2007 Participating Environmental Artists

Participating Environmental Artists
Click on the artist's photo for project photos

Roberley Bell New York, USA www.roberleybell.com Roberley Bell spent her childhood in Latin America and Southeast Asia, before returning to the United States to attend the University of Massachusetts and State University of New York at Alfred from where she holds an MFA in Sculpture. Bell is the recipient of many grants and fellowships including two from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Pollock Krasner Fellowship, and a Fulbright to the Netherlands. Bell has received several residency awards including the International Studio Program in New York City and the Stadt Kunstlerhaus Salzburg, Austria. Her work has been exhibited in both one person and group exhibitions, nationally and internationally. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Dieu Donne Gallery, NYC; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Fassbender-Stevens Gallery, Chicago Black and White Gallery, Brooklyn, Paul Petro Gallery Toronto and several Art Fairs. Bell has completed a number of garden projects including Second Nature is Home for Grant Park in Chicago, Listen for Evergreen House John Hopkins University Baltimore, Belvedere for the Neuberger Museum Public art Biennial, Purchase New York. Belvedere received the public art in Review Award in 2004. Bell’s projects examine ideas related to the built environment exploring the relationship between the man made and the natural in landscape focusing on the artifice of nature. Bell creates both exterior and interior works. Her gardens projects are both a play on and with nature. The recent sculpture series Flower Blobs take their cue from blob architecture their forms are in fact nothing in nature though the sculptures reveal themselves as natural forms. The Flower Blobs continue to explore the spills of her landscape projects, the space where the artificial meets the real. The Flower Blobs become a miniature version if not a souvenir of our extreme control of the landscape. She makes her home with her husband also an artist in a farming community in upstate New York.
Marco Dessardo France/Italy www.dessardo.com Since about 30 years, Marco Dessardo is tirelessly and joyfully testing and displacing the boundaries of forms, material, function and location. Italian, born in Brussels, he is surviving as a teacher in architecture and committing as a sculptor all around the world from his base, first in Spain, then in Paris. Regularly invited in biennials and residences, he is searching for the origin of space and questioning reality — as he puts it, the hidden garden of all wanderings — through all forms of settlement. His deliberately useless artifacts are responding to the specific constraints of each site, from China to Lapland, while marking the steps of his expatriation or exodus. Framing or duplicating his sculptures in a fiction in the form of a short — and most of the time humorous — film, Marco Dessardo is now beginning to explore the connection between space and time, in another attempt of escaping of the “unbearable lightness of being”.
Anne Dushanko Dobek New Jersey, USA http://web.mac.com/dushankodobek Artist and naturalist Anne Dushanko Dobek creates site specific installations addressing issues of migration and immigration. Growing up in rural South Jersey the artist spent many hours as a child collecting and studying insects. Over the past decade she has traveled to numerous rainforests in Costa Rica, often with scientists, to study, draw and photograph butterflies and moths. It is not surprising then, that Dushanko Dobek’s knowledge and concern for the environment and its more ephemeral inhabitants should inform her art. Working in mountains, meadows and seas the artist’s often surreal and seductive imagery belies the more ominous threads of environmental and spiritual loss. Her most recent installation in Auvillar France followed a portion of the pilgrimage trail to St. Jacques de Compostele. The transient nature and often remote locations of her work precludes public viewing and dictates photographic documentation. For the current version of Parallel Migrations here at I-Park the artist has created not only her first permanent installation but utilized the site and its contents to evoke references to the magic realists authors of South and Central America. Dushanko Dobek has been exhibiting for over twenty years both nationally and internationally including the Gulbenkian Foundation in Brussels, Musee Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, and the High Museum in Atlanta. Individual and collaborative works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Newark Museum, the National Gallery of American Art, the Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Montclair Museum of Art. Awarded two commissions by New Jersey Transit for a series of etched glass windscreens the artist oversaw the installation of the completed works at Hudson Bergen Light Rail Stations in 2000. Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships including the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and fellowships from the Vermont Studio School, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Weir Farm Trust and the Long Beach Island Foundation. A frequent lecturer on issues related to art and the environment Dushanko Dobek has spoken at conferences, museums and universities in this country and Europe. Included among the venues where she has given presentations are the Musee Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Switzerland, the Newark and Montclair Art Museums, the Lepidopterists Convention. The artist has degrees from Rowan University and Pratt Institute.
