Kevin Van Aelst

Kevin Van Aelst’s color photographs consist of common artifacts and scenes from everyday life, which have been rearranged, assembled and constructed into various forms, patterns and illustrations. The images aim to examine the distance between the ‘big picture’ and the ‘little things’ in life—the banalities of daily lives, and the sublime notions of identity and existence. While the depictions of information – such as an EKG, fingerprint, map or anatomical model – are unconventional, the truth and accuracy to the illustrations are just as valid as more traditional depictions. This work is about creating order where we expect to find randomness, and also hints that the minutiae all around us is capable of communicating much larger ideas.

• Artist's website
  

Wade Aaron

Artist Statement:
There is knowledge. There is belief. And while knowledge might connote something a bit more justified by evidence and reason, they are essentially one and the same: models for anticipation of outcome regarding present and future realities in the world outside of the mind. In their brevity, knowledge and belief are necessarily incomplete. They are always simplified distillations of accumulated experience, personal or societal, which should be by its own continuous nature unbounded and infinite.
 
In spite of their deficiencies, knowledge and belief are still functional. Continuously improving, they work toward reconciliation of one's experiences with expectations thereof. A steady stream of corrective forces (often seemingly disruptive) contribute to the perceived instability in these models -- sometimes necessitating small changes in understanding -- sometimes demanding complete restructuring of everything one holds as real and true about a particular facet of existence.
 
The world slowly maps itself into the mind. In turn, the mind projects itself out onto the world. In the case of the artist, the projections may take the form of action or object, text or image. Sometimes esoteric and at worst unintelligible, they are nonetheless compulsory and somehow communicative as much as they are perplexing in their necessity for being.

Wade Aaron is one of six selectees from our open call for emerging artists, Step Up.

Step Up 2009 was made possible through the support of our members, the Alexander A. Goldfarb Memorial Trust, Howard and Sandy Fromson, Greater Hartford Arts’ Council United Arts Campaign, Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, Travelers Foundation, Robinson and Nancy Grover, Gary E. West, National Endowment for the Arts, Lincoln Financial Group, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Nimoy Foundation, and the Ensworth Charitable Foundation.

• Artist Website
  

Robin Mandel
Present

Robin Mandel’s work examines how objects can embody our domestic yearnings, and how these desires address themselves to the viewer. He is interested in how an object can literally perform for a viewer, and what the duration of this experience can mean. In his work, household objects take on roles in an archetypal domestic drama, and their relationships play out through the kinetic mechanisms that drive structure that generates them.

Robin Mandel is one of six selectees from our open call for emerging artists, Step Up.

Step Up 2009 was made possible through the support of our members, the Alexander A. Goldfarb Memorial Trust, Howard and Sandy Fromson, Greater Hartford Arts’ Council United Arts Campaign, Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, Travelers Foundation, Robinson and Nancy Grover, Gary E. West, National Endowment for the Arts, Lincoln Financial Group, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Nimoy Foundation, and the Ensworth Charitable Foundation.

• Artist's website
  

LoVid
Rural Electrification

LoVid explores signals to translate and preserve information and memory. Their work is a mix of high/low tech, craft and real-time interventions. The pair use exposed electronics, conductive wires and live audiovisual feed to create a narrative of a retro-futuristic coexistence between biological and technological systems. The word ‘Wirefull’ describes their aesthetic and philosophy. Wirefull suggests a parallel universe where technology developed by a different evolutionary route and artificial systems are organic, large, chaotic, social and emotional. These ideas are developed throughout their cross-genre work. The installations materialize media into enveloping spaces. Participatory performances and installations highlight audiences involvement as a community and tactile, physical interactions with instruments. This enables audiences to experience otherwise imperceptible connections.

LoVid is one of six selectees from our open call for emerging artists, Step Up.

Step Up 2009 was made possible through the support of our members, the Alexander A. Goldfarb Memorial Trust, Howard and Sandy Fromson, Greater Hartford Arts’ Council United Arts Campaign, Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, Travelers Foundation, Robinson and Nancy Grover, Gary E. West, National Endowment for the Arts, Lincoln Financial Group, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Nimoy Foundation, and the Ensworth Charitable Foundation.

• Artists' Website
  

Elaine Gan

Artist Statement:

As neoliberalism activates “ever new” networks and mobilities that re-engineer parameters of human production and domestication, it is also inciting fundamentalist politics, violent antagonisms, and massive dispossessions. Elaine Gan’s practice is a search for a method of mapping otherwise, or a method of mapping entanglements, assemblages, and dynamic sites of encounter where neoliberalism is not the dominant circuit, but simply one among many effective charges. Other worlds are possible. They are, in fact, constituted historically—and already here. Gan uses installations, interventions, and digital media as speculative tools for making alternate worlds sensible, as experiments in mapping otherwise. What tools might an artist today propose? Not just more maps or better-looking maps. But different maps, perhaps even partial maps — mapping that instantiates difference.

About the Artist:

Elaine Gan produces site-driven installations, performative interventions, and multimedia narratives as different means of mapping territory, collectivity, and subjectivity. Her practice has earned grants and fellowships from organizations that include Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, NY Department of Cultural Affairs, and Puffin Foundation. Her
projects have been exhibited at art venues that include Soap Factory in Minneapolis, Toronto Free in Ontario (Canada), Third Guangzhou Triennial (China), and in New York at Artists Space, Exit Art, Bronx Museum, P. S. 122, Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Armory Show. Gan currently serves on the Artists’ Advisory Committee of the New York Foundation for the Arts - Interdisciplinary Arts. She participated in the Whitney Museum - Independent Study Program in 2006-7 and holds a B.A. in Architecture from Wellesley College. She is from New York and Manila.

