Kunc solo show [ARTSPACE], Oklahoma City

Waves of Riches is a beautiful installation that includes prints, and books, and the installation of a large, layered paper multi-print work.   Here are some photos to capture the sense of the installation, thanks to photographer Ann Sherman.   On view May 18 – July 15, 2017.

 

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details from Unfolding the Map

Here are some nice details from the exhibition Unfolding the Map.   What a beautiful show, and so honored to have these works at the studio!

Behl Dawson

Diana Behl                                                                    Sage Dawson

Doyle Jepson

 

Tallmadge Doyle                                                      Jill Jepson

Maury Nishimura

Nichole Maury                                                        Emma Nishimura

Plank

Carrie Ann Plank


Sarah Turner, Artist in Residence

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Sarah Turner, an artist from Detroit, was in residence at Constellation Studios for two weeks in April.  She worked on a series of prints made from inked objects and found materials, transferring detailed impressions, that literally spoke about form and function, of everyday detritus, and elegant simplicity.    She delighted in her discoveries from the hardware and thrift stores, and how to find the right pressure to capture the hidden textures.

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Material Meanings: Stripped, Splintered, Stacked

Works in print and wood by Kathy Puzey & Sara Tabbert

June 2 – July 22

First Friday Opening Reception June 2, 6-8pm

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These artists use wood for carving sculptural objects and as a matrix block to print from onto paper.   Their work in art-making is, in essence, to deconstruct this “once living” material, and then reconstruct the life force of the universal tree via their images and embedded meanings.   Carved panels, prints, and installation lead us through their creative actions onto raw material – actions that can be seen as violent, necessary, ritualized, and even reverent.

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Kathy Puzey grew up in Utah, as is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Utah State University. She earned her MFA from UNL in 2001, then held positions at the KNH Center in Nebraska City, the Anderson Ranch Art Center, and has been an artist in residence at Fiskers Art Colony, Finland.   She has received recognition with an Artist Fellowship from the Utah Arts Council in 2011, and a USU College Arts Teacher of the Year. She has exhibited widely nationally and internationally.

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Sara Tabbert was raised in Alaska, went to Grinnell College in Iowa, and received her MFA from UNL in 1997.   She now works as an independent artist in Fairbanks. On the way she held interesting positions as a children’s camp leader, bike tour guide, cook & baker at park lodges, while conducting engagements as an Artist in the Schools. She has been an artist in residence at: Zygote Press, Cleveland; Montana Artists Refuge, Basin; Proyecto ACE, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Artist in the Parks programs in Denali National Park , Zion National Park, Isle Royale National Park.   She has won numerous public art commissions throughout Alaska, and Alaska State Council on the Arts Career Opportunity Grants.   She presented a solo show at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, and has exhibited in numerous venues.


Unfolding the Map

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7 women printmakers reference maps and mapping using symbolic conventions of space and visual cues from the world of information, printed matter, and inherited narratives. The works investigate visual cacophony and information loss, imagined spaces, shifting climatic conditions, and where the journey is the destination.

Artists:

Diana Behl, Brookings, South Dakota

Sage Dawson, St. Louis, Missouri

Tallmadge Doyle, Eugene, Oregon

Jill Jepsen, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Nichole Maury, Kalamazoo, Michigan

Emma Nishimura, Toronto, Canada

Carrie Ann Plank, San Francisco, California

(Presented to compliment the 2017 Great Plains Symposium “Flat Places, Deep Identities: Mapping Nebraska and the Great Plains”, March 30-31, 2017)


Drawing to Print

January 6 – February 28, 2017

First Friday January 6, 6-8pm

Thumbnail sketches, tracings, and preparatory drawings highlight the work before printing begins.   Doodles and intuitive marks evolve into graphite ‘planning cartoons’ drawn to scale with delicate passages and rhythmic energy that form concept and unknown adventure.   Selections of Karen Kunc’s drawings are paired with her colorful woodcut prints that result from the mark-making impetus.thumbnails


Artist in Residence Shiho Saito

Shiho, from Tokyo, Japan, spent the month of November at Constellation Studios, and worked well in the rhythm of life in Lincoln, and with her own creative discipline.    She planned and accomplished a large multi-sheet monoprint that addresses the subtleties of luxury fabrics and the fashion world.   She also experimented with drypoint prints made from thousands of minute scratches on plastic plates, that she printed with water-base inks.   This technique, new for her, enabled her to make a small series of journal-like images from her experiences in Nebraska, and then a complex 4 part detailed image of a model on the runway and the audience.   Shiho demonstrated incredible persistence and patience to realize her print projects!   All so impressive for our First Friday visitors.   Thanks for your residency Shiho!

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Metropolis & Invisible Cities – Installation views

A virtual walk through of the gallery!   Metropolis includes 303 international artists and originated in Europe and was assembled in Venice Italy in 2014.   Invisible Cities will be bound in 2016, and all the 228  folio pages are shown on the walls.   This new accordion folded book has contributions from across the USA, and from Chile, Italy, Poland, France, Argentina, Egypt, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, India, Finland, New Zealand, Columbia, Guatemala.   The artists book are made in response to the evocative theme of  Invisible Cities and join to enrich the installation.