Ashish Ghosh India Ashish Ghosh, a sculptor and installation artist, was born in West Bengal, India. He received his BFA and MFA from Kala-Bhavana and a Diploma in wood work at Visva-Bharati University. He was awarded a National Scholarship from the Government of India and received the Nirman Award, Art in Excellency from the B.D. Bangur Endowment. His artworks have been shown abroad in major exhibitions including Art Forest-2 in Forchenstein, Wien, Austria and Europos Parkas, 4013 vilniaus in Lithuania and his work entitled “Splendour” was included in the 53rd Concorso Internationale Delle Ceramic d’Arte Contemporanea at the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza (RA), Italy and his work “Lonely Planet” at the Gut-Gasteil in Prigglitz, Austria. He has also participated in Nomadifesta, an exhibition organized by the Artrageous Group, in Nicosia, Cyprus; ARTIADE - Olympic of Visual Arts in Athens, Greece; Circulo De Bellas Arts in Madrid, Spain, and; “Hundred Artist for the Museum” in Naples, Italy. Ghosh’s work is also included as part of the permanent collections at the Museo Casoria International Contemporary Art Museum in Naples, Italy and Olympic Park in the Beijing City Sculpture Design Exhibition in Beijing, China. In India, he has participated in the Birla Academy Annual Exhibition in Calcutta, Lalit Kala Academy’s 42nd National Exhibition in Delhi, ENSEMBLE Government College of Arts in Chandigarh, and has installations of several site-specific sculptures throughout West Bengal. He has been involved with the Sculpture Camp at Lalbahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration and Lalit Kala Kendra in Bhubaneswar. He may be contacted at: Ashish Ghosh, Shyambati, Canalpar, Fuldanga Santiniketan – 731235, Birbhum, West Bengal, India or via e-mail at ghoeshashish44@rediffmail.com or ashishghoshsantiniketan@gmail.com.
Thierry Godet France www.natur-kunst.de Winds, smoke, smells, heat, light... The four elements manifest themselves in my natural works through their effects on nature. Sounds and rhythms interest me, as well as the development of forms and materials in the natural cycle of disintegration and transformation. Plaiting, stacking, planting... I describe my work as ethnic art. It draws its sources, techniques, materials and methods from the everyday life of various cultures, including the one that surrounds us. I prefer to work with my hands, using tools such as levers, wedges or ropes. Seaweed, pebbles, leaves, mosses, grasses, clay, sand. I use the natural materials that are available nearby... Living wood, growing forms, cut tree trunks, fallen branches, floating timber shaped by the water. Cardboard boxes and pallets in an urban environment. My works are born from the location. Space, the elements and the materials present there dictate my work, its dimensions and its form. Most of my works are large. You must enter them, sit down, feel, look, play... Since the exhibition “Im Garten der Sinne” in the foyer of the “Kommode” library in Berlin, I have decided to work “in situ” and to restrict myself to the materials available close by. — Comments collected by Sabine Schuberth
Cornelia Konrads Germany www.cokonrads.de Cornelia Konrads was born on the 14th of February 1957 in Wuppertal, Germany. She studied philosophy and cultural science and has been a freelance artist since 1998. Her focus has been on Land Art, site-specific installations and objects and she has been commissioned to create a number of permanent and temporary works for public spaces, sculpture parks and private gardens. In addition, Konrads has been an Artist in Residence in Odense, Denmark, Kamiyama, Japan, and St Pierre en Chartreuse, France. She has participated in various sculpture and Land Art projects in Germany, France, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, South Korea, Taiwan and Australia.
Roland Mayer Germany www.kunstwiese.de Roland Mayer was born 1954 in Burghausen/Germany. In 1969 he started his art formation and absolved it in 1972 with the German award Bundessiegerâ as sculptor of the year. He received his master diploma certificate in 1977 in Munich. For more than 12 years he worked in a sculptor community together with two artist friends where Roland Mayer started to create large scale outdoor sculptures. Now he is working worldwide, creating sculptures in stone and steel as well as Land Art projects. He participated in more than 40 international sculpture symposia in Europe, USA, China, Korea, Australia, Guatemala, Turkey, Kuwait and UAE. He was honoured with the following awards: Ortung 1 - Schwabach/Germany; Anne and Rodney Pearlman Fellowship/US; The Beijing 2008 Olympic Sculpture Competition. He participated in the following art events (artist-in-residence programs): 2003: Sea and Music Sculpture Manifest in Xiamen/China and Yuzi-Paradise Sculpture Park in Guilin/China, 2005: International Stone Sculpture Symposium in Icheon/South Korea 2006: The Bakersfield CA Visiting Artists Program CSUB. Currently he is working on a large scale steel sculpture for the Olympic Sculpture Exhibition in Beijing/China.
