Nashville Scene: First Saturday Gallery Crawl

Nashville Scene

First Saturday Gallery Crawl

A monthly event feat. gallery openings, drinks and the chance to mix & mingle with the best and brightest of Nashville's local art scene. The Arcade in Music City's burgeoning Arts District is ground zero for this buzz-worthy party that happens on the first Saturday of every month.

Nashville Scene: Jen Cartwright and Off the Wall at Twist

Nashville Scene

Jen Cartwright and Off the Wall at Twist
Got Any Papers?
Joe Nolan

Paper artist and bookmaker Jen Cartwright has found a way to leap from the page, creating sculptural forms that defy the fragile, fibrous media of which they are made. With just a few tweaks to her paper craft, Cartwright has devised a way to leave the two-dimensional plane behind in favor of the flexible, biomorphic forms that she displays in her new show at the Twist Gallery space at 73 Arcade. Not surprisingly, the organic shapes find their inspiration in the Ph.D. candidate's biology studies. The Off the Wall artists’ group will bring their works on paper, photography, paintings and multimedia work to Twist's space at 58 Arcade. While each artist brings his or her own unique voice to the proceedings, all the work in this new show reflects the group’s shared conceptual preoccupations with curious materials. Off the Wall includes Quinn Dukes, Janet Heilbronn, Mahlea Jones, Jenny Luckett, Jaime Raybin, and Iwonka Waskowski, whose intuitive images allude to body-forms, suggesting the figurative within the abstract and pairing nicely with Cartwright's work.

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creative process talk from Ted.com

Off the Wall Art Group at Twist 58 in April

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: 888-535-5286
twist@twistartgallery.com, contact@offthewallartgroup.com
www.twistartgallery.com
www.offthewallartgroup.com


Off the Wall Art Group at Twist 58
Opening Sat April 4, 2009
6:00 – 9:00 PM
58 Arcade
5th Ave N
Nashville, TN 37219


Twist Art Gallery has invited the six members of Off the Wall Art Group to present their new work. Off the Wall is Quinn Dukes, Janet Heilbronn, Mahlea Jones, Jenny Luckett, Jaime Raybin, and Iwonka Waskowski. An opening reception will take place at 58 Arcade on Saturday April 4, as part of the First Saturday Arcade Crawl. This event is free and open to the public. The show will run through April. Twist 58 is located in the balcony level of the historic Arcade building.

The six members of Off the Wall met as students at Watkins College of Art, Design and Film. The group developed as the artists sensed that their work was connected. The members share a similar artistic language, involving a foundation in conceptual art, a curiosity about materials, and an interest in making work with personal resonance. Off the Wall has been exhibiting since 2005.


Mahlea Jones explores the diorama as a learning tool on a human scale.

Jaime Raybin uses microscope photography to uncover tiny visual secrets in apple skin and lemon pulp.

Jenny Luckett's paintings are a memorial to the little things she has lost.

Janet Heilbronn’s paintings explore the 'quiet, private places' of one’s internal experiences and how they shift once brought out in front of others.

Iwonka Waskowski works within an intuitive place of form finding. Her images reference the body without committing to it. Mind, memory, and transference play with the possibilities of psychological deterioration as she explores thoughts about emotional, physical and social issues of isolation.

Quinn Dukes’s work reflects her ambivalence towards living in the “planned” environment of a major city, with its lack of connection to the natural world. The pigeon becomes a symbolic substitute for the influence of nature that she once encountered on a daily basis.


www.offthewallartgroup.com
www.twistartgallery.com

April at Twist Jen Cartwright at 73

Jennifer Cartwright: artist statement
Online portfolio: www.flickr.com/photos/jen_cartwright

Before I ever thought of myself as a sculptor, I was a papermaker. I taught myself the basics of papermaking from books and the internet, mostly by experimentation. To make decent recycled paper, all you need is a kitchen blender, water, a mounted piece of screen (called a “deckle”) and a flat surface for drying. Like many ancient crafts, papermaking is quick to learn but requires a lifetime of dedication to master; simple in concept yet endlessly complex in its challenges and rewards.

My papermaking took on sculptural dimensions in response to a simple question: if a flat deckle can be pulled up through paper pulp to collect the fibers, I asked myself, could I pull a more complex wire form through the paper pulp instead? My first experiments with a few twisted strands of wire produced intriguing results: paper fibers do indeed cling to the wire, and in the drying process they mesh together and condense, forming a richly textured “flesh” of paper over the wire skeleton. Once dry, the wire/paper form can be twisted, curled or manipulated into a variety of shapes. Encouraged by this discovery, I began making ever more complex wire sculptures as substrates for paper fiber, incorporating techniques like knitting and crochet and mixing together a variety of gauges, from sturdy bailing wire to hair-thin beading strands.

Soon enough, a problem emerged: fragility. Newly created sculptures are intricate and flexible, but with repeated handling the paper fibers begin to loose their grip on the wire, and will eventually disintegrate and flake off. If the piece gets wet, the problem is worsened: water is the medium which arranged the fibers in the first place and it can easily wash them away again. The solution I’ve found is to use acrylic media as binding agents. Imagine zooming in to the microscopic level of a finished sculpture: you would see paper fibers wrapped and tangled like threads around each strand of metal, held sturdily in place by long polymers of acrylic. The resulting piece is flexible, durable, waterproof, and can be made opaque, translucent, or even virtually transparent, depending on the types of acrylics used and the ratio of acrylic to paper fiber.

My most recent challenge has been to “scale up” the dimensions of my work, from individual hand-held pieces to a room-filling installation. Nature offers a model for this: a repetition of modular units (a leaf / a hair / a cell / a root…) all similar but no two the same, nested together into a pattern of subtle complexity. While an organism like a tree makes these units simultaneously, I only know how to work sequentially, accumulating piles of wire forms, all of a common design but each slightly different from the varying movements of my hands over time. As I add layers of paper fiber and acrylic, sometimes also incorporating thread, glue and pigments, each segment takes shape before my eyes. The final product is—in a very real sense—of its own creation more than it is mine, and it may bear only abstract resemblance to my initial idea. I’ve come to think that I do not “make” these sculptures, so much as I nurture them through the process of becoming, much like a parent or a gardener. Illumination and movement are the final maturation phase of each work, and the interaction of light and gravity, suspension and shadow can produce an infinite complexity of sculptural results.

Jennifer Cartwright: Biography

Jennifer Cartwright is a self-taught paper artist and bookmaker, born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work incorporates handmade wire forms, recycled paper fibers and acrylic pigment to create sculptural works which are lightweight, flexible, and waterproof. She is also a Ph.D. student in biology at Tennessee State University, where she’s studying the abilities of soil bacteria to break down harmful chemicals in the environment. Thus it’s no surprise that much of her work incorporates organic imagery—pattern, translucence, nested repetition—or that her sculptural process is experimental and emerges from the media she uses: wire, paper, plastic / metal, fiber, polymer.

Jennifer has also worked as a community organizer, gardener, tutor, and a painter of sets for country music videos (ahh, Nashville…) So far, her artwork has all been created in the kitchen of her tiny apartment and in the studio of her mother and mentor Sally Rutledge, a ceramic artist and science teacher. Soon, however, she is moving up the road to Joelton, where she’ll have her own dedicated studio surrounded by goats, blackberries, chickens and bamboo.




Jennifer Cartwright: Online Portfolio

www.flickr.com/photos/jen_cartwright

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