Steffani Jemison
Such is Your Luck

Artist Statement:
"Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bear it." —Nat Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner

"An insistence on legibility produces its own shadow, the illegible. Between the bare-faced lie and the naked truth lies the zone of illegibility…." —Raqs Media Collective

It has been suggested that faith and luck are fundamentally incommensurate: for a believer, it is not luck, but rather grace, that guides. But what about politics and luck? How do we orient ourselves in a political context that lacks a viable, enduring concept of progress? A context in which change is accidental and arbitrary and meaning seems incidental, redundant, or even absent? My recent work explores the tension between improvisation, repetition, and fugitivity. It is concerned with the ways that we make sense of the matter of our lives—the values (this matters) and the raw materials; the episodes, the contingencies, and the accidents.

Most of the works in this exhibition employ acetate as medium, glazing, or support for inkjet photographic prints. Several pieces are part of a larger body of work with a specific source of inspiration: A few years ago, a newspaper reported that Chicago public school student Derrion Albert had copied a poem called "Affirmations for Living" and posted it where he could view it while doing homework. The text is written in the present conditional tense: each phrase begins, "If I could…", and the final line triumphantly concludes, "If I could…and I can…so I WILL!" Albert was killed while walking home from school in September 2009.

About the Artist:
Steffani Jemison received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, her collaborative exhibition, “Steffani Jemison and Jamal Cyrus: Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet,” was presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Other recent and forthcoming exhibitions include the Studio Museum in Harlem (2012) and the Bronx Museum of Art (2013). Steffani has participated in artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Project Row Houses, and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; she is currently a Van Lier Fellow at the International Studio and Curatorial Program.

Steffani is the editor of Future Plan and Program, a publishing project featuring literary works by visual artists. With Future Plan and Program, she has published four books, edited two collaborative publications, and presented readings at ThreeWalls, Southern Exposure, Project Row Houses, the African American Library at the Gregory School, and the Houston Museum of African American Culture.

Steffani is the 2011-2012 Ann Plato Fellow at Trinity College, where she teaches in the Studio Art Program.

Phil Lique and Laura Marsh
Half Off

Laura Marsh and Phil Lique are not collaborative artists, but they share a similar focus: to critique misguided American inclinations. Their exhibition Half Off examines moments and products of consumer American culture through sculpture, works on paper, video and documented performance. Their work treads the line between patriotic nostalgia and dissonance. The artists overtly employ icons such as sneakers, twenty-dollar bills, the American flag and decorative patterns to reference consumer illusions and product promises. A blind celebration of the American way informs their work as notions of discounts and deals are positioned in relation to ideals and identity.

About the Artists:
Phil Lique is a New Haven, CT based mixed media artist and professor. His work reflects on consumer interests, politics, the Internet and restaurant culture. Lique received his M.F.A. from Western Connecticut State University (Danbury Ct) and his B.F.A. in Graphic Design from Paier College of Art (Hamden CT)

Laura Marsh is a New Haven, CT based mixed media artist and professor. Her works explore the constraints of female beauty, mass media, and political identities. Marsh works in a variety of mediums including drawing, painting, sculpture, and video. Marsh received her M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art in 2009, her B.F.A. from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2006, and is currently a Professor-in-Residence at the University of New Haven.

Johannes DeYoung
Ego Loser

Artist Statement:
My videos are essentially portraits, exploring shifting identities, cultural affects, and psychological unraveling. Humor is an entry point in the work: absurd narratives expand to confront failure and mortality. The characters in my videos are broad extensions of myself, occupying dream spaces that reflect, distort and magnify reality.

About the Artist:
Johannes DeYoung received his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. Working primarily in video, his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in New York, NY; Atlanta, GA; Detroit, MI; and Melbourne, VIC Australia. His work has been featured in publications including, The New York Times, The New York Post, Artnet Magazine, NYArts Magazine, and Artworld Digest. Mr. DeYoung has been a participant at Flux Factory in LIC Queens, NY and a recipient of the Ora Lerman Trust Artists Residency. He is currently a Lecturer at the Yale School of Art.

Steve Lambert
Capitalism works for me! True/False

In May 2012 Real Art Ways will present Steve Lambert's Capitalism works for me! True/False Project. It is an interactive portable public art piece, which lets people have a say on a topic that is central to our lives: Capitalism. Does capitalism work for you? Let's find out. Lets vote! Why? Well, it's an election year, the United States is a democracy, and our opinions matter! In light of the economic times, let's find out what people think about capitalism!

