Women on the Wing
July 2016

Lindsey Clark-Ryan, USA

I work primarily in installation and printmaking to investigate the precarious line between the graphic and the object, static and mobile, art and tool, control and chance. While my projects take on a variety of forms and subjects, they are all in service of an observational attitude that is equally absurd in its approach to the quotidian and the extreme. The sensibility is a sly, particular notation of the world that remains consistent whether shopping at Target or launching into outer space. Much of my work is expeditionary or semi-­‐scientific and concerned with either an archivist impulse or the experience of flinging oneself out into the world, literally or figuratively. Several of my recent projects involve a very close attention to objects and to how people interact with and organize their behavior around them.

Jaq Belcher, NYC

Jaq Belcher’s work is founded in a contemplative process of reduction and repetition. It was a practice she began in 2001 after moving to NYC. Each unique work begins with an unblemished sheet of white paper, a pencil, and countless x-acto blades. Belcher then proceeds to rupture the surface of the paper, slicing thousands of “seeds”, a form, commonly known as the vesica piscis.  The cuts are often in the tens of thousands and are counted prior to the forms being raised, then noted along with corresponding dates along the margins of each work.

Complex patterns emerge; Belcher references cross cultural meditative rituals, sacred geometry, semiotic, mystic connotation to the origins of light, the ebb and flow of nature, and dimensions of the human form and its energy fields. Consciously placing importance on the effect of each individual amendment to the surface of her paper, varying the scale and alternating the “intensity” of cut, Belcher investigates her own personal and spiritual understanding of frequency, creating a palette of white light that can play with the environments the works are seen in. A hybrid between drawing and object, the artist considers them primitive blue prints of alternate states of being. Fields of energy intended to interact with those who stand before them.

Kristen Currier, Boston

I grew up moving across the country with my air force family and I’m currently living in Boston. I received my BFA in animation at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2016. I like to combine hand drawn textures with digital composites in mostly mixed media pieces. I focus on cinematography, and try to employ a live action approach to it even when working in animation. My films have been screened in film festivals both internationally and domestically. I have always found infinite inspiration from the sky. I love animated documentary and have strong interests in cryptozoology and aviation.

I spent the last year completing my thesis film Gaining Altitude, an animated documentary about women in aviation history. The film was created after months of research and combines a wide variety of techniques. I really love exploring the forgotten women in aviation. One of my current goals is to work towards getting my own pilots license.  I have a strong sense of adventure and love to explore using my films and sketchbooks. This seems like an incredible opportunity for discovery. I feel strongly that this residency would make a huge and lasting impact on my work.

Through the employment of a rigorous research and writing practice, I pull from history, philosophy, science and literature to create immersive environments that assert their own constructed truth. In each artwork, I incorporate a variety of media (sound, lighting, video, found and constructed objects, etc…) that I invite the viewer to investigate and physically engage with. Every environment I create is a full sensory experience that fosters the sensation of stepping into the middle of a narrative.

In my work, I draw inspiration from astronomical history, Victorian spectacle, the military industrial complex and my time recently spent researching and visiting California air force bases, rocket test facilities and NASA research centers. I mythologize the unknown or classified, and attempt to promote a dialogue about environmental disintegration, scientific observation and social responsibility.

Jody Arthur

I have held a passport since infancy; travel has always been an integral part of my life and as such, it has always been an important focus of my art practice. This fascination with travel has included work that has touched upon exploration and migration, the beauty of maps, the mechanics and romance of navigation, how location and movement affects identity, and how we imagine life in outer space. As a book artist, writer, and printmaker, I explore these ideas through story and image.

Over the course of several years I created work in response to humanity’s ventures into space flight, exploring the tension between domestic spheres and the practicalities of the NASA space program. This project resulted in collages, large scale drawings, and even cardboard spaceships and playful etiquette brochures for astronauts. When I completed my MFA in book arts and printmaking, my thesis exhibition focused on a personal navigation across the pacific. I studied maps and the navigational practices of native islanders, and developed my own interpretations.

Mary Ellen Childs

I am a composer who creates both instrumental concert compositions and interdisciplinary performance works. I have long been interested in flight and, currently I am in the early stages of conceptualizing and researching material for a multi-media opera, The Urge to Fly, that looks at the nature of flight and the infinite. The intention of the work will be to explore the human desire to fly as a desire to commune with the infinite, which leads to the opening of – the soaring of – the human heart. At present I envision that the opera will explore various experiences of flight: early unsuccessful attempts to construct strange flying machines; 1930s barnstormers; space exploration; and the experience of a mystic, in the of a knitter who never moves from her rocking chair, but experiences flying nonetheless. 