New WallWorks Mural by Madison Svendgard

Thanks to Madison for painting a great mural this summer!   This mysterious narrative intrigues us with a fantasy world of larger -than-life figures that seem to stand in the garden plantings.    Madison has a distinctive style and dedication to the her visual story-telling.   You can join this ongoing story with a great photo op in front of this mural!

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Lining: Shealthing Residency In Process

Denise Bookwalter and Lee Emma Running have been working for two weeks to realize the installation project Lining: Sheathing.    In the studio they have made huge handmade papers sheets, printed onto the paper with laser cut woodblocks for repeat patterns, and assembled and sewn fabrics to construct a shelter in the gallery space.   Here are some images of works in progress:

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A room size tent enclosure, inspired by Yurts and other nomadic domestic structures,  is the core of the installation.   It will be covered with canvas walls that have been screen printed with a variety of designs, such as Fair Isle knits, traditional crewel work embroidery, an image of a “whorl” of wool, or a “bloom” of cotton.   Hand dyed silk lines the interior of the tent structure of a shadow like pattern, using the image of a cotton boil that was laser cut into plexi glass and clamped with the silk, for resist dip-dying on the delicate material.  Inside the dark space of the tent a bed-sized platform will be covered with two hand-embroidered felt blankets.   Large handmade papers of Iowa grown kozo fiber will be made during the residency, and then printed with laser engraved woodblocks, that will be hung on the gallery walls.    Lining:  Sheathing gives evidence of a love of textiles, while reflecting the beauty of materials that protect and house the body.  

 

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Denise Bookwalter works in a range of print media including traditional and digital processes, artist’s books, installations and dimensional prints.   Her artists’ books utilize old and new print technologies to create collaborative artists’ books. The National Endowment of the Arts funded her most recent collaborative artists book, Rain/fall. Her work has been exhibited in a variety of venues nationally as well as internationally. She received her BA from Northwestern University and her MFA from Indiana University in Printmaking. Denise currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an Associate Professor of Art at Florida State University where she teaches printmaking and is Area Head of the Printmaking Department.  She is the director and a founding member of Florida State University’s artists book press, Small Craft Advisory Press.

 

 Lee Emma Running is trained as a traditional papermaker and sculptor. She is currently an Associate Professor at Grinnell College and received a BFA from Pratt Institute in 1999 and an MFA from the University of Iowa in 2005.  Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues including the Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City KS, the Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg PA, and the Rijeka Museum of Contemporary Art, Rijeka Croatia. She’s been granted residencies at The Vermont Studio Center, Jentel Artists Residency, Penland School of Crafts and Anchor Graphics, and was in residence in the fall of 2015 at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico. She is represented by Olsen Larson Gallery.


Metropolis & Invisible Cities Exhibition

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Interpretations on Urbanity

October 21 – December 24, 2016

Opening Reception, Friday, October 21, 6-8pm

Metropolis is a handmade book venture in a spectrum of printmaking processes by artists from around the world, including two from Constellation Studios. The theme speaks to the broad contemporary urban experience and extends to the idea of the network of communication possible today.

The idea for this collaboration came from Berlin-based artist Andreas Kramer who prints at Centro Internazionale della Grafica (CIG) in Venice where Metropolis was realized under the guidance of master bookmaking Silvano Gosparini and where the Renaissance legacy of traditional Venetian book publishing continues.

Among the 303 interpretations of this theme, the reader is destined to discover reflections of one’s own meandering thoughts about ‘metropolis’.   The leporello (accordion) construction enhances this stream-of-consciousness effect as it stretches fully to 215 feet.   Ideas circling forwards and backwards through compositional and iconic connections and diversions make an impression underlined by the haptic qualities of the media where ink makes sculptural lines on paper.

What lingers is a metropolis of the mind, a crazy-creative vitality mirroring the variability and vicissitudes of existence, and inspiring a continuing interaction, and a visually challenging mix.

Participants come from: Australia, Japan, Brazil, USA, Italy, Germany, Russia, Poland, Hungary, UK, France, Spain, Tunisia, Canada.   The edition of three has been circulating on exhibition in Italy, Germany, USA and most recently in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and at the Katzen Rotunda Gallery, American University, Washington, DC. This is the premier exhibition in the mid-west.

CONCURRENT is Invisible Cities, an exhibit of artists’ books and folios destined to become a collaborative leporello book that present new interpretations of urbanity. The theme is inspired by the imaginative novel Le citta invisibili by Italian writer Italo Calvino, published in Italy in 1972 in which Marco Polo reports to Emperor Kublia Khan on fantastical, dream-like cities all named after women that he purportedly visited. This book is organized in a mathematical structure. After each eleven descriptions, the two men discuss ideas that evolve from the tales, reflecting on human nature and linguistics.

It remains to be seen what ideas, images and symbology the 150+ US national and international artists will contribute expressing the evolving new experience of real, ideal and virtual contemporaneous and futuristic  city life.