COMPOSITE { 1 } Educators / Fall 2014
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COMPOSITE INFO No. 17 Educators Composite is a quarterly electronic magazine showcasing the work of artists from multiple disciplines, each issue focusing around a specific theme.
All artwork and literature is property of contributing artists. All layout, design, and other content is property of Composite, 2014. Composite Arts Magazine: ISSN 2161-7961
More information can be found through the following vehicles: Website: www.compositearts.com Email: compositeeditors@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter & Instagram: @Compositearts Find us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/compositearts
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We at Composite owe much to art school, being born out of a conversation between Kara and I that was sparked by a presentation our BFA thesis instructors, William Staples (No. 6 Process), gave about his past art criticism journal. We are incredibly excited to again be working with another past instructor of Kara, Suzie, and I’s, Silvia Malagrino. Without Silvia’s constant encouragement both within school and out, including being willing to appear in our very first issue of Composite (No. 1 Tourism), and the support of other educators like her, we would likely not be working on this project today, let alone releasing our 17th issue. This issue, I am willing to admit, is somewhat self serving, allowing us each an excuse to work with a few past instructors that had an impact to our practices. However, this issue is also about highlighting the vast array of approaches and processes applied by teachers out there today making work that quite often goes unmentioned, or even unfortunately unnoticed, within the classroom. With only thirteen contributors, we aren’t even scratching the surface of the rich community of instructors actively shaping minds today, but in our small way, we hope to begin to extend some much needed gratitude to a population making us all smarter and better people than we were before we met them. Zach Clark Composite Editor
Educators / Fall 2014
I don’t believe there is another industry that is as tightly woven to its academic component as the art world. We have entire higher education institutions dedicated solely to the purpose of teaching art, design, and writing. Teaching positions afford many artists the ability to pay the bills while still dedicating significant time to their own practice. In turn, practicing creatives are able to relay not only their knowledge on a subject, but their experience tackling it every day, from the technical skills of making work to the many stages before and after. There is, of course, the constant debate if this cycle is viable, or even sustainable (points that will not be argued within the following pages). Yet all the same, conversations within our current art world discuss pedagogy more often than not.
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CONTENTS No. 17 Educators Amaris Ketcham 6
Using Lionel Richie to Access the Real World
Silvia Malagrino 10 Aaron Collier 22
Mathias Shergen 27 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin 32 Ark 3: The Workshop Scenarios
Omar Figueras 48 Jeff Horwat 54
A Bad Idea Gone Funny: The Reflections of an Artist-Teacher
Mark Fox & Angie Wang 63
Design is Play: Mission Cliffs Proposed Trademark
Richard Barlow 67 Bromides
Gary Minnix 78
On the Edge
A. W. Strouse 86
Be The First To Like This
Cover: Silvia Malagrino
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Educators
Educators tasked to impart these skills on to the next generation of creatives have their work cut out for them, and they know this, because they are still learning all of it themselves. One of two main requirements in order to teach the arts in higher education, besides the requisite degree, is being actively engaged in their own creative practice. In essence, being an arts educator is to have and to maintain two full time careers that are intrinsically linked. A heightened intimacy and vulnerability is undeniable within these teacher/student relationships, as they themselves are working to figure out their own path, while guiding students toward their’s.
Educators / Fall 2014
It is a rare contemporary conversation about the arts that is not, at least tangentially, also about pedagogy. The arts are obsessed with education. Creatives must understand their craft, be aware of their current and historical contexts, have the skills to write about and explain their work eloquently and effectively, and possess impeccable social and political skills. Arts higher education programs are one of the few bastions of classical academia, outspoken about the fact they are not trade schools, rather a time and space provided for conversation, for learning ways of thinking, for gaining “soft skills.” Most of all, we should not be concerned with actually selling our work while we’re still learning to make it, we should just be focused on the making.
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Amaris Ketcham
Using Lionel Richie to Access the Real World
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Amaris Ketcham
Educators / Fall 2014
To my students, the “real world” sits just beyond the classroom. It is a space in flux, moving and changing much more quickly than academia. In education, there is a creative tension between an established body of knowledge and the real world; this tension can help fuel teaching. One of my teaching goals is to better connect the real world with the classroom. For the past two years, I have taught in the Honors College at the University of New Mexico. The Honors College strives to offer a broad and flexible curriculum by teaching interdisciplinary courses and functioning as a small liberal arts college within a flagship research institution. I have taught interdisciplinary creative writing courses that combine science and creative writing, a course on wit in creative writing and the fine arts, and a series of literary publishing courses where students produce a regional literary arts magazine called Scribendi. Throughout the year, Scribendi students begin to master the skills necessary for small press production, including graphic design, desktop publishing software, arts and literature assessment, copyediting, and small business management and marketing. Most of the students who enroll in Scribendi are English majors who are thinking about applying to law school. Even though they are “digital natives,” their skills are not as technologically robust as most adults believe. While many more of the students are entering the class with previous experience using Word’s track changes functions, about half of the students are still just as intimidated by Excel as they are by InDesign. In addition to being nervous about becoming proficient enough at InDesign to create a successful flyer, brochure, or magazine layout, many of these students are terrified of being judged on their creative or artistic ability. They are, after all, mostly English majors. To reassure students that they could learn graphic design, and to begin introducing the graphic design component, one of my first lessons discusses the difference between art and design. The students are expected to have come to class already having read certain chapters in Denise Bosler’s Mastering Type and ready for a design discussion. In the past, I have drawn a Venn diagram on the board with the headings “Design” and “Art” to discuss the differences and similarities of the two. Then we look at some gig posters, book jackets, and advertisements to practice talking about design, and finally, we critique the previous year’s issue of the magazine. The morning of that lesson last fall, while walking to campus, I ran across a flyer stapled to a telephone pole. Typically flyers in my neighborhood advertise pets lost and found, couches for sale, or upcoming gigs by the Vassar Bastards or Let ‘Em Grow, but this one was different. Across the top of the paper it read, “Hello?” below which was a photo of Lionel Richie, then the words, “Is it me you’re looking for?” At the bottom were teartabs, where one typically might pull off a phone number or e-mail address of a student looking for a roommate. These tabs had other lyrics to Richie’s song “Hello.” Someone had already plucked off one “I love you.” The flyer was crafted and mysterious. Lionel looked straight ahead, making eye contact with his audience of passersby. Even though I recognized the headshot as a cropped photo from his album cover, his expression appeared vulnerable. I scanned the lyrics: “I can see it in your eyes…I can see it in your smile…You’re
