My art is a pure and organic expression of my thoughts and feelings. The textures, colors, and themes I explore are born from my interactions with the world, both physical and spiritual. Each piece has its own life─a kind of pulse─that echoes the energy and flow of the time it was created. Before I paint, I often spend time in meditation or absorb myself in music, which gives the resulting works an ethereal and other-worldly feel.

Being self-taught, I enjoy exploring the artistic process and the various materials that can be used to create art. I’m most often inspired by items found in nature and the simplicity of the thickness of oils on canvas. I believe that everyone has an innate creativity─a connection to a universal oneness─each person just needs to find how they were meant to express it.

www.scottpolach.com

The cultural, political and physical landscapes where I’ve lived are the focus of my work in painting, printmaking and installation. Having explored decaying corners of Baltimore, Brooklyn and Barcelona through a socio-environmental lens, I am currently working on a body of screen prints based on images of fruit displays and patterns from regions of Cambodia, Guatemala and Mexico in relation to American agriculture and food production. My interest begins in history, including archival and digital research, as well as physical investigation and documentation on site, and ends in the formal application and removal of paint, exploring the edge of real landscape and still life with visceral abstraction.

My last project, Landsmen, focused on an abandoned pocket of America’s most populated city: the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Simultaneously situated within the landscape of New York City while operating outside of city life, it was once an active United States naval base that has now fallen from its original grandeur to be ruins, at once imposing and picturesque that will soon undergo a major transformation as plans to open a “destination supermarket.” Admiral’s Row once stood as symbols of position and power, are now falling in on themselves and I interpreted their forms through a series of large oil paintings. Previous to this, I explored Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to better understand a underground oil spill there, under Newtown Creek. In these projects, I was attracted to a degraded architectural reality, which spoke to me, having grown up the daughter of an engineer in the industrial harbor of Baltimore. Like the uncanny poetry of Red Desert, the quiet strangeness of these places appealed to me, as well as more recent filmmakers, who would on occasion buy industrial plants in the area, only to blow them up for action movie scenes. When I moved to California, my approach to my work shifted.

In my current project, I began screen printing in relation to the seductive propaganda of fruit crate labels, and I am now exploring imagery of intricate carved fruit displays. These indulgent, kitschy displays from cruise advertising or banquet table events, bring to mind other images of food excess and waste for me. In 2012, news images showed fruit rotting in fields from labor shortages due to immigration laws and low wages in American agriculture. Moving to Southern California my interest in trade policy and the ramifications of NAFTA has deepened, and this work explores these ideas at a time of a salient national discussion of immigration policy. My theme draws from writer David Bacon’s idea of “transnational working communities,” expanding on policies and human movement through so-called free trade. My current project includes variations on Hmong batik and embroidery patterns from Laos, several Maya textiles from Guatemala, and Zapotec and Triqui patterns from Mexico among others.

I am indebted to several residencies where I developed these ideas and images. I was the recipient of a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2011, a  residency at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley in 2012, as well as a 2012 residency with Signal Fire Arts in Oregon.

Fruit Display I
2012
Screenprint on paper
26″x36″

I like to make things and try to make art out of things that people may not think of as art.  What motivates me is the excitement of doing something new. Because I have never done a particular idea before, or seen it before, there is a lot of experimentation in what I am trying to do and that is very exciting to me. My excitement is what informs me.  If I feel excited about what I am doing, then there might be something there.  I have an idea in my mind of how I want something to come out, but until I do it, there is an element of uncertainty. There is an excitement and an anticipation of how the piece will come together and that motivates me to work. After that initial idea I try and clear my mind before I actually start working.  I guess I start my work like an action painter would.  There is an element of chance in all this but I am controlling it. It is as if I am just getting acquainted with the work.  My work is a series of steps that get more and more focused.  They start off broad but then I use different techniques that focus them. I don’t like people to know how I do things.  I feel that is part of the mystery of the work.

Current themes I explore include 2^nd Amendment Rights, human rights, self awareness and ethics. Other current themes are landscape paintings and abstract art pieces which are simple in nature to help people recognize the beauty in the simplicity of life.

The current series of my work incorporates animation, traditional, and digital media. My primary focus is relating to The PaperAmmo Company and at times revisiting other outlets with my past series of work on “Organized Chaos: Destroying Order”. As always, we should learn from the past to live for the present and influence the future. My current work parallels this same concept; “What I create in my current state incorporates some elements from my past work. As for my future work it will be exciting to see what happens.”

paperammo

The mainstay of So Say We All productions are literary arts showcases, theatrical events involving several writers performing original work with the aid of multimedia. These showcases are often rooted in a theme or concept which the various perspectives offered by the participating writers examine. So Say We All produces the VAMP (Visual Art, Music, Performance) Showcase on a monthly basis, but special showcases are produced as a service through contract or collaboration with partner organizations, including San Diego Public Libraries, UCSD, Grossmont College, Father Joe’s Village, Veteran Writers Group, Space 4 Art, and various other local arts groups and nonprofits.

