Mint

Shawn Smith was born in 1972 in Dallas, TX where he attended Arts Magnet High School and Brookhaven College before graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, MO with a BFA in Printmaking in 1995. Smith received his MFA in Sculpture from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2005. He has received artist-in-residencies from the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA and the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. In 1996, Smith was a recipient of the Clare Hart DeGolyer grant from the Dallas Museum of Art. In 2006, he was commissioned to create a monumental public sculpture in San Francisco, CA. Smith’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States and in France. Smith currently resides in Austin, Texas and is represented by Craighead Green Gallery in Dallas and d. berman gallery in Austin.

Everett

Double Dahl

Shrodinger’s Hat

Cassandra Smith is an artist and curator working in Milwaukee, WI. She graduated in 2006 from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design with a degree in sculpture. After graduating, Cassandra co-owned the now defunct Armoury Gallery which exhibited contemporary work by local and national emerging artists. She has since curated several shows in the Milwaukee area. Among other places, her work has been show at the John Michael Kohler Art Center, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Hotcakes Gallery, Paper Boat Gallery and the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts.

Fish

Snack Cakes

left: Antelope, right: Coyote

LP: Favorite song for 2 p.m. on a sunny day:

CS: I know it’s probably cheating, but all I could come up with was a two-way tie. If I had my choice I’d listen to these two songs back-to-back on a sunny afternoon: Glad Tidings by Van Morrison and The Obvious Child by Paul Simon.

LP: Beach or mountains?

CS: Beach. The mountains are beautiful, but nothing beats swimming.

LP: What’s your all time favorite animated movie?

CS: I basically love all the Miyazaki films I’ve seen, but my favorite is probably Howl’s Moving Castle.

LP: What sort of progressions has your art taken?

CS: The basis of my work started from my first major piece where I decorated store bought snack cakes with sequins. This lead me to explore the link between decoration and preservation which lead me to work with taxidermy. Since then I have additionally added thoughts about creating synthetic camouflage, making patterns based on traditional shrines/mandalas and exploring masculine vs feminine forms of craft to my work. I want to keep working with these ideas, but I am not necessarily bound to working with taxidermy or animals. I want to work with transforming a variety of found objects.

LP: What is your favorite part about art making?

CS: My art is very repetitive, and I enjoy the tediousness of that. The best part of working on a piece is once I’ve figured out the specific pattern I want to create and I can just get into the rhythm of gluing and painting. That’s the point when I can put on some music or a dvd I’ve seen a million time and just relax and enjoy the process of making the work.

Don’t forget to check out more of Cassandra’s work on her website!

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Lindsay Preston is an artist and graphic designer from San Diego. In “Lindsay’s Quick Queries”, Lindsay brings you work by contemporary artists, and answers to the questions everyone has been wondering about them, like “pancakes or waffles?”

Brooklyn based artist John Paul Morabito has been dedicated to the art of the loom for nearly a decade. His work has been shown at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, the Lancaster Museum of Art, the Cleveland State University Gallery, and the Suffolk Museum. In tandem with his studio practice, John Paul maintains an active role as a commercial textile designer. From 2007 to 2009 he worked as a weaver with the Suzanne Tick Inc. Design Team and is currently a designer for Richloom Fabric Groups. He received a BFA in fiber from the Maryland Institute College if Art in 2005.

Plain Weave with Stripes, John Paul Morabito

Warp Faced Plain Weave, John Paul Morabito

Plain Weave with Stripes, John Paul Morabito

LP: Do you have any guilty pleasures?
JPM: Reality Television, it’s histrionics at their worst. The ridiculous behavior is absolutely infuriating but I still just can’t get enough.

LP: What’s the staple ingredient in your kitchen?
JPM: I grew up in an Italian American family so food and cooking are something of a religious experience. Olive oil, garlic, and onions have a permanent home in my kitchen. I’ve got a gallon jug of olive oil sitting on my counter and in my opinion there is no such thing as too much garlic.

LP: What is your favorite city that you’ve visited?
JPM: Barcelona is a pretty amazing place. The city’s architecture is astoundingly beautiful and you can wander from areas built in the Gothic age into the modern works of Gaudi. I love that both are so strongly present. That and the food is pretty fantastic.

LP: From what I can tell, your work is pretty firmly rooted in the concept of creation and destruction. Why are you drawn to this concept?
JPM: Creation and destruction beget one another, this can be readily seen in the relationships of birth to life to death. I am particularly interested in how awareness of this influences our behavior – there are rituals and celebrations surrounding birth, aging, and finally death. In my work I explore how this awareness is expressed through compulsory behavior by making and then destructing what has been made. There is a need to make something and then a need to destroy it, neither can be ignored. It is important to note that the sacrificing of my hand woven textiles is not a violent act. Instead the destruction is achieved through slow repetitive actions that become meditations on each moment that is burnt away. I see the works as thanatologies, records of the act of obsessive making followed by the act of obsessive destructing.