Michael McGillis Michigan, USA Michael McGillis was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1966 and currently resides in the suburbs surrounding the city. In 1989, he received a BFA from the Center for Creative Studies, also located in Detroit. As an artist whose work has evolved to include environmental, site specific sculpture, the influence of this post industrial landscape is ever-present. In recent work he has been using chromatic intensity as an element to reveal a human trace, vividly illuminating the friction of human interference. He has received grants and project funding from the NEA, ArtServe Michigan, and The Jerome Foundation. His projects have been installed nationally, including Michigan Legacy Art Park, Cedarhurst Sculpture Park, Franconia Sculpture Park and I-Park. As well as internationally, including The Netherlands, Taiwan and most recently, in the volcanic region of central France.
Rod Northcutt Illinois, USA Rod Northcutt mixes the languages of design, art, and craft to creatively discuss social and biological systems. Raised in South Texas with an agricultural background, he received a BFA from the University of North Texas in painting and drawing/biology and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in sculpture. He puts this agricultural experience to use combining it with art theory, craft techniques, and the study of social systems. Of prime interests are human/animal symbiotic relationships (domestic, agricultural, and pest) and the history of material culture that either supports or refutes these relationships (such as traps, houses, and feeders). He has exhibited this work through one-person and group shows in various galleries and museums nationally and internationally and maintains both a sculpture and a drawing studio in Chicago. He has taught at the university level since 1999, currently teaches Designed Objects courses at The School of the Art Institute, and will be a visiting assistant professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology beginning in the Fall of 2007. In addition to making sculpture, he also writes critical art reviews (Chicago Reader) and presents his scholarly research at professional conferences. In 2005 he received a research grant from the Hagley Library and Witherthur Institute to support his current project, a book entitled, 3-D Fundamentals: Strategies for Makers, and he is also a 2007 Illinois Arts Grant recipient.
Susanne Ruoff Germany www.susanne-ruoff.de Susanne Ruoff was born in Cologne, Germany. Ruoff began her art studies in 1981 at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, Germany and later attended Hertfordshire College of Art and Design in St. Albans, Great Britain. In 1987, she returned to the Hochschule der Künste for Advanced Studies. While at the Hochschule der Künste, she received a working residency in Caracas, Venezuela. In 1992, Ruoff received a grant from Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Kunst and, from 1993-1995, received a Studio Grant from Karl-Hofer-Gesellschaft in Berlin, Germany. She also received a Residency Grant from the Künstlerhaus in Ahrenshoop, Germany in 1996 and 2003. Ruoff’s works of art have been presented in both individual and group exhibitions since 1989 and, since 1996, she has been an active participant in an International Sculpture Symposia with the subject of “Art in Nature“ in Denmark, France, Poland, Estonia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Germany. Ruoff is currently residing in Berlin, Germany.
Cherie Sampson Missouri, USA www.cheriesampson.net Cherie Sampson is a visual artist working in the field of environmental sculpture, performance and video. Cherie has exhibited her work widely in the U.S. and in a number of installation/performance pieces and video screenings abroad. She received her BFA in Drawing from Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa in 1986 and an MFA in Intermedia Art at the University of Iowa in 1997. In 1998, she conducted research on the traditional wood art and architecture of the Finns and Sami people on a Fulbright Fellowship to Finland. In addition to the ethnographic research, Cherie participated in a number of arts exhibitions and conferences, including an installation/performance at Pori Museum of Contemporary Art, and environmental art residencies in Lapland, Ilomantsi, Alajärvi as well as northern Norway. She returned to Finland in 2004 to create a public sculpture in Sorsapuisto Park in Tampere as part of an international conference on the mire environment and most recently exhibited a performance-video at the “Aesthetics of Stone & Rock” conference in Koli Mountain last June. Cherie has also shown her work in the Netherlands in 2003 and the Festival of Water in Campagna, Italy in August. Recent U.S. exhibitions and video-screenings have taken place in California, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan and St. Louis, Missouri. Cherie currently lives in Missouri and is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
Hartmut Stockter Denmark/Germany www.hstockter.de Hartmut Stockter was born in Wilhelmshaven, Germany in 1973. He attended the University of Applied Sciences and Art in Hannover, the Bergen National Academy of the Arts in Norway (yearlong ERASMUS scholarship) and the Braunschweig University of Art, where he graduated as a Meisterschüler. He received a travelling grant from the German Academic Exchange Service, enabling a journey to Denmark and Greenland. In Copenhagen, Denmark, he was a guest student at the Department of Eskimology, before he went on a journey to Upernavik in the northwest of Greenland, where he stayed for two months. He spent his time there working on his large “Rucksack Book” and documenting the local rock scene, resulting in a 15 minute short film. However, his main field of work is sculpture (his tow large books can also be seen as sculpture), many of which are designed for use within a specific type of landscape (rural or urban). Others are easily portable in order to allow usage at different sites. They are handmade devices, apparently assembled from metal, wood and plastic materials in the workshop of an inventive craftsman. Lenses and mirrors are important components of many of these tools, as they are made to help obtain a better understanding of landscape by viewing it from different perspectives. Stockter’s work has been exhibited in Europe and Asia.