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all I’ve ever wanted…’cause I wonder where you are…Are you somewhere feeling lonely?...For I haven’t got a clue.” I wondered what on Earth this flyer was trying to express. Perhaps someone was recreating feelings of alienation, or, I guess, lovesickness to make us reflect on our own emotional states. It could be a secret message intended for one person’s full understanding. The music video for this song—if you remember it—is disturbing to a modern audience. In it, a high school teacher lusts after a blind girl. Perhaps the flyer, too, was trying to suggest some illicit university affair with a striking power imbalance. Or, perhaps it just was, just was there. I knew instantly: the flyer was perfect to start my discussion. I grabbed it and took it to class with me. I scrapped the Venn diagram concept that I was going to use that day, and tacked Lionel onto the corkboard. I told my students that I’d found it in my neighborhood. Then I asked, “What is this? Is this graphic design or art?” They looked at the flyer; they looked to me; they looked at the flyer. Hello? Lionel’s eyes entreated them. Is it me you’re looking for? Finally, taking her odds, one student ventured a guess, “Art?” “Why do you think its art?” I asked. It was the second week of our course, and the students were still shy. When she glanced down and fiddled with pen, giving me the universal student body language code for, “I’m afraid of being wrong in public,” I continued, “Or, put another way, why wouldn’t it be graphic design?” Rephrasing the question allowed another way to think about it by comparing and contrasting the two fields. And so, we were able to begin deconstructing the flyer. On one hand, it looked like a good example of graphic design. It was a form we recognized and associated with design—a flyer, complete with tear-tabs as if selling us something. But what was it selling? Lionel Richie music from 1983? Probably not. Its message was vague, as if it existed for its own sake. And you cannot have design for its own sake, but you can have art for art’s sake. That is, while art can simply “be,” design cannot. Design must communicate something. While art may cause reflection or inspiration, design should cause someone to act—purchase royalty-free art, submit work to Scribendi, quit texting and driving. An artist may start by suffering from stage fright in front of a blank canvas, but a designer starts with his or her message, then creates a work to communicate it. Whereas individuals might interpret a message in a good piece of art in many ways—is Lionel giving you bedroom eyes or is he about to cry, or could this flyer be a comment about power dynamics in the classroom or the various types of predation to which disabled people are subjected—everyone must walk away with the same message from a clear design. You don’t want one person to walk away wanting to buy a new Nintendo Mario game and another person, a pair of new overalls. For example, on the intersection of Yale and Lomas Boulevards in Albuquerque, there was an ENDWI billboard that I thought was clever until my passenger
The fact was, none of us knew what Lionel meant.
Amaris Ketcham
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Amaris Ketcham
Educators / Fall 2014
turned to me and asked, “What does on-dwee mean, anyway?” The fact was, none of us knew what Lionel meant. While we decided that the flyer was art, we also decided the flyer was something each student could make fairly easily. The design obeyed a grid. It used Helvetica, which is a clean, legible, if common typeface. There was a hierarchy of information. Hello? was large enough to catch someone’s attention from a few feet away as they passed on the sidewalk. Phrasing the header and sub-headers as questions drew the audience close enough to scrutinize the tear-off lyrics. The photographic art contributed to its theme. The lesson helped provide entrance to introduce students to the difference between art and design, encouraged them that they could design a successful flyer even if they feared that they weren’t “artistic,” and modeled the application of classroom concepts to objects found in the “real world.” That connection between classroom instruction and the world beyond the whiteboard is one of the types of creativity that professors must possess and that students must practice. It is a kind of creativity that allows one to adapt an established body of knowledge to a context that shifts and changes quickly. Exercising the ability to improvise helps prepare students for life’s real world challenges by connecting understanding to experience. This flyer may have been some quick meme that came and went without much fanfare, but Lionel stayed with us on the corkboard all semester, and one by one, his lyrics were plucked and taken home. I hadn’t known it at the time, but it was Lionel I was looking for.
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Silvia Malagrino
Musings. Electronic drawings. 2012 Drawings were generated combining two open source softwares that map the traces of the mouse on the computer screen. Documentation of a day of work on the screen.
Work, work, work, discipline, discipline, discipline. Whether I’m teaching or not, that is how I have to operate if I want to get things done in the studio. There is play too, lots of it. Play that is necessary for experimenting, for letting oneself be open to chance and discovery. This is intentional play and it is precious.
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Musings. Electronic drawings. 2012 Drawings were generated combining two open source softwares that map the traces of the mouse on the computer screen. Documentation of a day of work on the screen.
Silvia Malagrino
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A ballet dancer trains and practices on an average of six hours per day, a carpenter works eight or more hours per day. I keep this in mind when summer comes. It is easier to drift away from the studio into socializing and the outdoors. Not having the structure of the teaching weeks makes it, paradoxically, more difficult to stay focused on the art practice. An open day can feel like a void, it can swallow you, distress you. That is why it is necessary to remind oneself of the studio practice, come back to it with an open mind, a warm heart, and willful courage – a difficult practice in itself. For the past decade and beyond, I have spent my summers working on some project, trying to finish a film or start a new one. Experimenting with new techniques, reading, researching, and writing grants to be able to make a project. The two feature films I made, Burnt Oranges and A Song for You took seven years each – between research, travel, production and post-production.
Musings. Electronic drawings. 2012 Drawings were generated combining two open source softwares that map the traces of the mouse on the computer screen. Documentation of a day of work on the screen.
Silvia Malagrino
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Burnt Oranges film still, 2005
Silvia Malagrino
{ 14 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Burnt Oranges film still, 2005
Silvia Malagrino
Silvia Malagrino on location shooting Burnt Oranges, 2005
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Burnt Oranges film still, 2005
Silvia Malagrino
{ 16 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 A Song For You film stills, 2014
RP A FILM BY SHARON KA GRINO LA MA VIA SIL CO-DIRECTED BY
U A S O N G F O R YO Poster of the film A Song For You, 2014
Silvia Malagrino
Malagrino on location shooting A Song For You, 2010
COMPOSITE { 17 } Educators / Fall 2014 Silvia Malagrino
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This past summer I created my first outdoor light and video installation in collaboration with new media artists Joshua Albers and Jesus Duran, both UIC alumni. Titled Swimming With a Kite, the project was an immersive site-specific installation and a one-night-only situational event. It took place at The Franklin, an outdoor, experimental, artist-run backyard gallery in Chicago. The site-specific event offered a platform for public engagement with poetry and technology.
