have when we’re children forms who we are I think when we’re adults. So that’s where I am right now. I sort of worked from my own perspective, working my way out to what’s going in the world around me. That’s pretty much what I do.

Seth Papac (Cranbrook)

Hold, 2007
Wood, Silk, Silver

I’m Seth Papac. I make jewelry with mixed materials. I usually go pretty broad with materials and that’s usually based on what I’m doing or what concept I’m working on.

I started in architecture, because physical contact was important for me, or being able to experience art, and for me that was architecture and not so much art. But then when I started doing architecture, I found that it was too flat, and I actually wanted to make the pieces with my own hands. In school I was exposed to some metal artists who were making jewelry that was very architectural. So that’s how I got into making jewelry. And at first my work was very technique-based. I was pushing the limits of my fabrication skills, but I was also doing a decorative technique with gold. So it was jewelry but like on steroids. And then when I got out of undergraduate, the jewelry became more literally architectural, so I would actually base it off of buildings, but I would abstract their forms. And it was still heavy metal and heavy fabrication. Then I did a series of work where I started analyzing why I did what I did. And so I actually made one piece and started cutting it apart. I did a series where I left things unfilled and there was a light, sort of like a blank canvas to start over.

Right before I came to Cranbrook, I did a series of work, it was a chronological series of metaphors. There was no metal, it was all wood and fiberglass and aluminum. It was really a way to break away from using architecture as a metaphor, I was realizing it was like a crutch for me. But also it was a way of avoiding talking about more personal issues, which I think in jewelry, that’s its strongest aspect – it’s about the body and being worn on the body. And it’s the perfect sort of format to talk about maybe like a personal narrative. The work I’m doing now is mostly fabrics. They can be worn as jewelry, but they also hang on the wall as objects. For me, it’s just I hate to see stuff thrown in a drawer. And I think most jewelry is that way, so if there’s an option of hanging it on the wall, it gives it more variety. And so now the work is based on a certain section of my past. I’m sort of purging out some stuff that I’ve been holding in. It’s a really personal, heavy narrative. And that’s what I’m doing now.

Leyla Munteanu (WSU)

Stitches, 2008
Untitled, 2008
Acrylic on canvas

My name is Leyla Munteanu. I’m from Canada. I moved to Canada ten years ago from Romania. My work is today more based on painting, and I’m using the materials as they are. I’m inspired by everything around me. Let’s say I found a piece of wood, the shape is pretty interesting, and I’m just using it in my work. Or I found a color, it’s suited for something and I’m grabbing it and just using it as it is. Now I’m working with different materials like aluminum foil, rope, newspaper, pieces of garbage, everything I can find that is interesting and I can put it on.

I have a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. I was an engineer before. As a child, my father taught me then that girls should know how to paint and to sing, have some knowledge in music and painting. And not too much as in other areas as engineering and building things, because that’s a “man” area. So I started drawing and I went to school in Romania for three years and I majored in sculpture. At the same time I was in civil engineering. I worked as an engineer for six years and got bored of doing things that my father had right – they were not made for me.

I had some problems there, and the revolution came, and the changes after the revolution were not the changes I was expecting that the country would have, and I decided to move to Canada. I came in Canada very disappointed, I didn’t know which way I should go. Start with engineering again or go back to art. After three years, I decided, “you know what, I am thirty-five years old, let’s do art. Engineering is not the thing for me.” I registered for university, I got in, I was pretty happy with the change that school helped me to do. In my country I was used to the sculptures, and they were copies of the Greek sculptures. They were more idealistic work. I don’t know how much of it was real, it looks real to you, but it was just the ideal of the human body. Coming to Canada, everything changed. From those illustrative works that I was doing by myself, just trying to recreate in painting what I saw in sculpture, I changed to something that was totally different that was more enjoyable. “You don’t have to represent the human body, why should you represent that?” You can represent what the human did. If he touched something, he made something from it. And that’s very important for our evolution. Then every object that is used has its own importance. For me it’s like a little jewel. Then if I represent it or not, or it’s just the idea of that object down there on my painting, it’s recording the time. But in my own way. Even this painting that you see here, for you maybe they meant something else than they meant to me.