Weds and Thurs, April 20-21: Thinking With Our Hands

Opening April 20th from 6:30-9:30PM

Closing April 21st from 6-8:30PM

Artists include:

Daniel Allegrucci, Fiorella Gonzales-Vigil, Hovey Brock, Jacob Williams, Simone Couto, Quinn Dukes, Katherine Verdickt, Alexandra Hammond, Chang Shen Tan, Brandi Marti, Christybomb, Seirin Nagano, Donna Cleary

Thinking With Our Hands

 The decoupling of craft and art has been in process since the Industrial Revolution, yet skill and craftsmanship remain common terms connoting cultural and economic value. Whole movements of “craft” foods and “makers” are alive and well in fields ranging from luxury goods to scrap-booking to regenerative agriculture and product design, but specific skill in manipulating materials is no longer a prerequisite for making art. This feature of art since the mid 20th Century is often bemoaned in accusations of its unrecognizability as art: previously understood as the production of a trained master. (e.g.“My four year old could have made that.”)

 In the so-called Information Age (now the Digital Age) the primary skills of more and more workers have to do with the manipulation of ideas and knowledge or the creation of particular interpersonal interactions or experiences. The steelworker, loom operator or carpenter of the past is likely to be the call center representative, user experience designer or home care attendant of today.

 Likewise, since the beginning of the 20th Century, the work of artists has increasingly shifted from the creation of hand-wrought, mimetic likenesses to the engagement of knowledge and ideas. This shift does not preclude traditional hand-skills and mastery of materials, but it changes their relationship with art objects and production. In “Thinking With our Hands” we draw on an expanded notion of craft: how conceptualization can be craft, and how doing and learning are forever linked.

 Artists in “Thinking With our Hands” make in the service of ideas and use ideas in the service of making. Additionally as Glenn Adamson notes, “You can think very effectively in a manner that is non-linguistic. Conventionally we say “You think with your hands." That’s not what’s going on… you discover things with your hands and then your whole brain gets involved in that process of discovery. So your hands are a way of gathering information and then testing it…

 Sirin Nagano’s three mirrors create visual effects that embody a psychological transformation realized through the repetitive task of etching as it transforms mind and materials. Similarly, Hovey Brock regards his paintings as records of his own consciousness playing out as the recursive process of building a surface creates the work. In contrast, Katherine Verdickt’s still-lives render disposable objects of contemporary life in the vernacular of the Dutch Masters.

Jacob William’s ceramic sculptures are simultaneously painterly and architectonic while Fiorella Gonzales-Vigil’s digitally embroidered bruises become both room-dividers and “the dirty laundry of domestic violence hung out to dry.” Donna Cleary’s multimedia installation engages concepts of labor, gender and desire, questioning perceived boundaries between instinct and cultural construct and reclaiming the power of the domestic space. Dan Allegrucci’s biomorphic, optical wall-sculptures perform the inextricable connection between the body and the eye while Brandi Martin’s wood blocks consider craft as cognition.

 Chang Shen Tan’s sculptures transform found objects to elicit an appreciation of the aesthetics of the utilitarian objects while Christy Bremer’s glittered and beaded cigarettes draw a relationship among meticulous labor, pleasure, and addiction. Alex Hammond’s multimedia installation speaks to the complicated correspondence between labor, commodities and spirituality in American culture while Quinn Duke’s performances engage craft through the ritual of duration and repetition. Finally, the titling for our show was created by Artist George Pfau and Poet Tom Comitta, creators of Blabberlab, an App they designed to bring hand illustration and the body into letterforms and word-play into the realm of social media.