THE FOCUS

My work embodies the transformational spirit of the vernacular. I search for and collect articles and materials with a specific history. I then add to the history of the thing by employing multiple techniques and processes such as airbrushing, spray painting, vacuum forming, or simply reassembling the object. Over the past sixteen years, I have been professionally custom airbrushing at t-shirt and car shops, athletic events, carnivals, festivals, and homes. Customizing and personalizing things is to me a rite. I...

The images I make are unplanned and improvised. I work spontaneously and tend to work on multiple pieces at the same time. Typically, I am terrible with organization, including but not limited to arranging my materials. Josh Elrod, Studio Visit, October 2016 Josh Elrod, Studio Visit, October 2016 What I mean by this I is rarely feel prepared to make anything, and I just use whatever I can find on hand at the moment. I'm largely self taught and increasingly my...

Locate Arts Co-Director Brian R. Jobe visited 7 of the MFA Studios at the University of Tennessee School of Art in Knoxville on Friday, September 16, 2016. We're happy to share the travel log with you! Tom Wixo, studio visit (9-16-16)Austin Pratt, studio visit (9-16-16) [also includes header image]MaryAnne Carey, studio visit (9-16-16)Abigail Lucien, studio visit (9-16-16)Cassidy Frye, studio visit (9-16-16)Erica Mendoza, studio visit (9-16-16)Johanna Winters, studio visit (9-16-16)

Jason Sheridan Brown received his M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999, and has been teaching Sculpture at the University of Tennessee since 2001. Brown’s artwork has been exhibited nationally, including solo and group exhibits in Arizona, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. Recent public art projects include large-scale outdoor sculpture installations at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville, No...

Jennifer Danos (b. Chicago) comes to Chattanooga by way of Berlin, Germany, where she lived for almost three years working as a professional artist, gallery assistant, and translator. Jennifer also participated in a six-month artist residency at Kuenstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral in Bad Ems where she created new site-specific installations for locations throughout Europe, such as the Staatskanzlei Mainz, Artissima Art Fair in Torino, the Thermen am Viehmarkt in Trier, and Mila Kunstgalerie in Berlin. She has shown nationally and internationally...

A native of Mississippi, Marlos E’van; painter, musician, filmmaker, honed his signature style of obsessive scribbling, found materials, and commercial imagery while observing cultures in different cities and communities across America. E’van earned his BA from Watkins College of Art in 2016 and resides in Nashville where he currently has a residency at the McGruder Center. Both he and his work are being nationally recognized as an important voice on cultural and social commentary. Growing up in Mississippi, E’van wa...

My work is about the places where the concerns of modernist painting meet my own experiences and the physical reality of the body. Often the subject matter is a visual bridge between painting tropes and the objects of everyday life. The lines of a lawn chair seat serves as a veiled reference to the grid, and its breakdown – presumably by human weight – to an imagined encounter with the human body. Eleanor Aldrich - studio visit July 2016 My work is textural and...

As an artist I make paintings that exist in the sliver of space between abstraction and representation. I look to the lived daily experience of the world coupled with the artifacts of the past. My work compresses time into the surface and touch of painting, that old technology. Increasingly flora, fauna, and natural phenomenon have held my attention as I wrestle with this imagery within my paintings. Birds, plants, flowers, stones, and fires dissolve into the light of the screen,...