Invitation postcard for Swimming With A Kite, 2013
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Using video projections, light design, and responsive computer programming, my collaborators and I transformed The Franklin into a responsive environment inviting exploration, reflection, and play. I worked inspired by Audre Lorde’s essay, “Poetry is not a Luxury”, and the markings left by an anonymous reader on a book by Carl Jung about the transformation of the self and society. I found the book in a second-hand bookstore in Chicago. Inside the book there are intricate markings, handwritten notes, and drawings. On each page someone – an anonymous reader – inscribed her/his own constellation of images and writings, unleashing meanings and tracing a territory of thoughts comparable to visual poetry. Based on the experience and content of this particular book, I wanted to explore a trinity of concerns: language, image, and technology in an open space. I conceived the project, and the two new media artists were responsible for programing its interactive elements. It was a rich and enlivening experience.
Swimming With A Kite Installation views, 2013
{ 20 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Swimming With A Kite Installation views, 2013
Silvia Malagrino
COMPOSITE { 21 } Educators / Fall 2014
Swimming With A Kite Installation views, 2013
Silvia Malagrino
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Aaron Collier Art is made out of more than good ideas. As a painter, I recognize that the medium itself has properties and characteristics that profoundly influence the content of an image. The paint has the binary ability to summon and refuse, reveal and conceal, beautify and debase. My work frequently attempts to revel in these manifold offerings of the medium, for in so doing, the resulting imagery is consonant with our tangled interaction with the world and its phenomena. Routine are encounters marked by disclosure and obstruction; we happen upon events, objects, spaces, or experiences that we are seemingly able to know, grasp, and understand, along with those we fundamentally cannot. Paint becomes a fitting medium for picturing such a paradox, for painting itself is an in-between act, a simultaneous doing and undoing. My work, which can also include drawing and collage, thus traffics more in glimpse, suggestion, or fragment than in chronicle. The limitation of my own hand lends itself well to rendering the brokenness and incompletion of what is around me: I cannot see or know or describe in full. Images that indefinitely propose or imply allow me to situate myself, as well as the viewer, as deferential participants, adventuring with the image, rather than exercising omnipotence over it. I aim for my work to assume the posture of contentment within the pasture of finitude, yielding joy in humility. What are we to make of the beauty that can accompany not knowing in full?
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Not Necessarily in That Order. Photo collage with Duralar, acrylic. 10.5 x 12.5". 2012
Aaron Collier
{ 24 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Untitled Photo collage with Duralar, acrylic. 11.75 x 10.5�. 2012
Aaron Collier
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Uncalled For Photo collage on laser cut Plexiglas with acrylic. 19.25 x 22.5�. 2013
Aaron Collier
{ 26 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Untitled Photo collage with Duralar, acrylic. 10.5 x 8.75�. 2012
Aaron Collier
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Scream Again. 14 x 36�. 2013
Educators / Fall 2014
Mathias Schergen
{ 28 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Anxious Warrior. 22 x 32�. 2011
Mathias Schergen
My work is a compulsive attempt to reimagine the functionality of objects and materials to suit my visual aesthetic. It is a type of mimicry that fulfills a compulsive, life-long need to make stuff. I want to engage viewers in a conceptual dialogue that changes their initial assumptions about what they are seeing and what it actually is.
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Scream Again. 2013
Pretty Girl. 18 x 38�. 2011
Mathias Schergen
{ 30 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Scrappy Bird. 22 x 24�. 2012
Mathias Schergen
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Miss Priss. 24 x 30�. 2012
Mathias Schergen
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Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
Ark 3: The Workshop Scenarios
Together, we have based our single-channel videotapes, installations, workshop performances, and curations on research into diverse speculative fictions including reimagined educational practices, crypto-utopian musicals, appropriated horror genres, paranormal phenomenon, virtual choreographies, cos-play, and trans-human love stories. Ark 3: The Workshop Scenarios will be an installation in a fall 2014 exhibition at Fosdick Nelson Gallery at Alfred University. The first part of the title takes its name from an obscure and short-lived children’s television series named Ark II from 1976 where a group of young scientists accompanied by a chimpanzee attempt to bring new hope to a postapocalyptic world that has been ravaged by pollution and waste. Their science fiction mobile lab roams a land populated with feral children, feudal barons, and supernatural beings. In Ark 3: The Workshop Scenarios, we reimagine this mobile lab to be colorful inflatable orbs, and its occupants, as performed by the artists and willing workshop participants, are evolved bodies rather than glamorous youths. Void of flesh and genetically modified to be in communion with the animal and insect worlds, these earth bound bionauts mine the environment around them, looking for clues to their ancestral past as a way to pave a way into their possible futures. In their search, they discover recordings of Leonard Nimoy and Patrick O’Neal introducing LaserDisc & CED technologies to a broader public. They also see early clues to their semblance in the images of the iconic Slim Good Body from Captain Kangaroo. Ultimately, images of their search and research will be projected in multiple ways upon the spheres that compelled their travel. At either end of the main installation, experimental documentaries will be projected based upon Burn’s Wiccan mother and Martin’s gay cop father, both of whom act as spirit guides to the future explorers. Special thanks: Kari Gatzke / Denis Luzuriaga / Chris Nelson / Michael O’Malley / Alicia Renadette / Michael Savage / Mercedes Teixido
Darrin Martin & Torsten Zenas Burns
COMPOSITE { 33 } Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
{ 34 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
COMPOSITE { 35 } Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
{ 36 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
COMPOSITE { 37 } Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
{ 38 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
COMPOSITE { 39 } Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
{ 40 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
COMPOSITE { 41 } Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
{ 42 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
COMPOSITE { 43 } Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
{ 44 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
COMPOSITE { 45 } Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
{ 46 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
COMPOSITE { 47 } Educators / Fall 2014 Torsten Zenas Burns & Darrin Martin
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Omar Figueras I believe that storytelling is something that is innate in all of us. It is how we process the world and our place in it. Either in our voice or through our characters, regardless of genre medium, whether set in the remote past or distant future, storytellers create fantasy to make sense of reality.
