In our midst, we have a number of nationally prominent visual artists. Here are a few of my favorites, in alphabetical order.
Judy Bales: Public Art, Fiber Arts, Sculpture
Judy Bales has long specialized in making sculptures from salvaged materials such as wire, plastic, metal mesh, brillo pads and other household objects. Her works are often whimsical, clever and deeply affecting, incorporating materials most of us would discard, as she evokes the breath of humanity. 
“Cold, industrial materials intrigue me with their potential to be used to create objects that contain warmth and lyricism,” she says. “Although materials cast off from industry and agriculture provide the raw materials for my work, the inspiration for the work comes from the landscape, my personal sense of place, and the human figure.”
In recent years, Bales has designed a number of public bridges and other installations in Iowa, Arizona and Missouri. By immersing herself in the history of each community and forging alliances with local engineers and civic representatives, these projects have brought new challenges and rewards to the artist. She says, “Public art projects have given me the opportunity to create permanent works that will be of great benefit to communities for many years . . .”
Bales has had solo exhibitions at galleries and universities in Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee, Illinois, Massachussetts and Georgia, as well as group shows at numerous museums and galleries throughout the U.S.Judy Bales works as a full-time artist and designer.
Gillian Brown: Video Installations, Conceptual Photography
Gillian Brown explores perceptions of reality through constructed photographs and, more recently, video installations. The first major work of Brown's I saw (more than 20 years ago at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.) was a ghostly image of the artist and her sister painted on a staircase.
From one angle, the painted parts coalesced to form a coherent image of the sisters. From other angles, however, the images became disjointed or dissolved. I remember being transfixed and somewhat unsettled by the changes in my perception as I moved around the room. Any certainty about what I considered real in this world suddenly seemed less than reliable. While Brown has shifted to working with digital video installations in recent years, she continues to explore the subtle fabrics of human consciousness, with a focus on how experience is comprehended and ordered.
For the last decade, Brown has often worked in collaboration with Washington, D.C. artist Inga McCaslin Frick, a painter and digital artist, on a variety of projects. Their most technically complex work, Turnaround Time, which the two artists constructed while on Bunting Fellowships at Harvard University, was an interactive installation employing face-recognition software.
Brown describes how she and Frick employed the face recognition software in this work. “When the viewer looks through a porthole at an image, another image starts to project behind her. However, as the viewer turns around to see what is happening behind her, the projected images immediately fade away. The viewer glimpses the embers of an image - enough to tantalize but not to decipher. The rear projections reappear again only after the viewer turns forward.”More recently, Brown has completed a series called Five Works on Becoming.
“Thematically,” she says, “this group of work is informed by: creation myths from around the world; recent scientific work on how existence comes into being (including cosmology and string theory); and my own sense of how something comes out of nothing in our consciousness and our perception.”
Fred Camper of the Chicago Reader wrote about her solo video works, “Brown's fragile magic recalls the charm of lantern shows, stereoscopic slides, and shadow puppetry, configuring images as conjurer's tricks.” Mouthtomouth magazine called her work “sheer visual poetry.”Exhibitions, Awards, Teaching Experience
Brown has had solo exhibitions at galleries, museums and universities in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Massachussetts, Illinois and group exhibitions in New York, Washington, D.C., Maryland, North Carolina, Illinois, Georgia, California, Minnesota.
Besides the Bunting Fellowship, she has won fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Iowa Arts Council grant, the Maryland State Arts Council and the Ford Foundation, among others.
Brown’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums, among them the Seattle Art Museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Center George Pompideau in Paris.
She has been a visiting artist and guest lecturer at many institutions, including the San Francisco Art Institute, University of Chicago, Tisch School of Art at New York University, Minneapolis College of Art and Design and Rochester Institute of Technology.
Brown currently teaches in the Department of Art and Design at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield.
[More artists to come: David Hanson, Barry Ross, Jim Shrosbree]
.jpg)
.jpg)