All literary arts showcases are open to participation by the public through a vetted submission process. Chosen participants receive extensive literary critique through group workshops, performance coaching, and one-on-one mentorship with senior writers. Participation in these workshops yields therapeutic benefits from socializing with others who share similar experiences, of being welcomed back into the community after disclosing difficult truths, and through public self-representation.

Long Story Short (LSS) is a storytelling show in which anyone of any skill level can arrive and tell a 5-minute story, without notes, on a different theme each month. LSS serves as a vehicle for the organization to welcome newcomers who are curious about participating with SSWA, but not ready for the more advanced commitments of VAMP. Many of SSWA’s most dedicated writers, performers, and volunteers were introduced through Long Story Short.

So Say We All makes creative writing courses available to the general public through its Greenroom Writers Workshop series, produced at various independent venues and the San Diego Public Library system. These hour-long workshops welcome writers of any skill level to participate in topical discussions on technique or subject matter, engage in a generative freewrite, and the option to share their work at the end.

The three main at-risk populations So Say We All currently directs its arts education programming towards are: 1) homeless teenagers, 2) veterans, and 3) survivors of abuse.

So Say We All Press

2012 marked the entry of SSWA into the publishing world through the creation of a multimedia anthology (The Far East, funded under a grant from The San Diego Foundation)  and an experimental collaborative novel, Last Night on Earth. Both works featured local writers alongside nationally recognized contributors. To date, SSWA is the only independent publisher of artistic literature operating in San Diego County.

www.sosayweallonline.com

Check out this PREVIEW of the upcoming performance for the Fringe Festival this summer.

www.uradnza.com

“the invocation of st. nicholas”, 2011, video still

Unfortunately, the reality of paint, seen only as a plane of material reflecting its range of perceivable light, is most often (perhaps always) obfuscated by the ‘scrim of language’ – memories, connotations, denotations, history. I’ve been trying and failing to paint ‘le vide’ (emptiness, meaninglessness, non-referential, ‘the void’). It’s fun, but I’m sure I’m not doing what I think I’m doing.

is one thing I do. It is always something else, someone else, decided somewhere else.

This is not a conspiracy. I am as complicit as the someone else. I look and choose just as

anyone somewhere other than here. One something else is as else something.

The current body of work represents a questioning of this Else-ness by its variation

of media, concern with movement and it’s concentration on inter-subjectivity or

points of exchange. It looks into the way we interact with information, specifically,

the flow of pre-mediated visual information that envelops us daily as defining terms.

To show the visual nature of this structuring flow, I use random imagery culled from

a variety of media sources. These images, incomplete replications in varying scale,

are stacked, repeated, stretched, melded, transferred onto a variety of forms that

act as a vessel for projected information – in it’s ever changing forms, mediations and

politicized agendas – to flow through, filling momentarily, dissipating, and then, quickly

repeating the cycle. This constant cycling forces the body to activate in a movement

towards a muted, fragmented and formless multiplication.

Since they are more spatial and thus more concerned with a literal and felt

interchange, I have been working of late in Sculpture, Installation, and Video

Projection. For these works, it is not important that any of the images are

understood individually, but rather together as an untouchable movement. Imagery,

or the information that it imparts, should be viewed then, not as a holder of

individual meaning, but instead as a precursor or enforcer of Else-ness.

Even as I experiment with the spatiality of movement, I still retain a love and

practice of drawing as a means of direct exploration. Contemporaneously to my

more 3-D work, there is a constant consideration of mark-making in my drawings.

I explore drawing as both the mark I make and the mark made upon me. I am

intrigued by how – through this direct point of contact (a sense of touch rather

than sight) – there is such equivocation between art and life. In the actuality of the

media, there is an endless array of points and paths between self and society, active

and passive, percept and precept, impulse and recognition. Rather than answering,

drawing is the way I develop my questions.

All of these artistic explorations, whether they be a felt interchange of information

or the directness and touch of drawing, aim to clarify my role in a culture that, as I

understand it now, would prefer I had no role. It would, instead, keep me moving,

translucent, malleable, unable to touch and forever in search of an Else.

curtisbracher.info

Media: Drawing, electronics, performance