Holding Tank You’re cold. Tuck your arms inside your filthy T-shirt streaked with God knows what. Army green cargo shorts slumping off your waist. They’ve taken your belt. A guy’s already in the cell when they bring you in. Americano. Tells you he was on a flight from Port-auPrince to Miami–this was a couple of years before the earthquake–and he drank a little too much. Got rowdy. Mouthed off to one of the flight attendants. Said he cracked jokes about her hair. Chuckle, maybe just a little too loudly, certain there’s more to his story. When his flight arrived in Miami there were a mess of cops waiting. He was shackled, ushered in a white room with no windows, not given any food or drink. Placed in a van, he was not told where they were taking him, and they brought him here. Tell him it would be Okay. “My girlfriend doesn’t know where I am. I’m supposed to meet her at our hotel.” Say you’re sure she’ll call the airline and they would tell her what happened. “I’m going to get fired.” Agree with him. Worry about your own job. Then mention to stress about what’s at hand, not what’s yet to come. Your father always says to focus on the positive. Even here you can find something. Your cellmate sits on the floor against the wall, head bent between his knees. “Are you close to your dad?” Tell him your viejo died years ago, but you’re still close. He chuckles, maybe just a little too loudly.
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Omar Figueras
Educators / Fall 2014
The cell door opens and a guard orders to get up and step out into the hallway. A line of inmates walks down the corridor in your direction. Listen to the echo of the steel locking into place and the muffle of incarcerated feet shuffling across linoleum. You shiver either from fear or the air conditioning. “Keep it together,” he says, then touches your shoulder. A guard says keep quiet. The line stops where you’re standing. You’re placed at the front. Walk to the end of the corridor where a garage door opens. Sunlight pours over you. Notice a tall chain-linked gate. Men and women dressed in dark blue uniforms stand on either side. There is a van whose windows are covered with white-washed metal plates. Another guard calls out names, including your cellmate’s, the one you forget the second it’s announced. He steps forward, turns to his right, and stands close to you. Your name was not called. “Allison Schafer. She’s at the Intercontinental Hotel.” Nod at him once as if to say, “goodbye,” or, “nice knowing you,” or, “Okay,” without uttering a word. The line walks past the gate and up to the van. The inmates are ushered into the vehicle. Realize you never told him your name. Shuffle back into the room with no windows and wait for Cuca, your wife, to bail you out. She had to leave Jordan and Sammy with her Mom, that vieja who you know is campaigning for Cuca to leave your ass in jail and take your girls. Go through the rigmarole of group counseling, breathalyzer installation to the steering column of your car—a sober threshold to its ignition, and one hundred community service hours under hot weekend sun. Cuca supports you through this first DUI, but not your second. She and the girls leave. Jordan doesn’t smile when you pick her up on Sundays anymore. Sammy was too young to remember a time when you lived under the same roof. “Hi Papi,” she’s told to say. Every visit feels like your first. One Sunday out with the girls you remember you never did go to the Intercontinental Hotel to look for Allison Schafer. You never found out what became of that guy.
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Post Nuptials Would you please just take the fucking picture? I’m tired of standing in this position. I cannot hold a smile on my face any longer. I am nauseated by your bodily sweat-perfume mixture, your pastel tourist clothes, and our destination. Would you please just take the fucking picture? Our honeymoon already we’re a fracture. Rescind my marital decision? I cannot hold a smile on my face any longer. Ceremony is easy; hold hands like caricatures, dance, feed each white cake before the congregation. Would you please just take the fucking picture? This is utter torture eased only by copious medication. I cannot hold a smile on my face any longer. I’m not your partner, but your pet, a household fixture. Regret and source this awful submission. I cannot hold a smile on my face any longer. Would you please just take the fucking picture?
Omar Figueras
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The last time Esperanza saw Miguel they were eighteen and she was boarding a two-engine Pan Am Clipper in Havana bound for Miami. Four months pregnant, just enough to show, she had him escort her out on the tarmac. He kissed her, tugged on his ear, then hers, as he always did after they made love. Agreeing to meet in Miami within the month, promising to write and send letters with her parents who would leave the following week; however, her brother, Agustin, was incarcerated days later, and her viejos chose to remain on the island. After the embargo took effect, letters took weeks to arrive. Few were the times she was able to reach her mother by phone, repeatedly asking her if she had seen Miguel. The old woman could only tell her daughter, “No.” Soon her mother’s letters stopped altogether. Esperanza assumed her family had been jailed, or killed. Bodies vanished as had happened to countless others, people she pretended not to know. One moment you’re at home listening to radio, playing dominoes, then guards arrive, placing everyone face down on tile floor. If you got out of line in the process they’d beat and take you somewhere no one would ever see you again. It wasn’t until that afternoon in Manhattan when she saw a man who resembled Miguel leaving the subway. Her day off from the Donohues, the couple Esperanza kept house for since she moved to the city in the mid-80’s with Miguelito. She saw the man, and could not resist following him because he reminded her so much of Miguel. She tailed him to Central Park, watched while he sat on a bench and read his newspaper. He ate something wrapped in wax paper which he removed from a small, brown paper bag. When he finished, he noticed her staring at him. She hid behind tree. The bark was rough against her hands.
Omar Figueras
Educators / Fall 2014
Esperanza
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That’s him, she thought. It must be. She followed the grooves of the trunk with her fingertips and peeked around its side. The man continued to stare at her. Esperanza could not find the nerve to walk up to him. What would I say? What if it’s not him? Then it seemed to her he lost interest. He rose from the bench and began to leave. She followed him out to the edge of the park where he hailed a cab. He sat in the backseat and the cab edged its way into traffic. She saw him looking out the rear window at her as the vehicle disappeared. The last time Esperanza saw Miguel was December of that year while she read the obituaries. It was Miguel’s picture, but not his name in the caption which read “Antonio Macias Fernandez.” Widower who left behind two daughters and four grandchildren. Professor of Latin American History at Columbia University for over thirty years. Published several books on U.S. and Cuba relations during and after the revolution. Of course. What else would Miguel do but talk about the revolution. The article mentioned services were to be held at St. Jude’s the following Saturday at 1:00 p.m. Saturday afternoon she put on her only black dress, donned her strand of pearls dotting the base of her neck— the ones her son had bought her last year when he’d graduated from NYU. She always thought they were too expensive for Miguelito said he’d found the money somehow. She arrived at the parlor and immediately recognized Miguel’s two daughters. They resembled his sister, Lupe—tall, large around the thighs and loud.