LP: What draws you to weaving and fiber as your material choices?
JPM: I am very interested in hand labor and how meaning can be derived from extreme labor. Obsessive repetitive processes are inherent to textile making. There is a ritualistic endurance that comes out of working by repetition. The body memorizes movements and actions transforming them into tacit knowledge and allowing the mind its own journey. In my case this enables both an extreme focus on the action and a contemplation on what it means.
Additionally textiles are so heavily prevalent within human experience that they leave a myriad of traditions to draw on. I find the story of Penelope to be particularly important. She sat each day at her loom to weave cloth and each night returned to the loom in secret to unravel the days work. There is a strong correlation between Penelope’s ritual of futility and my own making and destructing woven cloth.

Don’t forget to check out John Paul’s beautiful work on his site!

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Lindsay Preston is an artist and graphic designer from San Diego. In “Lindsay’s Quick Queries”, Lindsay brings you work by contemporary artists, and answers to the questions everyone has been wondering about them, like “pancakes or waffles?”

Matt Bradley was born in Southern Missouri, grew up in Arkansas, went to grad school in New York City, and won’t get into the gory details of why he’s not in San Diego….but it’s cool. The weather’s nice, right?

White Box Drum, Matt Bradley

Record Drawing, Matt Bradley

Guitar Drawing, Matt Bradley

LP: So Matt, when it comes right down to it, Miller High Life, or Bud Heavy? Explain.

MB: This is kind of a false dichotomy, both kinda suck…but forced with a decision I’d go with the “Champagne of Beers.” Bud Heavy not only reminds me of all the douche-bag frat boys I went to undergrad with, but it’s also got a strange sweetness that’s off putting (often referred to as a green apple flavor by beer nerds).

LP: If you could rock one guitar solo in a stadium full of people, which would it be?

MB: Easy! Since I was a teenager, I’ve fantasized about playing “Orion” by Metallica in front of a high school football stadium full of people who didn’t think I was cool in Junior High. I’m over the rejection of being a squirelly teenager, but I still close my eyes and picture myself playing that song in concert any time I listen to it. It’s actually one of the first songs I ever learned on bass guitar, but I’ve never been good enough to pull it off on lead axe.

LP: Best mustache of all time:

MB: never been much of a mustache guy (probably because I can’t grow one), but I guess you can’t mess with Lemmy Kilmister (Motorhead). 

LP: How does your experience growing up affect your work?

MB: Well, my work is all about my experience growing up. That’s my total reference point. The passion and fetishiztion of music cultures and scenes, how they shaped me and gave me my strength and personality…that’s the totality of my conceptual framework.

LP: Discuss the use of non traditional and “low-fi” materials in your work.

MB: I guess that relates pretty specifically to the last question. I try to make material decisions based on conceptual aims. The desired message of a piece dictates the medium, so if I’m trying to convey the feeling of being a teenager who wants to be a rock star, I have to use materials that would be at a teenager’s disposal (which for me happened to be pre-internet, pre-garage band, pre-youtube, etc.). I actually built a fake guitar out of a piece of cardboard when I was a kid so that I could jump around my room and pretend I was Eddie Van Halen. So, when I got older, remaking that cardboard guitar with an adult level of knowledge about the specific size, shape, technical specifications, etc., seemed like a pretty good way to not only reference the energy of that time in my life, but also how it carries over into adulthood. As a kid, I was just concerned with having something to hold in my hands and run around with. As an adult, I was concerned with how many frets Steve Vai had on his seven string guitar from the cover of “Passion and Warfare,” but it still needed to be made out of cardboard to connect to the pathos of the original scenario.

Plus, I’m honestly kind of bored with slick highly polished work. Haven’t we seen enough pretty pictures on archival grounds? I have no interest in art as a marketable sell-able product. I believe art is an enterprise of ideas, not objects and pictures. If ideas happen to take the form of objects and pictures, fine…but that’s certainly not my only agenda for making stuff.

Matt just made a killer mix tape for Lindsay’s blog. You can download it here.

Also, check out some of Matt’s video projects here.

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Lindsay Preston is an artist and graphic designer from San Diego. In “Lindsay’s Quick Queries”, Lindsay brings you work by contemporary artists, and answers to the questions everyone has been wondering about them, like “pancakes or waffles?”

Julien Berthier graduated from l’école des Beaux-Arts de Paris and works with galleries in France, Germany and Italy.

“Chappelle,” Julien Berthier

“No Print,” Julien Berthier

“Self,” Julien Berthier

LP: Julien, what song do you wish would have been playing during your first kiss?

JB:”After laughter comes tears” by Wendy Rene. I sure did wish someone would have warned me.

LP: Got any good jokes?

JB: A guy meets a friend. He says, “Wow man, yesterday at a family dinner I made a terrible slip of the toungue. Instead of saying to my mother ‘would you please hand me the salt’ I said ‘you ruined my life you bitch.’”

JB: Humour is a tool. Like an entry door. But what has to be defined is the laugh we are looking for. In my work I like when people start smiling and when suddenly the smile is wrong. Because the work deals with social and political issues. The proposals are sort of ghostly solutions that in the end just enlarge the matters through another angle. In fact, more than humour, I guess we could talk about irony in one of its definition: to raise questions pretending to be ignorant.

LP: What do you feel is your most successful piece and why?

JB: The next one for sure.

Don’t forget to check out more of Julien’s work on his site!

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Lindsay Preston is an artist and graphic designer from San Diego. In “Lindsay’s Quick Queries”, Lindsay brings you work by contemporary artists, and answers to the questions everyone has been wondering about them, like “pancakes or waffles?”