Spring Break Art Show NYC 2022
ARTISTS STATEMENTS
Brian Fick
Brian Fick was born in 1959 and has been making and showing paintings since 1984. He has
worked since 1989 as an Architectural Conservator of interior finishes of historic buildings in
the US and abroad, on projects ranging from the US Capitol and Library of Congress to F.L.
Wright’s Unity Temple and Robie House.
His paintings have always been about what beauty and humor can be found in depicting the
anthropogenic degradation of the natural environment in a traditional painting format.
He lives in a small town in rural Indiana in a Gothic Revival house built in 1861 that he and his
partner Mary Yeager restored.
David B Frye
I was born in Mildenhall England in 1963. At the time my father was serving in the U.S Airforce. He met my mom by chance, at least according to what lore was shared. He dialed the wrong number, chatted. The dice got rolled and so did my parents. My father was African American and my mother is English. During the early 60’s their relationship would have checked nearly all the boxes needed to be a scandal. When I discovered Art, I was drawn into the hellfire and brimstone of a Bosch painting, the otherworldliness in it made me pause. I connected with the belief that drove a man to make Hell real. Then discovered within those works a hidden hand. The absurd nature of humanity’s suffering. A dark humor. I started painting when I was 15 years old. I still find new heroes in art. Over the years I kept working. I ended up studying painting and printmaking at John Herron school of Art in Indianapolis where I earned a B.F.A. In 1985. I moved to Richmond, Virginia where I received a M.F.A from Virginia Commonwealth University. Over the many years I have maintained a practice and exhibited as an artist.
Mary Gagler
I am passionate about making experiences with art accessible to all through curating and managing local arts organizations. I promote work by local contemporary artists through curating exhibitions. I promote work by Aboriginal Australian artists in my scholarly writing and share stories in everyday conversation about artists' impact on local culture and national civil and land rights. I am interested in the way art expresses humanity and can create agency at all levels of society.
My path through art history is fueled by a passion for the things people make with their hands. My vocation as a welder combines the handmade with the industrial. In research and production, I follow the human drive to alter materials, and celebrate how and why materials are changed.
Carla Knopp
The Choracles is a digital environment from 2018. The 2D & 360 videos show a dystopian robot choir singing on a snowy mountain, while dissenters scream from under glass. Each Choracle is synced in song and appearance. It's a clan.
As I began creating this augmented reality version, ROE had just been overturned. The Choracles donned vestments. Their tunes became repetitive. Two singing, one screaming. The experiences are not synced and will change with each additional participant.
Carla Knopp founded Olgaforce3D as an experimental platform for the production of her virtual reality projects. As Artist/Producer, Carla draws on her experience as an explorative painter to create unusual worlds with allegorical themes. Olgaforce3D embraces the game industry development workflow, but also uses nonstandard methods to produce unusual virtual vignettes. Her current work can be seen at various film festivals and virtual reality events/platforms.
Steve Paddack
A graduate of the Herron School of Art and Design and the University of Illinois, Steve was part of the first wave of Massachusetts Avenue artists that helped breathe life into the nascent downtown cultural awakening in Indianapolis in the 1980s and 90s.
After many years of making large expressive paintings with oils and house paints, Steve turned to acrylics in the mid 2000s and has more recently been working at a very small scale. He has developed a visual vocabulary that frequently employs mundane images in such a way as to render them iconic. By altering the familiar visual context usually associated with everyday things, objects such as covered bridges and discarded carpet rolls become suffused with symbolic or poetic possibilities.
Steve has worked in the field of historic paint restoration, beginning in 1988 with the restoration of the Indiana State Capital. In 1996 he formed his own company, Paint Box Studios, which provided all manner of decorative paint services and mural painting. Since 2016, he has focused almost exclusively on studio art.
Gwendolyn C Skaggs
The artworks included in this exhibit embody my keen and painful awareness of the struggles and challenges that surround and exist within domestic violence, also identified as intimate partner violence, and the forces that play a hand in the cycle of abuse and how it is protected by silence. This realization transformed my lens, seeing clear a judicial system that entangles both victim and those accused of the crime in its grip, the strength based on class, race, and a lame system burdened with archaic and patriarchal laws and politics that lag behind in the understanding of the psychological and physical battle victims endure from their abuser: Coercive Control, a form of intimate terrorism.
The artworks shine light on Coercive Control, Trauma Bonding and Narcissistic Abuse, from awareness to accountability, while integrating todays global issues from social and climate change, animal welfare and public health. SILENCE IS VIOLENCE, produced by hornworms, combines my understanding of balancing opposing forces with a knowing to look deeper into causes that disrupt and destroy the path to a just life for all sentient beings and holding systems, predators and perpetrators accountable. The leaf embodies and reflects the voices from the unheard, the silenced, and the forgotten, along with the souls and spirits lost to violence and oppression. Accountability is key to moving towards change. The telling of stories from survivors is crucial for recovery, crucial to ending the stigma, therefore crucial to justice. Accountability is prevention.
I work on the demands of my heart and mind with the mindset of the carpenter, craftsman, activist, and fine artist. I am the founder of SUGAR, established in 2009, BugArtNYC and The Freedom Grill.
Martha Vaught
For more than 30 years I have made art. My works, paintings, drawings, and prints, explore the human condition and life’s struggles, violence, sexuality and futility. And all that time I have been reading. Kierkegaard, Tillich, C.S.Lewis, Kant, the Bible, Anatole France, Hughes. From the New York Times to The Atlantic to Farm World.
Currently I produce socially relevant, if somewhat feral art in my home studio. And yes, I built my home studio, and no, it is not attached to my house. I was a Stutz Artist Association member, working at the Stutz Business Center from April 2012 to Sept 2018.
My “serious artworks” always have a story telling nature, and I purposefully make the narrative’s meanings tricky to suss out. I want you, the viewer, to have to study the image and think about it for yourself. My art functions as both narrative and visual puzzles. I’m a trickster. You have to discover if I am a trustworthy tale teller or not. I have complex notions about what my images mean and I leave clues about MY perspective, but I hope you take these works, through your mind’s eye, to interesting and satisfying places. Like all travel the destination is not a final answer, it’s the twists and turns of the journey that really matter. Fasten your seat belts, a visual trip with MCLV is gonna be a bumpy ride!