Omar Figueras
COMPOSITE { 53 }
She saw a small framed woman, hunched over in a corner like a comma either from age, pain, or both.. The lady was hopped up on shots of espresso distributed throughout the parlor. It was Lupe, yammering about how lovely it was in North Carolina. Yes, colder than Miami, but the people were warmer. Esperanza didn’t pay much attention to what she said, but to the way they said it: her hands danced in the air, choreographed by her voice, climbing in the middle of her sentences and falling at the end. One of the Giacomettis approached. “Excuse me, señora. Did you know my father?” “I used to.” “Esperanza?” She looked to find Lupe. Folds of skin framed her light green eyes. She looked like her mother. Esperanza nodded. “I’d know that face anywhere. It’s me, Lupita.” You haven’t been an ita in years, she thought, but kept that to herself. “It’s so good to see you,” said Lupe. Esperanza hated lying, but what could it hurt after all these years. “Good to see you too.”
Omar Figueras
Educators / Fall 2014
Boisterous Giacometti statues, heads too small for their wide shoulders but made up for their tiny noggins with their booming voices.
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Jeff Horwat
A Bad Idea Gone Funny: The Reflections of an Artist-Teacher Allegories have been something that have always interested me. When I was a teenager I was drawn to a variety of books that told complex political or philosophical stories in clever ways. Dr. Seuss’s Butter Battle Book, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus were some of my favorites. These stories profoundly influenced the way I thought about how skillfully composed allegories could be used to tell complex personal narratives. As I got older and studied art in college, I was also inspired by Surrealism, German Expressionism, and Pop Surrealism. Artists like Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Käthe Kollwitz, Sue Co, Max Beckman, Mark Ryden, Todd Schorr, and many others all used metaphor and symbolism in similar ways to my teenage heroes Seuss, Orwell, and Spiegelman. They created emotionally charged works of art that were thoughtful and reflective, yet still maintained an ambiguity that allowed personal interpretation. Inspired by these artists and authors, I began creating a metaphorical space and symbolic language to tell my own stories. These were usually personal narratives addressing my struggles with loneliness, anxiety and depression. As I developed this visual language further and worked through various traumas pictorially, I began to heal emotionally and psychologically. My visual world became a safe place for me to work through obsessive and intrusive thoughts – emotions that had sullied my early adulthood. By creating these pictures and telling these stories, I was able to think about my life in a more constructive way. Through this work I began to grow past my adolescent traumas and explore new interests such as Buddhism, Existentialism, and psychoanalysis. My art practice became a healthy part of my self-care and a way to further understand the world. As an art educator, I feel maintaining my art practice is essential to my growth as a teacher. This is not an uncommon belief held by other artist-teachers. Most artist-teachers see their art practices as pedagogical tools that shape how we teach. Their art practices allow them to continue to hone skills and techniques that could be taught to their students. Making art also serves as a reflective practice where they can elicit tactical and practical knowledge
Jeff Horwat
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My position towards my art practice was inspired by my love of Buddhist philosophy. I am specifically drawn to the Buddha’s perspective that self-care was a form of service to others. In his teachings on cultivating love and compassion, Buddha taught that one must be the best for themselves so that they can be the best for others. He encouraged his followers to engage in virtuous activities that provided them personal joy and happiness. For the Buddha, cultivating a happy, loving, and compassionate mind was the greatest gift anyone could give to the world. In western thought, this logic of self-first / others-second often contradicts traditional understandings of moral inquiry. However, in eastern traditions such as Buddhism and Confucianism, engaging in positive personal practices was noble and wise. My interest in Buddhist philosophy provided me a sound philosophical platform to validate my art practice without experiencing any of the guilt or self-reproach many westerners experience when taking time to do something for themselves. My current project is something I’ve been developing over several years while I worked as a high school art teacher. It has more recently germinated into something more substantial as I began doctoral work in art education. My project, tentatively titled There is No (W)hole, is a wordless surrealist graphic allegory about desire, attachment, and renunciation. The allegory tells the story of a nameless underwear-clad protagonist who undergoes a philosophical journey to satiate an existential lack—an incompleteness, which he struggles to accept. Throughout this journey, the protagonist prizes various objects of desire (stones, bones, a pin cushion, a broken ceramic pot, and daisies) in attempt to feel complete. However, these external objects are insufficient and fail their purpose of fulfilling his intrinsic desires, causing the protagonist to continue on his quest until he realizes nothing will satiate his sense of lack. There is No (W)hole draws from my experiences coping with everyday traumas, while combining the Buddhist philosophy and Surrealism with my current interest in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to tell a story of how to be present in a world of endless desire and uncertainty.
Jeff Horwat
Educators / Fall 2014
through awareness between our actions and reflections as artists. While these aforementioned justifications for continuing to make art are valid, my main concern for making art is that it simply makes me happy and more pleasant (or more tolerable) to be around. When I’m making art regularly, I’m more patient, empathetic, optimistic, energized, and fulfilled. When I don’t make art, I get antsy, anxious, and depressed. Therefore, I’ve surmised that my art practice makes me a better person and being a better person makes me a better teacher for my students.
{ 56 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Jeff Horwat
COMPOSITE { 57 } Educators / Fall 2014 Jeff Horwat
{ 58 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Jeff Horwat
COMPOSITE { 59 } Educators / Fall 2014 Jeff Horwat
{ 60 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Jeff Horwat
COMPOSITE { 61 } Educators / Fall 2014 Jeff Horwat
{ 62 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Jeff Horwat
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Design is Play: Mission Cliffs Proposed Trademark
The original rough sketch is approximately 5/8 of an inch wide. The hexagonal silhouette is a reference to the bolts that are used in both indoor and some outdoor climbing to fasten anchors to the wall.
We are graphic designers who specialize in creating trademarks. The following images track the development of one symbol we recently designed. Mission Cliffs is an indoor rock climbing gym located in San Francisco, California. One of the concepts we proposed relied on a spider as a metaphor for the sport: the spider represents the climber; the single strand of silk is the rope. (The star is a symbol of superior quality.)
