8 artists with 8 hours to create 8 works
8 to CREATE is a live-drawing event in which 8 artists have 8 hours to create 8 drawings. The event is free and open to the public.
Our second-annual live-drawing event will be on Saturday, March 12, 2016 from 10am-6pm at the [co][lab], located at 206 West Main Street in downtown Urbana.
The following artists will be participating on March 12, 2016: Angelo Martinez, Dean Kugler, Deanne Wortman, Jason Patterson, Kathryn Scarim, Shelby Shadwell, and Wesley Berg.
Chicago-based artist Matthew Woodward will be the featured artist in our inaugural 8-hour live-drawing event on March 14, 2015.
Woodward will also be giving a lecture on his work on March 13, 2015 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Matthew Woodward was born in Rochester New York in 1981. He was educated at the School of the Art institute of Chicago (BFA ’05) and the New York Academy of Art (MFA ’07). He is an instructor of Art at Dominican University and has given numerous lectures at schools and colleges throughout the United States.
Currently, Woodward lives and works in Chicago. He is represented at Linda Warren Projects. An exhibition of his work is currently scheduled for The Hyde Park Art Center in 2017.
Artist Statement:
My work searches the rote design logic of mechanically reproduced architectural ornamentation. An ornamentation which, originally meant as a cultural communicator, had been multiplied and repeated to a point that exhausted them of meaning as iconographic objects. My work attempts to excavate from an oft repeated utilitarian agency a formal material life that has been buried away in anonymity. In this way, then, the ornament is able to return from the dead, artificial and negating permanence of serial reproduction, and assume its original purpose as monolith, as cultural monument, a status it no longer covets. And inso doing, the works reintroduce to the built environment a performance of the very material life -the activity of ideas- that human recourse once sought to signify.
Langston Allston, local artist and alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s painting program, is participating in our 8-hour live-drawing event. Allston’s work can be seen around Champaign-Urbana, such as the large bike mural in downtown Urbana in the alleyway behind the [co][lab], between Courier Cafe and Siam Terrace. He’s spent the past year working on murals and public art in Rantoul, East S. Louis, and Decatur.
Interview: Interview with Langston courtesy of ART/BTS (Behind the Scenes), produced by Illinois Public Media.
Website: www.langstonallston.com
Recent Work:
Born in 1987 in South Korea, Heelim Hwang is a young emerging Korean artist. Hwang earned her BFA degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012 and she is currently enrolled in the Master of Fine Art program at the same school. Some parts of Hwang’s works are extremely decorative, integrating patterns into space with saturated colors. Hwang attempts to create visual atmospheres that allow for complex and contradictory influences. She pulls from various sources of inspiration, including Indian miniature paintings, biological structures, children’s toys from thrift stores, and over-saturated neon lights of Seoul.
Artist Statement:
I locate my work through a triangulation of painting, collage, and cut-out. A variety of images and symbols in my paintings are drawn from the structures in the world, visual influences of my childhood (born in South Korea) and the shared culture. My paintings borrow, in various degrees, from kitsch, the iconic compositions and figure ground play. I attempt to create works that suggest a capacious view of painting incorporating styles and references from high and low, East and West through interweaving virtual and physical working method. My recent paintings (untitled1,2) are rigorously maintained and largely privileged over digital output. I am interested in looking at the interaction between the digital and the manual modes in treatment of image. I think a lot about a mess of images floating around on the internet and I am interested in pulling a type of physical response from something immaterial. My process gets initiated by making a preparatory work through cutting and pasting the archived printed matters on a piece of paper, to be scanned and Photoshopped until the distinction between the layers blur. After the digital editing, the result is blown up and printed on a primed canvas fabric. In yet, another stage of constructing a painting, the printed out image gets slightly retouched with hand. In my practice, the act of painting is similar to that of photo editing on a software program. My works suggest a way of perceiving the world in which we are living in a particular set of circumstances that seem really tied up with digital technology and the way it influences our modes of seeing.
Website: www.heelimhwang.com
Recent Work:
