Redux: Seeing Life through Art Practice

 When life experience and art practice merge, artworks show refinement, growth, and clarity of voice. Art can record memory, meaning, and emotions specific to different times in life. Artists that are committed to engaging in creative expression tend to play and experiment with their work within a timeline of knowledge, transformation and understanding.  In ‘Redux”, eleven artists re-examine original works constructed in the beginning of their dedication to an art praxis. 

The start of a serious pursuit in the arts requires careful navigation around experimentation and failure. Artists somehow summon strength to quell the voices that question ability and certainty and begin to trust their instincts. Carrying on through times of insecurity while remaining vulnerable and curious requires a special kind of audacity. As we practice art and continue to learn over time, we gain a certain refinement and confidence that can bring a clearer sense of identity, point of view, and purpose.  Driven by passion and curiosity, artists using mosaic as their primary medium engage with physical materials a means to convey meaning through shapes, forms, colors, and textures,

Most artists work in isolation, alone in their studios, slogging through doubt and disappointment while yearning for connection through their work and camaraderie. Receiving critical feedback and pursuing education can be powerful resources to support artistic development - especially within a medium that is slow, tedious, and laborious. Mosaic practice requires patience and an abandonment of instant gratification. Art practice demands discipline and resilience and an acceptance of the trial and error that occurs with time and experimentation.

In ‘Redux”, eleven artists re-examine original works constructed at the beginning of their journey within the discipline of mosaic art. While these practitioners take varied and diverse approaches to the medium, each one of these artists started with undeveloped abilities to express engaging ideas. Each artist has stepped back to revisit an early piece to look at where they were in their lives, studio practices, and abilities. Being able to reexamine an older idea acknowledges changes within ourselves and in the world around us. This exhibition also shows how the Chicago Mosaic School has transformed and expanded these creative voices. “Redux’ presents both works, side by side- a before and after, showing how art can reflect transformation and record experience through the lens of time.

The Chicago Mosaic School was born of the desire to learn an artform with depth and visual literacy from experienced, knowledgeable artist practitioners. The value of an art education is not only in the cultivation of information and art methodologies, but ultimately what a student does with that knowledge and within a discipline of practice.

This month an exhibition- “redux” opens at Gallery GoCM Chicago. This has been a project that has been sitting on a shelf in my mind for decades. The concept of revisiting a work at the onset of one’s practice has been a deeply moving and enthralling experience. I invited 10 artists who began their practice initiated by study at The Chicago Mosaic School. I was excited experience this project and document the process with my peers.

Solo, 1991, Ceramic, glaze, glass on board

Emenence, 2023, Ceramic, mortar

Drawing for September, 2023, Pen and Ink on Paper

Brokenness Pre-empted.

A defense mechanism. I shall shatter this!

I will be responsible for my own destruction.

Untitled, September 2022

Slogging along. Still. Finding a deeper connection with sculpture and part of the mosaic. Mosaic. That fucking word. I feel comfort in defining it but doesn’t quite fit anymore, it’s more than what “they and you” perceive as mosaic. Its goddamn collage, its a bricoleur brain in clay builders body- carving, incising, scratching away at the surfaces. These tablets, MY OSTRACA, hold information, drawings, symbols, memory, poetry- broken a reformed reconstructed recomposed to tell some truth that hasn’t been told. I’m excited but the re-introduction of terra cotta into the work as an earthy dynamic element within the graphic-ness of the black and white.