Educators / Fall 2014
Mark Fox & Angie Wang
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Our process is fairly simple: we sketch at a small size. If a sketch works at half an inch, it typically works well as a finished symbol at any size. (When working small, extraneous details are eliminated, and the essential structure of the symbol is clearly established.) Once a sketch shows promise, we typically refine it further and then ink the refinement with a Rapidograph pen. We then build the symbol in Adobe Illustrator to test it, after which we hone the design further, re-inking the symbol and rebuilding it in Illustrator. Our process is laborious, but we believe it yields distinctive results.
The first inking is around 3 1/4 inches wide. The symbol is purposely designed so that four of the eight spider legs define four of the six points of the hexagon.
Mark Fox & Angie Wang
The final inking is a little over 6 inches wide. The addition of the star makes the spider mythic as its domain is the sky and not the earth.
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Final art for the proposed trademark.
Mark Fox & Angie Wang
{ 66 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 The proposed trademark paired with typography. The primary typeface is Magneto, designed by Leslie Cabarga.
Mission Cliffs ultimately chose another direction we proposed which will be unveiled by the gym in October of this year. Design: Š 2014 Mark Fox and Angie Wang, Design is Play, San Francisco Illustration: Mark Fox
Mark Fox & Angie Wang
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Bromides
Silver Bromide. Ink graphite and oil on panel. 36 x 44”. 2007
Over the past several years I have produced a multi-faceted body of work based on a single nineteenth century photograph by William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the silver negative photographic process. The photograph is entitled “Reflected Trees,” and depicts a row of trees in winter, reflected in a pond. The image has a Romantic feel, as though in the style of a painting.
Educators / Fall 2014
Richard Barlow
{ 68 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Daily Bromides 6/23 – 7/22 2007. Ink and watercolor on paper. 4 x 6” each, 32 x 36” group. 2007
Daily Bromides 1/19 – 2/17 2009. Ink and watercolor on paper. 4 x 6” each, 32 x 36” group. 2009
Initially I decided to reverse this process, turning the photo into a painting. I had wanted to work with an arbitrary landscape image, an image of a place I had never been, as a way to explore the rhetoric of painting and the assumptions we bring to painted images. I am interested in how images produce meaning, and thought this arbitrary choice would allow me to drain out the original meanings from the image, while deferring the original. In working with the photograph, though, I became more and more fascinated by how this photograph worked as a commentary on the proliferation of images, and had this deferral embedded within it. Not only is the photo already in the style of a painting, it is an image of an image being produced – the trees themselves are doubled in their reflection. Talbot’s invention itself, the silver negative, is a method of making an image from an image. By working from the photograph again and again I was simply further deferring the original moment. After having made the oil painting “Silver Bromide,” I began an ongoing series based on “Reflected Trees,” the Daily Bromides. These watercolor postcards are made daily for thirty days, with arbitrary color choices, and each card is put into the mail the day after it is completed. Each set is sent to one recipient. Once the full series is sent, it is displayed in a grid, in chronological order. I have repeated this process over thirty times now, painting more than a thousand versions of the same image.
Richard Barlow
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Daily Bromides 6/19 – 7/18 2011. Ink and watercolor on paper. 4 x 6” each, 32 x 36” group. 2011
Richard Barlow
{ 70 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Daily Bromides 6/24 – 7/23 2012. Ink and watercolor on paper. 4 x 6” each. 32 x 36” group. 2012
Richard Barlow
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Daily Bromides 5/5 – 6/3 2014. Ink and watercolor on paper. 4 x 6” each, 32 x 36” group. 2014
Richard Barlow
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ArtHouse New London Installation. 2009
Richard Barlow
Educators / Fall 2014
In other Bromides I have used silver leaf and silver paint as a visual pun on the photographic process, but also to destabilize the image. Due to the angle of reflection of the silver, the images flip from positive to negative as a viewer moves past them (or, in the case of the outdoor mural version, as the sun crosses the sky).
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Pixelated Bromide. Plastic billboard spangles on latex background. 132 x 204”. 2012 on previous: Silver Bromide Mural. Latex and acrylic on cinderblock. 144 x 600”. 2009
Eventually I realized that, despite my fascination with the positive and negative image and interest in visual puns about the silver process, I was constantly referring to a jpeg of the Talbot photograph. Silver is no longer the basic building block of photography; the pixel is. This lead to my last work in the Bromides series, “Pixelated Bromide,” an 11’x17’ wall hanging made of 36,000 plastic billboard spangles. These “pixels” respond to the movements of air currents in the gallery, dematerializing the image in front of the viewer.
Richard Barlow
{ 76 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 Photogenic Drawing. Silver leaf on paper. 44 x 32”. 2014
Oriel window at Lacock Abbey
This summer, thanks to a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant and a Hartwick College Faculty Research Grant, I had the opportunity to visit Lacock Abbey, the site of Talbot’s invention. I wanted to visit the Talbot Museum, as well as the oriel window depicted in the first photograph. Mostly, though, I wanted to take part in a somewhat absurd pilgrimage and attempt to find the site of this landscape I had painted so many times. I had two chief fears about this: either, after 175 years, the site would be entirely impossible to find – or as part of the museum’s program there would be clear signage leading tourists to the exact site of the photograph.
Richard Barlow
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Pond at Lacock Abbey.
Richard Barlow
Educators / Fall 2014
Upon my arrival I asked Roger Watson, the director of the museum, if he knew where the photo was taken. While he wasn’t sure, he suggested I explore the pond on the grounds of the Abbey, or the banks of the River Avon flowing through. After wandering for a while, it became clear that the exact scene was no longer to be found – and, of course, the trees looked quite different in summer foliage. However, standing on the far side of the pond, facing back toward the Abbey, I looked up and saw something familiar. It was the unmistakable branching pattern I had painted over a thousand times. The other trees were gone, and the pond was too heavy with algae to produce a reflection, but I had found the site.
