THE FOCUS

Wesley Roden: Though many artists seek to emulate childlikeness in their work, your sculptures stand apart by appealing specifically to children. How is sculpture serving a role in artistic literacy as well as general development for a younger generation? Beth Reitmeyer: I want the world to be a magical place, a place in which we all experience wonder and awe. As I consider my audience, I don’t set out to appeal specifically to children, but often they are the qu...

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Rachel Bubis: You describe your work as resonating around the notion of faith, its tangibility, and the “intricacy and length of a soul’s pondering.” This is reflected through your process of layering and abstracting imagery of subjects such as church buildings. Can you talk more about this? Has this process informed your own spirituality and faith? Joe Letitia: The process started from teaching students a project where they produced an abstracted mandala type image based on their names. They would...

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Wesley Roden: Whether landing gear amidst an excavation site or classical sculpture lingering in a basement, your work turns recognizable objects foreign by altering the environment. Do you see your role as an artist as being that of reframing cultural symbols? How does depicting some objects as if naturally existing and others as if collaged in place, comment on their recontextualization? Donald Keefe: I’m interested in anachronisms. We very much experience the world in a broken up, jumbled way. We...

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Rachel Bubis: You use a “formalized system of knot creation” in the geometric shapes and patterns of your work. Can you elaborate on what you mean by “knots,” and how you developed this system? Where did your interest with knots begin? Adam Rowe: Technically I should probably be using the term ‘knot diagrams’ since, generally speaking, a knot is a closed, non-self-intersecting curve embedded in three-dimensional space. That basically means that if you tie any knot you might have heard of by name (...

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Rachel Bubis: You describe your inspiration coming from “mundane, everyday objects and humorous, uncanny scenes that you might encounter at home or on a walk.” Could you tell me a little more about your process – what happens from the time you encounter an interesting object or scene to a finished painting? Caitlin Blomstrom: Like a lot of people, I use my phone as a tool to document the things around me. While walking, I take quick pictures of things that I want...

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Wesley Roden: The scale of your work coupled with the attention to detail allows viewers to either look closely or from a distance. How do you anticipate your works to be viewed and how do you create them with this dynamic in mind? Do you expect the works to be viewed personally, impersonally, or somewhere in between? Bethany Carlson Coffin: I definitely put a lot of emphasis on the experience and the encounter. That dictates, to a large degree, the...

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Rachel Bubis: Your recent exhibition at the Parthenon, The Odyssey: A Retelling (2022), takes inspiration from Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of Homer's epic poem, and highlights the “hospitality of the overlooked identities that made Odysseus’ long journey home possible.” Were you a fan of Homer before this exhibition? Lisa Bachman Jones: I was not a fan before, but I was interested in how Homer’s work was a foundation for Greek education. What propelled selecting Homer and The Odyssey for this project wa...

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Rachel Bubis: You mention that your prints "explore our relationship with other living creatures as we become further removed from the natural world.” How did your passion for animals and the environment first begin? Ashton Ludden: I think we all first have that fascination with animals and the wild world when we are children. For me, I’m sure it began in my young childhood, particularly when I was between 2 and 8 when I lived out in the countryside of Western Miss...

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