We will be placing this portable sign in several locations in the Hartford region. We hope to engage as many people as possible.

Manchester Community College
(entrance to Arts, Science & Technology Center)
9 AM - 9 PM, Wednesday & Thursday, May 2 & May 3, 2012

Blue Back Square
10 AM - 9 PM, Friday May 11, 2012

Creative Cocktail Hour at Real Art Ways
6 - 10 PM, Thursday, May 17, 2012

Artist Statement

For me, art is a bridge that connects uncommon, idealistic, or even radical ideas with everyday life. I carefully craft various conditions where I can discuss these ideas with people and have a mutually meaningful exchange. Often this means working collaboratively with the audience, bringing them into the process or even having them physically complete the work.

I want my art to be relevant to those outside the gallery – say, at the nearest bus stop – to reach them in ways that are engaging and fun. I intend what I do to be funny, but at the core of each piece there is also a solemn critique. It’s important to be able to laugh while actively questioning the various power structures at work in our daily lives.

I have the unabashedly optimistic belief that art changes the way people look at the world. That belief fuels a pragmatic approach to bring about those changes.

About Steve Lambert
Lambert made international news after the 2008 US election with The New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica of the “paper of record” announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He has collaborated with groups from The Yes Men to the Graffiti Research Lab and Greenpeace. He is also the founder of the Center for Artistic Activism, the Anti-Advertising Agency, Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art) and SelfControl (which blocks grownups from distracting websites so they can get work done).

Steve’s projects and art works have won awards from Prix Ars Award of Distinction Presentation, Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, and others. His work has been shown at galleries, art spaces, and museums nationally and internationally, appeared in over fourteen books, four documentary films, and in the collections of The Sheldon Museum, the Progressive Insurance Company, and The United States Library of Congress. Lambert has discussed his work live on NPR, the BBC, and CNN, and been reported on internationally in outlets including Associated Press, the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, Good, Dwell, ARTnews, Punk Planet, and Newsweek.

He was a Senior Fellow at New York’s Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology from 2006-2010, developed and leads workshops for Creative Capital Foundation, and is faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Steve is a perpetual autodidact with (if it matters) advanced degrees from an reputable art school and respected state university. He dropped out of high school in 1993.

Visit Steve Lambert's website for more information about Capitalism works for me!

Dennis Maher
House of the Unmaker

Artist Statement

The hybrid art/architectural practice of Dennis Maher explores critical approaches to demolition, renovation, and restoration. Since 2003, Maher's work has involved the harvesting of discarded building materials from sites of demolition, and the construction of aggregate environments of urban unmaking. Recasting erasure as efflorescence, waste as vital resource, and dismantlement as catalyst for reassembly, his ongoing Undone-Redone City project conjures a new urban core from assembled city fragments, illuminating a world on the brink of indefinite becoming. In 2009, Maher acquired two adjacent vacant properties slated for demolition in Buffalo, NY.

He has since begun to transform these structures through the continuous collection and reorganization of salvaged building materials, domestic objects, and furnishings. The houses are regarded as frames for formulating an alternative domestic infrastructure, a fluid site within which the patterns of daily living meet the instability of matter. House of the Unmaker, presents a constructed narrative about the anatomies of these houses. Re-imagining the house as a social, material, and psychological construct, its casts aside the exterior shells of "home" to reveal an inverse living-scape where walls are not static barriers or dividers, but animate and organic communicators of matter, places, and time.

About Dennis Maher
Exhibitions by Dennis Maher have been presented at such venues as Black and White Gallery and Project Space in Brooklyn, NY, Pulse Miami Art Fair, the Pittsburgh Biennial, Galeria Antoni Pinyol in Reus, Spain, Superfront in Los Angeles, CA, The Carnegie Center in Covington, KY, and Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY.

Maher has been selected as the 2012 Artist In Residence at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. He is also a recipient of the Real Art Ways STEP UP Award (2011), the Black and White Project Space Prize (2010), a NYSCA Independent Projects Grant (2010), and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2008).

His work has been featured in Architect Magazine, on the national radio program Smart City Radio, and on PBS television's Going Green series. Published writings by Maher include Towards Un-building, in 306090 Sustain and Develop, and The Nightworks in Unplanned, Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale, and Afterlives of St. Gerard's, forthcoming in Architecture Post-Mortem. Maher is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at SUNY, University at Buffalo, where he has taught since 2004.