Jessica Curatz

Artist statement:

I take a practice often thought of as feminine domestic craft and bring it into public space, imposing my imagination and “feminine” perspective on the urban landscape. I crochet giant weeds, insects, real and imaginary creatures, creating oversized fantastical renditions of flora and fauna, that I install, with and without permission, on chain link fences, city lampposts, and, occasionally, gallery walls.

My latest work appropriates elements of fairytales, mythology and religion. I interrogate the meaning we imbue in these symbolic elements by removing them from their original context and installing them in unexpected places. Do fairy tale roses elicit feelings of beauty, flesh, mortality, and danger when installed at the airport? Does a chimera have more or less meaning when on a city fence? Does Arachne, a woman cursed into the body of a spider for daring to challenge Athena, hold sway beyond the giant scale that I have created? These pieces incorporate humor and escapism into an explicitly political feminist project, blending the banal with the fantastical, the domestic realm with the public sphere

Jenny Lynn

Melissa Joseph

Artist statement:

To recognize self in others is to understand what it means to be human and to be fragile. My work as an artist addresses this phenomenon and is dedicated to mending and healing some of the seemingly persistent failures of civic and social infrastructure. The work explores memories and our relationships to them: nostalgic, obsessive, glorifying, dismissive, repressed. Using Indian silk for these is intentional and functional. Textiles speak to how our bodies interact with space, and folds allow for only limited accessibility. The work is also concerned with the way in which we occupy space and the peculiarities of diasporic life. This is both political and emotional. Whether we are aware of it or not, our body takes comprehensive notes of our experiences.

Candace Jensen

I work in numerous historical disciplines to make contemporary calligraphic illuminations. I slither between working in “pure” traditions such as calligraphy, printmaking, book-arts, and oil-on-panel painting, to the more materially uncertain territory of building bridges between them – alchemical assemblages of paper, pigment, precious metal, medium, herbs, and else. I strive to use naturally derived and biodegradable (although often archival!) materials in alignment with being a responsible global citizen.

My contemporary illumination work directly engages the theory and practice of ecological relationship, systems of knowledge and magic, and mythologies that help us grapple with cosmic vastness, chaos and uncertainty. I investigate nature/culture dualism, and face my own hopes and skepticisms through these layered symbolic and totemic images, organic textures, and literary distillations. My strategies are grounded in both visual art and artful writing, privileging neither over the other — in fact I view the literary, the aesthetic and the sensory to be crucial partners in the development of my work, visual and otherwise.

My Gaia Illuminations reflect a deeply felt awe for our earth, sky, moon and stars. I am very inspired by the writing of James Lovelock, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Derrick Jensen and Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose writing figures into my illumination work as well as my poetic and prosaic compositions written alongside.

Meredith Sellers

Meredith Sellers is an artist, writer, and educator based in Philadelphia. She is an editor for Title Magazine and her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, ArtsJournal, and Pelican Bomb, among others. She has exhibited work at ICA, Lord Ludd, Vox Populi, Icebox Project Space, Pilot Projects, Black Oak House, Pressure Club, and Delaware County Community College and has curated exhibitions at Crane Arts, Pilot Projects, and Esther Klein Gallery. Meredith is the arts and accessibility programs coordinator at the Mütter Museum and has lectured at UPenn, Moore College of Art and Design, Temple University, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Hannah Vogel

I create imaginary landscapes and growths to investigate the effects of entropy on our environments. I transform the commonplace materials of paper and steel wire into unfamiliar forms and textures that evoke growth, decay, and the tenuousness of our surroundings. By referencing craft traditions and natural processes of dissolution, my work addresses aspects of existence on the edge of potential destruction. The physical and connotative properties of my materials speak of the possibility of their demise — a wrinkled, skin-like coating of paper is stained and slowly decayed by its rusting steel wire skeleton. My work asserts the craft-based primacy of the handmade, grounding itself in the physical world on which we all, ultimately, rely.

Combined with this materiality, the scale and visual delicacy of my work request viewers’ spatial consideration when interacting with it. The size and placement of the objects compared to the body describe the nature of their relationship. Some works loom down from above as if sitting in judgement or, alternately, being elevated above the destructive reach of human hands. Others strive to coexist, overcoming the internal tension between the vivacity embodied by their forms and the decay implied by their materials. By openly displaying their own physical vulnerabilities, these objects underscore the precarity of our surrounding ecosystems. In doing so, my work aims to cultivate compassion for the physical world around us and for our own impermanent selves.