Artists Featured in Exhibition:
click on the name to see the card image from the show
Ruth Ann Borum: painting
Garrison Buxton: painting, printmaking
Cate Kelly: sculpture, installation (Fuglies)
Sharon McCoy: painting
Daisy Patton: photography
Angela Renke: sculpture, installation
Mark Wyatt: photography
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Ruth Ann Borum:
Ruth Ann Borum received her Bachelor's Degree in Studio Art at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma.
Borum's current subject matter deals with obsession, excess, celebration, and the dual nature of sugar as friend and enemy. These themes are expressed through specific characters, towering cakes, streamers, tiny particles drifting down, and cupcakes galore. She is also exploring a female form with an elongated neck, while investigating beauty in the potentially grotesque.
Borum uses painting and drawing as her primary media. However, in the later part of her education, Borum discovered functional ceramics and has incorporated them into her body of work. She draws on the vessels, using those well loved re-occurring themes of skulls and the beautifully grotesque.
Ruth Ann Borum currently maintains a studio space in Norman and plans to continue her art career in Oklahoma.
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Buxton's inventive painting process, a type of "flash printing", requires a sound knowledge of the chemistry of inks, solvents, binders, papers, and paints.
Buxton's fugitive images allow for the universe's spontaneity and chaotic indulgences to commingle with his contrived, calculated visions.
The surface color varies enormously in its character: sometimes solidly fixed, sometimes liquidly rippling, and sometimes a fine lacy mist.
The works are often titled after stellar and micro-cellular phenomenon, which reference Buxton's appreciation, admiration, and respect for the interrelatedness of the macrocosmic and microcosmic. The more humankind learns about the infinitely large and the infinitely small, the more it understands the symbiotic, harmonious relationships that exist between all things.
However, regardless of how much we learn about our planet and the universes with which it commingles, there always exist an underlying mystery, where the unexplainable happens, where the secrets we have yet to uncover, and may never uncover, reside.
Buxton's intuition guides him towards this place, leaving visual references along the path of this never-ending journey.
Oklahoma-born, Garrison Buxton graduated with a BFA from the University of Oklahoma prior to moving to New York City and earning his MFA from Pratt Institute. Buxton then taught printmaking at Pratt until 2004, when he left to found Peripheral Media Projects, Inc. (PMP), a print shop that specializes in graphic design, fine art printmaking, and textile fabrication. Buxton's home, studio and PMP's facilities are in New York City.
His most current venture is co-creating a retail and online store called Antimart, Inc. Antimart carries products manufactured in socially responsible ways by individuals and groups working at the forefront of globally sustainable business models and lifestyles.
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These handmade, re-used, trash treasures automatically form their own identity when turned inside out.
Their identities are further revealed with the artist's embellishments of discombobulated parts.
While some may appear similar, no two are exactly alike. Unique as snowflakes and inept as "Frankenstein's Monster", these little plushmongers will no doubt bring out the alchemist in all of you.
"The closer I get to reaching my goals as an artist, the bigger my dreams become. I'm actually not sure I will ever be satisfied with any measure of success as an artist, only always wanting more. However there is one thing that really does satisfy me. That is using my art as a voice for what I believe. So that's what I do for real satisfaction."
Daisy Patton:
There's something intrinsically vulnerable about having your picture taken. The act captures, so complete and unbiased, the exact instant, whether the individual happens to be looking into the camera oddly or caught unawares. Doubly helpless is a stranger who is the photographer. The subject does not have any control, and basically, their essence has been stolen from that moment for someone else's use.
It is this vulnerability that draws me to taking images of people. Intruding on these individuals is a form of voyeurism on my part as I watch, stealthily position, and snap before I can be stopped. Perhaps they see me or knew me; there is then a tacit understanding, a sort of give and take, between the person and myself. The viewer also is given a chance to role-play. Either they can inhabit the world before them, or they can envision what it was like to be the photographer, the voyeur.
While there is a lot of thought into the specifics of control, the images themselves are quick, brief, candid moments documented for posterity. This fluidity, combined with the push and pull of the viewer versus the subject, drives my documentary work. The concept of the mundane, where everyone lives the same type of boring life and performs the same boring behaviors and actions, interests me because of how subtly people react to these situations. It is my opinion that the human character is revealed here; people allow themselves to open up because of the lack of stimuli and the prying attention of others.
Some of my documentary photography is focused on certain individuals close to me. In this case, rather than gaining a brief glimpse into the subjects' lives, it is more of an established relationship and a development of personality that is exhibited. Instead of intrusion, there is intimacy; instead of powerlessness, there is some control in how the person is portrayed. The contrast of the two sets of subjects is distinct but not necessarily noticeable. Overall, one theme remains: the need to construct a narrative, either quickly or drawn out over time.
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I create work that includes my obsessive perception of perfection, and allow perfect numbers to control the outcome of the work and ultimately define the perfection. A perfect number is one in which its divisors add up exactly to the number itself; they are a rare group of numbers. Based on twenty-eight is a series where the measurements, quantity of materials, and arrangement of the sculptures are all determined by the perfect number 28 and its divisors. Using this process allows my work to achieve perfection through a system that is structured and organized with an infinite diverse possibility for materialization.
I have found that utilizing formal geometry within my work holds a place within visual symbols, which can also be seen in nature. The circle is a shape that can almost always be found within my work. I have used man-made materials such as concrete and rubbers as well as natural materials to execute my ideas of relating humans to perfection, mathematics and nature.
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Mark Wyatt:
Mark Wyatt is a graduate student finishing a Master of Fine Art degree in painting at the university of Oklahoma. Prior to entering the graduate program, Wyatt completed his undergraduate work at Oklahoma university. He began his college education at the age of thirty seven years- after being disabled at his job.
He is a painter, print maker, and writer who specializes in experimental processes and techniques. Painting with a process on glass and developing experimental lithographic methods, he has exhibited regularly while a student and on Renaissance and Baroque Art.
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Links to artist's websites
Ruth Ann Borum
Garrison Buxton
Daisy Patton