I believe flight to be a rich and multi-dimensional subject and over time I'm interested in creating additional new works related to the topic. I am especially interested in the spiritual dimensions of flight, the emotions of flight (from trepidation to euphoria), the imagination of flight (early designs for strange flying machines, for instance), and flight in all of its incarnations (a bird; a kite; clouds; a child swinging; a leaf falling; bombs falling; the arc of a baseball through the air), and the mystery of the night sky.

Sandi Milford

I am an Edinburg, Texas based artist who has a desire to blend the fields of science and fine art.  My background is grounded in an understanding of biology and life sciences, followed by an exploration into the field of fine art.  My current work involves an appreciation for all things living, with an emphasis placed on the mechanisms needed to produce life and how precise they need to be for everything to function properly.  I have been using 3-D printing to represent sculptural forms from nature and place them on the body, as well as experimentation with installation pieces.

I am currently taking time to work on my portfolio and experiment with new mediums.  I pursued a B.S. of Biology followed by a B.F.A. with emphasis in CAD-CAM/Jewelry/Metals from the University of Texas – Pan American.  During my B.F.A. I was a supplemental instructor for a Genetics course and that experience greatly influenced my understanding of the body and in turn my current work.  Originally focused on illustration, creating in 3-D has opened up many possibilities for me.  Future plans are to make biological sculptural forms interactive, and experiment with installation and performance pieces.

Samwell Freeman

I make software and hardware. My artwork is interactive; aiming for interactions that activate pictorial space, transforming the viewer of a piece into a participant or even better-- a creator! My software functions as a platform for creativity, facilitating drawing, image mash-ups and programming novel processes. The hardware I make includes printed circuit boards, drawings, paintings, fountains, and kinetic sculptures. They are augmented with electronic sensors, able to react to their surroundings. Accelerometers, gyroscopes and joysticks interface between the virtual and physical worlds. These gadgets enable the pieces to become tactile. Whenever I see a sign that reads ‘Please Don’t Touch the Art’, my heart sinks. Please touch my art! I hope it will touch you too.

 Art asks questions. The quiet, contemplative space of visual art allows critical inquiry into technology, instead of the vapid and breathless glorification we see in the marketplace. Repurposing obsolete technology, and irreverently deploying current ones, can teach us about our lives as aging cyborgs. I'm looking for a starry synthesis of the shiny speedy electron and the soft wrinkly human. In a matter of decades, electric technology has extended our central nervous system across the globe and connected it with almost every living person. The impact of this on our society and on each of us individually is so profound that it is almost impossible to talk about. Through carefully programmed interactions the assumptions and demands underlying electric technology can be rendered in plain sight. As Samuel Johnson said about poetry, I want to make familiar things seem new, and simultaneously make new things feel familiar.

Decision Altitude: Incident Report uses the medium of photography in an attempt to capture an image of the physical space and compression of time between throwing yourself out of the door of an aircraft and saving your own life.  In this buffer zone between earth and sky the view of earth from above is anything but the sterile experience of cartographic representation, it is instead an incomprehensible combination of aerodynamics and adrenaline. Incident Report uses a lens-less pin-hole camera which does not refract light but instead allows the image to imprint itself directly onto a piece of film over a period of three seconds hereby capturing 500-feet of free-fall at speeds exceeding 150 miles per hour. The process of taking these images includes a pinhole camera affixed to a specially designed helmet and shutter release.  I wear this contraption on my head the entire duration of exit, freefall, canopy flight and landing.  I cannot see what the camera sees so the images are composed with a great degree of chance.  Coordinating our exits, my subject(s) and I jump from 13,500 feet in the air.  This altitude provides me with one minute of freefall in which to compose and take the photograph.  My subject and I must then match vertical fall rates, move into close proximity with one another then as I release the shutter hold as still as possible for between 500 and 1000 feet (3 – 6 seconds.)   Most of the images generated by this process provide little or no recognizable information but the ones that succeed at capturing this absurd performance become un-refracted indexical marks of a human being falling through space and time recorded in photosensitive gelatin.  The photographic negatives are then used to make photogravures. I was attracted to this printing process because of it’s historical significance and the highly physical image that is produced.   
Each image is then paired with text from the United States Parachute Association archive of “Incident Reports” which are the official reports from people who have died while skydiving.  The reports that have been selected are of personal significance to me either because of the type of malfunction or because of the person or people involved. 

Dana Boll, NYC, USA

How can we fly without leaving ground?  Commit to something beyond ourselves? That moment of acceleration on the runway, cleared for takeoff, no turning back, a complete commitment to speed, elevation…and lift-off.  What does it take to soar, to capture that feeling in the body, and transmit it mid-story?
I am passionate about storytelling through the integration of text and movement. My artistic practice attempts to use movement and dance to give voice to the unspeakable parts of a story – whether in devastation, boundless joy, or apathy. 
The work I am currently creating, My Toothbrush Killed an Albatross is an environmental dance-theatre musical about how a transatlantic flight changes a man’s life.  My research for the work includes ocean-polluting plastics, albatross legends, weather patterns, and the pursuit of flight.  The work will depict the experience of flight on several levels: in a passenger aircraft, with a dancer (and/or puppet) as an albatross bird-spirit, and an ensemble musical dreamscape where the human chorus all “take flight.”  Topics of my past dance-theatre work and research have included the experience of WWII refugees, addiction’s effect on families, square dancing, and swordfighting.