TAV Group: Reuven Cohen-Alloro, Yoav Trifon Israel www.tavgroup.com The TAV Group was founded in 1987 by three architects, Reuven Cohen Alloro, Maoz Alon and Yoav Trifon. The team now also includes the architects Avi Or, Dalia Kramer and Ronen Boneh. Over the years, the group has collaborated with many friends and colleagues, actors, musicians and designers in a wide range of activities including architecture, museum exhibitions, interior design, street theater, performance art and installation, illustration and graphic design, teaching, lecturing and print media. TAV is a framework for individual and joint creation as well as an intimate social community. The long lasting acquaintance produces a natural blend of professional, social and domestic activities, which is reflected in the resulting work. They view their work as an open process, the product of being a temporary manifestation of it. There is no end product. The end is not the product. The way is an end in itself. The work usually involves concept, design and execution as a whole continuous and interactive process. The design is not an applied theory nor is the execution an applied design. The work is usually done on site, evolving from and responding to its unique context. In a rather naive way, they try to indulge in such activities that promote the sustainability of our surroundings. This disturbed environment, if in any need for more human action, asks for reconciling acts, that might bring about peace between its conflicting components, nature and man, nations and individuals. In their choice of what to do and how to do whatever they do, they try to adhere to this commandment.
DJ Whelan California, USA www.djwhelan-art.com Born on the first of January, 1965, DJ Whelan grew up exploring America with her best friends/hippie parents. She lived out of a succession of VW bugs, buses and tents, on a farm in Canada, a cabin in the mountains and dozens of rural routes, small towns and long stretches of road throughout the country before settling into one town to get through four years of high school (albeit nine different houses). Whelan attended art school in Boston in 1982 where she stayed until 1995 (12 addresses in 13 years) when she moved to San Francisco. Whelan currently resides in Berkeley, California. What she creates is greatly informed by her location in the world. Living on the West Coast (and reaching my forties) has shown her the obvious connection between art and land. Whelan’s work has always been an expression of her search for home and a need to feel rooted to something/some place. She sees the tiny dwellings that she builds as natural metaphors for family, love, loss and hope – personal reliquaries created from bits of earth and debris. She lives inside of each piece as they come together and loses them slowly over time, as their deconstruction seems equal to their creation, the marriage of materials and the eventual return to the land that offered up their beginnings.
Shirley Lena Wiebe Canada http://naturalmanufactured.org/wiebe.htm www.wooloo.org/wiebe Shirley Wiebe is an installation-based artist whose practice considers sculpture, space and light. Her work is based on an ongoing inquiry into the routines of daily life – the materials that sustain it and the rhythms that mark its progress. The artist employs common materials that are typically associated with construction, industry or domestic activity. While the appearance of the material is not disguised, her process seeks to reveal uncharacteristic qualities that subvert intended purpose and synthetic origins. The resulting installations are site responsive and created for a specific context or environment. Much of this work is temporal, existing only in memory and documentation. The artist spent her childhood on a farm in Saskatchewan where she was able to observe her father’s relationship with the land. Recent work focuses both on the land and on the relationship of a community with its environment. Wiebe currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia where she has combined her art practice with a career in set decoration for film production. She has created installations for outdoor and gallery exhibitions throughout the Pacific Northwest and completed two public art projects for the City of Vancouver as well as private commissions in a number of locales. The artist has participated in art residencies with the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon and with the Department of Agriculture at the University of British Columbia Farm. In 2006, she took part in a social transformation project residency in Golyazi, Turkey, along with nine other artists.