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Gary Minnix On the Edge
On the Edge #7. pigment inkjet print. approx. 30 x 44�
COMPOSITE { 79 } Educators / Fall 2014 On the Edge #1. pigment inkjet print. approx. 30 x 36�
Gary Minnix
{ 80 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 on previous: On the Edge #2. pigment inkjet print. approx. 30 x 35�
Gary Minnix
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“On the Edge” is the working title of a work-inprogress that I have been developing over the past few years. Most of my previous work was made in the studio, photographing objects both found and altered, dealing with a dense overload of information. But, after seeing a connection to that work in the natural landscape, I had to—just as I tell my students to do—follow that connection to wherever it might lead me. It led me to the edge of forests where light can penetrate the canopy and an explosion of growth competes for the light. It also led me to photograph these places in the fall and spring when there are little or no leaves, so the trace of that competition for light is revealed in the pattern that the branches create. Thinking about landscape as a construction, I find myself considering these dense traces of plants competing to survive a fitting contemporary landscape. They are literally on the edge of forests, but as images I strive to make them on the edge of understanding, both beautiful and disquieting, forming more than one image, one trace seeming to be both connected to the other and separate at the same time.
On the Edge #3. pigment inkjet print. approx. 44 x 29”
Gary Minnix
{ 82 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 On the Edge #4. pigment inkjet print. approx. 30 x 38�
Gary Minnix
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On the Edge #5. pigment inkjet print. approx. 37 x 30�
Gary Minnix
{ 84 } COMPOSITE Educators / Fall 2014 On the Edge #6. pigment inkjet print. approx. 30 x 38�
Gary Minnix
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On the Edge #8. pigment inkjet print. approx. 30 x 44�
Gary Minnix
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A. W. Strouse
Be The First To Like This
I’ve been poppin’ shit for too long But still reppin’ where I came from I guess it’s how I came up I wish you would try to play us. —Kanye
1. Transferring at Myrtle-Wyckoff, I run into a rival poet. He says he’s still living off of his PS1 stipend, back from when he performed there last summer. The next two days, I can’t get out of bed because I’m so jealous. A mutual friend lets me know that my rival’s got a heroin problem, and I start burning my notebooks. The bastard has, not only money, but even credibility? I knew from the beginning that I should have gone to Bard. 2. Vladimir Nabokov, when he was a professor at Cornell, wrote in a letter to a friend: “I am sick of teaching. I am sick of teaching. I am sick of teaching.” Johann Sebastian Bach, Cantor at the Thomasschule, earned the ire of the Leipzig city council when he regularly played hooky from his teaching duties. I, unlike those geniuses, show up dutifully and cheerfully at Hunter College to teach Chaucer to a roomful of yawning freshman. To all of the science students I give A’s—those are the ones who make me the most nervous. 3. Youtube tells me that Bud Lite now owns a town in the West. My best-friend’s girlfriend tells me that Brazil signed over its sovereignty to the World Cup. She’s from Mexico, and the Mexican government paid for her to get an M.A. from Columbia (the University). I think he wants to marry her, but she isn’t going to fall for it. One really is better off remaining a free-agent in this tell-all world.
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5. My blog divulges how in college I used to date the girl who became (according to HBO) “the voice of our generation.” The Jezebel critics have denounced her hit sitcom as insidiously racist, and to those sour-grape gripers I would add one further damnation: Lena used to call me a faggot a lot, and she meant it pretty spitefully. In the name of moral outrage, I am trying to reach for her coattails, but the effort is transparently selfserving—I fall flat in the mire of P.C. liberal hypocrisy. And so, too, with this confession. Is it not a self-reflexive escape-hatch, an “out” from my codependent love for the fame machine, lubricated as it is with the ooze of identity politics? All along, I really have been a faggot—in the worst sense of the word. 6. Kierkegaard mocks the poet who says, “If only I had enough money, then I’d be a great artist.” All one has to do, Kierkegaard says, is sit down and write. But Kierkegaard isn’t interested in literal poetry—the wouldbe writer is, for him, only an analogy in the service of his larger point, which has to do with a question about “Salvation” (a word that, for us, belongs to the extinct dialect of some bulldozed spiritual Amazon rainforest). 7. My neighbors use the word “nigger” an awful lot. I hear it maybe ten, twenty times a day. I thought maybe I could try putting the word into a poem and reading it at an event in Queens, but that turned out to be a BIG FUCKING MISTAKE. Sorry, guys. My bad! 8. Whoever taught me that I should want fame and an upper-middle-class lifestyle? It must have been those dodgy undergraduate instructors, the Corduroy-Blazer Poet with a Soft Skull book, and Pince-Nez Painter, who was big back in the 80’s. The only solution is to reactivate my Facebook and try to begin to network. 9. One of my colleagues in the English Department admits to me that she admires the style of one of her students (he wears a lot of brightly colored hemp), but she’s afraid to compliment him, lest she be guilty of “exoticizing the Other.” I try to cultivate a kind of esprit de corps by sharing with her my ordinate lust for gay black porn. Word gets around, and the whole Department shuns me. Even the Reggae kid looks mad, but that must be my projection.
A. W. Strouse
Educators / Fall 2014
4. Back in October I quit my Facebook and I stopped reading the newspapers. I expected to still be able to keep up with current events by chatting with friends over lunch, but hardly anybody ever mentions the news, let alone discusses it. My need for 24/7 updates is furtive and private—shared by all of my acquaintances through digital updates, but shared with nobody in person, like how everyone’s a porn addict but no one wants anymore to fuck.