Rahni Allan, Tazmania
Arsetronaught Training Handbook

For as long as we have been looking up we have also looked within. My practice employs perhaps the most influential human narrative; the love story in order to resonate the complex and emotive forces inherent in science and discovery with the individual. I am inspired by quantum physics and the existential and scientific conundrums that can deduce macrocosmic conundrums to tangible microcosmic materials present in everyday reality.
My practice is inspired to find a moment of synthesis between the apparent extremities pertaining to self and universe, by pitting myself and my love against scientific conundrums such as gravity, space, time and a demonstrable objective resolution. Gravity has throughout human history been a powerful metaphor for freedom, to break free of gravity has been for generations, a symbolic gesture embroiled with hope, wonder and peace. My practice offers an opportunity to look up and within to experience moments like the thousands of explorers, scientists, philosophers and artists throughout history have looked to the skies for answers. I too am overcome with the awe and wonder of living in a time in human history in which complex and impossible notions traditionally belonging toscience can be explained via artful media.

Consideration, 2014

Art is an experience. It can wrap you up in another world or show you something about your own that you never knew. Since I was young, art has been equal parts captivating and freeing. Initially, art was an emotional release for me. It was spontaneous and compulsive. And in many ways it still is, but instead of rushing to the nearest canvas, now I write or sketch whatever image or idea has invaded my mind and refuses to leave. Certain things continue to fascinate me or pull at me, and demand to be expressed: With an unending interest in the way that light functions, I fill my camera with pictures of shadows and reflections. Wishing that people could see or understand certain truths, my pieces are an attempt to share things that may be difficult or unavailable to them, like just how many children get cancer, or how, even if they survive, like me, they could still face a number of medical issues. Exploring the edges of art and function, but always leaning more toward art, I have created lights, tables, chairs, and climbable sculptures. Spatial consideration, think about how a piece interacts with
the space in which it is placed, and how the viewer fits in with the piece and the space, is my most recent obsession, which played a part in creating two climbable sculptures, and an art piece installed over a staircase so that people experience it as they walk up or down. I want to change the notions held by the viewer of what their relationship is to the space and to the piece, and challenge the way that the audience sees the relationship between the space and the piece.

Cara Cole, Canada
Every Living Thing

I am interested in the impact of time on both earthbound and celestial bodies.  Time devastates flesh and rapidly consumes it. So, we humans and beasts have a finite arc of time--a brief interval between birth and death--in contrast to the relative eternity of the cosmos.
In performing dissections on dead beasts for this series, in peering intently at their viscera,  I am struck by the grace and mystery inherent in the folds of brilliantly hued flesh, and fur and bone. This internal landscape is one of fearsome poetry. It echoes the immense and distant universe, a luminous arc of fur in darkness resembles a  solar flare. Folds of flesh  glow and stream like remote star fields.
I must admit I do not observe this phenomena neutrally. I wish I could do more then simply dissect and expose the interior space, that secret rich place where memory and desire--a life--dwelled. I examine these interiors and wish I could perform my own miracles upon the flesh. I wish I could  reverse the tide of time and bring the dead back to life: to make blood rush into the body instead of out, to inflate collapsed lungs with fresh breath, to seal gaping wounds neat and invisible like they were never there at all.

Melaina Todd, BC, Canada

Melaina Todd is an artist whose practice involves drawing, painting, collage, murals, editioned prints, monotypes, performance, mail art, design, sculptural print and GIF's. Her goal is to activate a picture plane by questioning the “original” image and considering the many ways it can be reproduced. She is an educator at Kamloops Art Gallery, teaching printmaking and other mediums. Melaina is an active member of the Kamloops Printmakers Society in Kamloops BC and a BFA graduate from Thompson Rivers University in 2011.
She is interested in the purely cathartic actions of drawing and printmaking. Gaining a finer understanding of her subjects is discovered during the two-dimensional processes she uses. A common theme of her drawings and prints is the natural world and the dilemmas of modern existence. Melaina's goal is to create work that is easily disseminated into multifaceted mainstream culture and allowed to mutate/develop through the mediums of time, history, social engagement and media. She engages viewers by displaying her process (such as the carved blocks of woodcuts) and encourages learning and interrogation. She believes the viewer should be subjected to the process of an art work, and also learn how to decode their own experience in a world full of images that seemingly appear from thin air.