Artist Shout Out: Beth Hoeckel (collage)

VOLCANO AT NIGHT – 6 1/2″ x 9″

Artist Bio:

Elizabeth (Beth) Ryan Hoeckel was born and raised in Baltimore, MD USA and has been pursuing artistic endeavors since a very young age. She attended Carver Center for Arts magnet high school, and in 1997 earned a merit scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At SAIC she studied Painting/Drawing, Photography, and Printmaking and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2001.

A whirlwind decade was subsequently spent abroad including studies in Japan and Greece followed by two years living in New York and four in Los Angeles. Beth can currently be found working on Collage, Mixed Media Painting/Drawing, and Photography in her studio in Baltimore City. She contributes artwork to international magazines and websites and exhibits her work both locally and nationwide.

All collages shown are made with found paper and archival paste (not created digitally)

See more of Hoeckel’s work on her website:
Collage
Mixed Media
Photographs
Painting/Drawing

HORSEBACK RIDER – 6 1/2″ x 9 1/2″

TOYBOAT – 6 1/2″ x 9 1/2″

MIRROR – 6 1/2″ x 8 1/2″

CREAM – 6 1/2″ x 8″

Artist Shout Out: Kit Leffler

“Chameleon Car Graveyard” –  Four-colour serigraph, 77 x 102 cm

“Bernard Matthews” – Four-colour photo litho, 42 x 59 cm

Kit Leffler is a collagist, photographer, incredible printmaker and an all around great person who The Rathaus is lucky enough to call a friend.  She graduated from the University of Kansas with an Expanded Media degree in 2007 and is currently working on her MFA at the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.

According to Patriothall Gallery, home to Kit’s latest show Second Nature, which opens today, April 22:

Leffler’s works question the natural and artificial through appropriation, alteration, and manipulation of digital images –recalling the worlds of advertising and science fiction. Through this process she encourages viewers to examine our perception of and role within the natural world. This exhibition features multiple new series of printed works by Leffler, including Mirage, Meat Entrepreneurs, and Genetic Bottleneck. Three of the works included in the exhibition were executed at Belgium’s prestigious Frans Masereel Centrum during a two-week residency in which Leffler took part during March 2011.

Leffler’s practice implements visual anthropology as a way of investigating the human experience of the natural environment: it is her interest that the works generate discussion between viewers rather than preach a political stance. Her process juxtaposes imagery liberated from many diverse web image locations: ranging from machinery manufacturers to scientific databases to Blogger travel blogs. However, not all of Leffler’s imagery is appropriated from the web: some images are Leffler’s photographs taken during travel or in studio and some are donated for use, as is the case with Simon Buckhaven’s image in one of the Meat Entrepreneurs series.

After hearing a Radio 4 broadcast about the barrister/entrepreneur’s invention the Crustastun, Leffler was inspired to include Buckhaven in a portrait series that recognized major contributors to the food/meat industry and highlighted the ethical ambiguity of the corresponding machines. The Crustastun is a device that humanely expires shellfish with a quick electric jolt rather than slowly boiling alive. Due to Leffler’s interest in this topic, a dialogue has been created between the two and Buckhaven has kindly supplied Leffler with his photographic image for the portrait’s creation. This work will be exhibited for first time during Second Nature.

The public is invited to meet the artist at the opening reception on Friday, 22^nd April from 7-9 pm. The show runs until the April 30.

“Mirage (2)” – Four-colour serigraph, 77 x 102 cm

“Cornelius Van Der Lely” – Four-colour photo litho, 44 x 66 cm

See more of Kit’s work here

Beauty & the Travesties of Nature

A Jawless Class of Marsupial Reign by Kristi Arnold

• Beauty & the Travesties of Nature
KU Art and Design Gallery (1467 Jayhawk Boulevard in Lawrence, KS)
Sunday, November 21, 1-4:30pm (Ongoing until Dec. 10th)

From the Organizers:
A series of 25 mixed media and collage pieces by Kristi Arnold that explore what could happen in an evolutionary process gone awry. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Intrigued by nature’s beauty as much as its mystery, Arnold’s compositions hint at real-life creatures whose identities aren’t immediately discernible.

Arnold is a KU alumna who received a bachelor’s in painting in 2001. She earned a master’s in fine arts from the University of Connecticut and is pursuing a doctorate in painting at the Sydney College of the Arts in Australia. She was artist-in-residence and a lecturer at KU from 2008 until spring 2010.

Artist Shout Out: Adam Friedman

“No Vestige of a Beginning, No Prospect of and End” – screen print, acrylic, gel transfers, and collage on panel, 16″x16″

Artist Statement:

In his book, Basin and Range, John McPhee explains, “If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time.” I prefer to view the world from a geologic assimilation of time. The human understanding of its duration is skewed and relative to our experience and mortality. On a roughly 4 billion year timeline of Earth’s history, the human inhabitance is barely even visible. Needless to say, the Earth was here long before humans, and will be here long afterwards. I believe that for human beings to think we have the power to completely destroy the Earth is an expression of our vanity and arrogance. Words like “apocalypse” or “doomsday” have inherent religious connotation and suggest that the end of the world coincides with human extinction… But the Earth will go on with or without us, and I take comfort in that fact. Through all of the damage that human beings inflict on the earth (and therefore each other), nature will recover.

In my work I attempt to visualize the imperceptible geologic process by compacting millions of years into a single moment. Rocks bend and grow. Entire mountains crumble in an instant. And the environmental damage that human kind has left in their wake has long since healed. I’m drawn to how geologic processes (erosion, orogeny, etc) relate to our institutions (financial, governmental, etc). I strive to present an era that defies human intervention in the landscape. An optimistic view of the natural world, post human presence.

See more of Friedman’s work here

“That Which Swells” – acrylic, screen print, gel transfers, and collage on panel, 35″x60″

“Oceans Before and Behind Us in Time” – acrylic, screen print, and collage on panel, 18″x12″

Artist Shout Out: Susy Oliveira

“Have Everything And Die”, 2009, c-prints on archival card and foamcore, 39 x 24 x 16 in

“The Girl and the Bear, 2008″, c-prints on archival card and foamcore, 108 x 108 x 22 in

Artist’s Approach:

Through her tri-dimensional works designed to evoke the virtual modelings simulating reality, Susy Oliveira questions our habits of replacing nature with fabricated replicas. In her works, there is a playful dynamic which associates the characteristics of photography with those inherent to sculpture. Their structure incorporates the angles and features of some giant origami. The photographs are mounted on each face of a volume to restore the three dimensions of the image. Through this process, the shape is both simplified and amplified, giving the photography a volume, an ambiguous character oscillating between reality and fiction. (via)

“Night eyes open”, 2007, c-prints on archival card and foamcore, 20 x 24 x 6 in

“Time is never wasted”, 2006, c-prints and foamcore, 144 x 58 x 15 in

See more of Oliveira’s work here