Elaine Gan is one of six selectees from our open call for emerging artists, Step Up.

Step Up 2009 was made possible through the support of our members, the Alexander A. Goldfarb Memorial Trust, Howard and Sandy Fromson, Greater Hartford Arts’ Council United Arts Campaign, Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, Travelers Foundation, Robinson and Nancy Grover, Gary E. West, National Endowment for the Arts, Lincoln Financial Group, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Nimoy Foundation, and the Ensworth Charitable Foundation.

• Artist's Website
  

Olu Oguibe

Olu Oguibe will present new work that will stem from research he has been conducting about New England stone walls, which are found throughout forests and country sides in the northeast. Oguibe is exploring the metaphorical and physical significance of the walls as structures that divide, segment, and delineate, noting that people encountering a wall (whether real or symbolic) can choose either obsess with the barrier or circumvent it.

This project will also bring the natural environment into a gallery setting, highlighting the aesthetic qualities of everyday objects and developing new perspectives on elements of the local environment. This facet of stone walls also relates to Oguibe’s new-found rootedness in his adopted home state of Connecticut to his Nigerian heritage and Igbo thought and design, which place importance on clear definitions and demarcations.

About the Artist

Olu Oguibe is currently an Artist and a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Connecticut. Beyond his extensive contribution to the literary art field, Dr. Oguibe's work has been exhibited in museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Migros Museum in Zurich, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and most recently the 2007 Venice Biennial. He has also served as curator and co-curator for numerous exhibitions including the Tate Modern in London, Biennale of Ceramics in Contemporary Art in Genoa and Albisola, Italy, the Authentic/Ex-centric: Africa in and out of Africa for the 49th Venice Biennale and City Museum in Mexico City.

This exhibition was made possible with the support of our members, and:

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
The Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation
Artist’s Resource Trust
The Nimoy Foundation

• Official Site
  

Saya Woolfalk

Artist Statement:

Drawing material from various realms of the visual—pop-culture, ritual, street-spectacle—I use art as a laboratory to catalogue and critique our socio-visual landscape. Combining performance, sculpture, painting, and video, my installations investigate and playfully re-imagine the representational systems that hierarchically shape our lives. My art is an experimental ground where I create alternative bodies, environments, and consciousnesses.
 
A black, white, and Japanese woman, my work is inspired by ethnographic, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory. I spent two years going back and forth between Brazil and the United States and traveled to Japan in the fall of 2008. All three countries have had an enormous influence on my practice.
 
My sketches are a notational system; from them, I make paintings that recombine texts, images, and objects. From the two-dimensional I move to the three-dimensional and create landscapes. Through performance and video I activate those landscapes and produce narrative.

[watch a video of some of Saya Woolfalk's work]

About the Artist:

Japan native Saya Woolfalk received an MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 and a BA in art and economics from Brown University in 2001. Woolfalk seeks to create narratives with her work using the desires and ideas of people that relate to a contemporary audience. Her work has been shown in galleries in Chicago, Buffalo, New York City, and New Jersey. She currently lives in New York and Nashville.

This exhibition was made possible with the support of our members, and:

• Inteview with Saya Woolfalk: Art21
• artist's website
  

Step Up '10

A series of up to six solo exhibitions, open to emerging artists living in New York, New Jersey, and New England.

We are pleased to announce the selectees and alternates for Step Up '10:

Selectees:

• Karen Miranda Rivadeneira, Sunnyside, NY
• Asuka Goto, Brooklyn, NY
• Jarrett Min Davis, Chelsea, MA
• Nicole Ratos Enerson, Winchester, MA   
• Michael Donovan, Chesire, CT   
• Amy Theiss Giese, Cambridge, MA    

Alternates:

• Laurie Frick, Long Island City, NY     
• Cullen B Washington Jr., Boston, MA
• Gregory Russell, Manchester, CT   
• Garrett Gabbey, Manchester, CT   
• Gail Biederman, Croton-on-Hudson, NY  
• Isaac Wingfield, Providence, RI      
   
  

Congratulations!

STEP UP is a series of six solo exhibitions,open to emerging artists living in New York, New Jersey or New England.
As Real Art Ways grows, our commitment to supporting young and emerging artists remains a touchstone of the organization. With the addition of an exhibition space called the Real Room, there are now more opportunities for artists to exhibit their work at one of America’s leading alternative spaces.

The STEP UP exhibition series seeks to provide emerging artists in our region an exhibition and publication opportunity at a critical moment in their careers. While artists are permitted to propose the exhibition of existing work, the jury will place special emphasis on proposals that call for the creation of new work.

The jury will select work based on: the quality of the artist’s work, the innovation evidenced by the submitted work and proposal, the potential impact of the exhibition on the artist’s career and the economic and physical feasibility of the proposed exhibition.

THIS YEAR'S JURORS:
Nato Thompson Chief Curator, Creative Times, NY
Barkley Hendricks Artist & Professor of Art, Connecticut College, CT
Nick Capasso Curator, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, MA

Artists selected will receive an exhibition, an exhibition publication, and will be given an opportunity to participate in an artist talk in conjunction with the exhibit schedule. Information on all projects by selected artists including their final exhibition publication will also be available on our web site, which is viewed by 165,000 unique visitors per month.
Selections from the submitted slides, videos, and electronic media that are not chosen by the jury for exhibition will be considered for inclusion in a presentation called Slide Slam.

STEP UP '10 is made possible with the generous support of our Members, the National Endowment for the Arts, Sandy and Howard Fromson, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

• Open call archives