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10. “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Everyone wants to make it in the art world, but everyone knows that the art world’s a scam. How can you tell the dancer from the dance? 11. Oh, for a muse of Youtube fire! Every morning I log on and do my exercises, mimicking (with dubious success) the steady pushes and pumps of the walking-erection trainer in the video. “Don’t quit now,” he yells from the screen. Another guy in another clip explains to me how to trim my pubes without their getting itchy. Then, I watch one where a high-school homo details the right way to buy jeans that fit. It gives me an idea, maybe I ought to be the Youtube poet. I’ll get some makeup to hide my Warholian leprosy and put a spotlight on my blue eyes, Lawrence of Arabia style. Then I can sing into the online waste-dump about my lost Penelope (awstrouse.com). There’s no sense letting my new sense of style go to naught. 12. The L train comes in an advertisement skin. It wears it all over like a condom. My friend Nick calls it “the Death Train.” It reminds me of this documentary I watched that showed a warehouse filled with women’s hair, shorn from them to be woven into rugs. I couldn’t quite believe the scale of it, all of those bodies without any meaning. I think it was called the Criteria Collection. I get on the train and ride it to the university. The girl in the cupcake ad sure looks sweet, maybe wants to get asked out. 13. The first thing I’m going to do, when I get rich and famous, is: I’m going to start a non-profit to help the homeless. It will employ volunteer English majors who will consult with derelicts and spell-check their cardboard signs for them. Our P.R. team will teach them a few tips about marketing and self-presentation. Bushwick, 2014
A. W. Strouse
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Amaris Ketcham is currently soliciting art submissions for a coloring book to benefit homeless children and child victims of poverty and domestic violence. Please consider submitting or sharing this request with your students and fellow artists. For more information, please visit enchantedwatermelon.com. Silvia Malagrino is an international award-winning artist and filmmaker, native of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is Professor in Photography at The School of Art and Design of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her works have been exhibited widely in the United States, Latin America and Europe. Malagrino is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship. Find her work at silviamalagrino.com. Aaron Collier is an artist living in New Orleans, where he teaches painting and drawing at Tulane University. Solo exhibitions of his work have occurred at Cole Pratt Gallery and Staple Goods. His work has been featured in New American Paintings, and is represented in collections such as NOMA, Iberia Bank, and the Boston Medical Center. Aaron has enjoyed residencies with the Ragdale Foundation, VCCA, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Find his work at www.postmedium.com/aaroncollier. Mathias Shergen has served the children of the Cabrini Green Public Housing Community for 25 years at Jenner Academy of the Arts. He received the Golden Apple Award for Teaching Excellence in 2005. Find his work at mathiasschergen.com. Torsten Zenas Burns and Darrin Martin began their collaborations as undergraduates at Alfred University. Burns received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Martin received an MFA from The University of California, San Diego. They have jointly participated in residencies at Eyebeam, Signal Culture, and The Experimental Television Center. Their collaborative works have exhibited nationally and in venues across Asia and Europe. Selected videotapes are distributed by VTape, Canada; Recontres Internationale, France; and Video Data Bank, USA. Darrin Martin is an Associate Professor of Art Studio at UC Davis California. Find their work at holyokeresearch.blogspot.com & darrinmartin.com. Omar Figueras lives in Miami Beach and has a Master’s of Fine Arts degree from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky where he was a student fiction editor at The Louisville Review. Adjunct Professor of English at Broward and Miami-Dade College, his work has been published in Penumbra Literary, he is a fiction co-editor for Blood Lotus, sits on the Advisory Board of Reading Queer, and is completing a collection of stories and poetry.
Educators / Fall 2014
CONTRIBUTOR BIOS No. 17 Educators
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CONTRIBUTOR BIOS No. 17 Educators Jeff Horwat is an artist, teacher, and writer from Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Jeff received a bachelor’s in art education at Kutztown University, a master’s in art education at Massachusetts College of Art, and is currently a doctoral candidate in art education at the University of Illinois. Jeff has taught art in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Massachusetts, while showing work throughout the northeast. His artwork uses a whimsical visual language to tell stories about desire, identity and philosophy. Mark Fox is a Professor at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco where he teaches courses in graphic design; Angie Wang is a Senior Adjunct Professor at CCA where she teaches courses in typography. The work of their studio, Design is Play, can be seen at www.designisplay.com. Richard Barlow received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Minnesota, and his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. After several years of working as an adjunct professor of art in the Minneapolis area he recently accepted a full-time, tenure-track position at Hartwick College, in Oneonta, NY. Further samples of his work may be seen at his website: rbarlow.net. Gary Minnix received a BFA from Bowling Green State University and an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Originally from Ohio, he has lived in Chicago and taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 1981 where he recently retired this past June. His work is based primarily in photography but has included sculptural installations, an interactive virtual reality piece and experimental offset lithography publications. A. W. Strouse studies medieval literature in the English doctoral program at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. He teaches literature at Hunter College. His poems, stories, and research articles have appeared in various publications, and his book Retractions and Revelations is available from Jerk Poet (jerkpoet.com). He is also co-curator of the Ferro Strouse Gallery (ferrostrouse.com).
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Submissions
Composite Arts Magazine is now accepting literature and visual arts submissions, including completed work and proposals, for inclusion in upcoming Issues. One of our favorite aspects of this publication has always been providing a venue for artists to show work that exists as a form of experimentation, does not fit into their normal repertoire, or they have been unable to show publicly for one reason or another. We’re hoping through this process we’ll be opening up to artists we are unfamiliar with or provide a space for those we know looking to branch out in their practice. Selected submissions and proposals are currently unfunded. However, along with publication of the project, we are here to support and work with all artists as much as possible and can provide the use of our blog, web hosting of project collateral, and any other resources we may have access to. Please specify in proposal what you may need from us. We are interested in cultivating relationships with artists through the process of their projects. Submissions / proposals are open to all mediums as long as they can exist within the final publication in a .pdf format. Work that has already been completed must be no more than 2 years old, and also must include a written proposal/ artist statement. We are currently looking for work for our upcomming Spring issue, Youth. While we are open to and encourage submissions from people of all diverse backgrounds and upbringings, with this call we are especially interested in work from artists and authors who self-identify as being a part of an under-represented social, economic, or cultural group. More information on this call and instructions for Youth and all other open calls can be found at compositearts.com/submit.
Educators / Fall 2014
COMPOSITE INFO
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COMPOSITE INFO No. 17 Educators Coming Fall 2014: Issue No. 18 Youth. Youth. On the surface, it isn’t special; it’s a common denominator that we all share. Yet, we still revel in frequent bouts of nostalgia. When we’re young, we want nothing but to grow up, and sometimes, after we’ve grown up, we want to return to days when life was nothing more than a small blip nestled on the horizon. What is it about youth that is so enticing? And what can we uncover about the human condition in its examination?
Composite is managed, curated, and edited by: Zach Clark should have failed 4th grade, but eventually became a 4.0 student and now is in grad school. His work can be viewed at zachclarkis.com. Kara Cochran has a long list of educators to thank. Her work can be seen at karacochran.com. India K does not have the patience to teach, yet she is extremely grateful for everyone who was patient with her. Her work can be seen at www.india-k.com. Suzanne Makol will be an officially certified art teacher next year. Her work can be viewed at suzannemakol.com. Joey Pizzolato didn’t not need no teachers and learned real good all by him self. He can be reached at joeypizzolato@gmail.com. Composite is a free publication. If you like what we’re doing and would like to help support us financially, you can donate on the website or at http://tinyurl.com/Compositedonation. Anything helps, so thank you in advance.