Category Archives: Sondheim Prize

This is the twelfth in a series of interviews with each of the Sondheim Award Semifinalists. Finalists will be announced in mid-April, and will be on exhibit at the Walters Art Museum June 21 to August 17; those not selected as finalists with be exhibited at the Decker, Meyerhoff and Pinkard Galleries at MICA  July 17 to August 3, 2014.

Name: Jon Malis
Age: 29
Website: www.jonmalis.com
Location: Live – DC, a new landing spot is TBD, but I’m looking to buy.
Studio – Bloomingdale (DC)
Work – Baltimore
Hometown: Boston, MA
School: UG: George Washington University (DC)
Grad: American University (DC)

Current favorite artists or artwork: This is a good one… I just returned from London a few weeks ago, and saw so much amazing work that I’m perpetually horrible at picking favorites. Locally, I had a chance last week to tour the Winogrand show at the NGA with the show’s curator, and that was just an amazing experience. When I was in London, I had a chance to spend an afternoon with James Turrell’s show at Pace, and just the way he works with light…

What is your day job? How do you manage balancing work with studio time with your life?
I’m an Assistant Professor of Photography at Loyola University, and, honestly, at the moment, I’m not balancing my work/studio life as much as I should be. This is my first year at Loyola, so there have been a lot of administrative and teaching factors that have kept me out of the studio lately. I can’t wait for the summer to be able to spend the majority of my time in the studio, I’ve a lot of new ideas to develop.

How would you describe your work, and your studio practice? I alternate between calling myself “an artist who works within the greater realm of photography” and a conceptual photographer. I’m fascinated with how viewers interact with work – and how you can look at the same thing, but through different devices (projection, print, slide, screen, etc), and come away from it having experienced something completely different. My studio practice really works to examine the mechanisms behind viewing art, from old and tarnished slide projector screens (like what you’d have viewed the family trip on when we all shot slides on vacation) to pixelated computer screens, expired black & white photo paper, and everything in-between. I just received a summer research grant to stretch these ideas into a new tangent, and I’m super excited to see what I’m able to develop.

What part of artmaking to you like or enjoy the most? The least? Please don’t get me wrong – I love the process of creation – but, personally, my favorite part of art(making) is having a chance to disconnect from the work from time to time, and just think about things that interest me. Idea generation really is the key (in my opinion) to successful work, and just having an opportunity to sit back, not worry, and think is pretty awesome. As an educator, my favorite part of art (in general) is being able to sit down with my students, look at their ideas/work/etc, and help them figure out where to go next – it’s easy to tell students what they should do, but it’s much more rewarding to help guide them to their own conclusions, which I then get to see the results of. My least favorite part is the paperwork and business of being an artist – I’m willing to bet that this is a common answer, but I’m much more involved with the process, and my work, when I’m creating than when I’m filling out forms and fighting bureaucracy.

What research do you do for your art practice? I look at research in three different modes – conceptual, technical (practical) and theoretical. Conceptually, my research is a very internal process – how I approach viewing & interacting with work, seeing work, thinking about how I see work, and how others see my work. Technically, it’s the how I create my work – is there technology involved (I have a new project on the horizon that hinges on custom 3d modeling and printing interfaces I need to develop), what format will the work be in, how will it be presented/mounted, etc… Theoretically, it’s about how my work fits in the current conversations among artistic, as well as scientific/philosophical/etc, ideas. There’s a lot of work being created that deals with archival materials and/or alternate narratives, which I’m really interested in. Likewise, as technology develops, there are more and more ways of viewing content, and with each new device of viewership, there needs to be an understanding of how that device influences its viewer.

What books have you read lately you would recommend? Movies? Television? Music? To be honest, most of the books I’ve read lately are all tied to this spring’s teaching – I’m a little embarrassed by the lack of things I’ve read for myself recently. I did just see a great documentary, though – Particle Fever. I think, given my interests in science growing up, it’s really awesome to see so many scientists excited over a single machine. As for music, it depends on what I’m doing – I tend to equate different memories and motivations to music, so, really, it all depends on what I’m doing. If I’m writing/researching, I love Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way, chiller Moby, Bon Iver, etc. If I’m working in the studio, it’s usually uptempo pandora mixes (there was a lot of Girl Talk and things like that going on in grad school among). When I’m in the office or commuting to work, it’s usually NPR and NPR podcasts. I still love reading the New York Times (in its printed form), but I just don’t have the time to do it consistently anymore.

Do you ever get in creative dry spells, and if so, how do you get out of them? All the time! I’m lucky, though, in that I usually have enough material to keep on with something – if I get stuck on one project, I’ll move to another, then back, etc. This was especially true when I was working full-time in the film business, as corporate/commercial work tends to be very quick – I’d be able to take a few-day break from my own art, then, when I came back from the job, I’d be ready to take it back on. Now that I’m teaching, I think I’ve got enough ideas to last a few years – they’re probably not all winners, but they’re things to explore when I get stuck on my primary body of work.

How do you challenge yourself in your work? Right now, the challenge is just to keep making. I really hate how slow my production has become this year, and it’s definitely a rut I’m looking forward to escaping this summer. Overall, though, I think the challenge is to stay relevant – and not let others get you down. I know there are artists out there doing similar things to me, some more successfully, but ultimately, it’s how my work all fits together that keeps me on track. If my overall themes start to lose focus, then, I think, it’s time to re-evaluate what it is that I’m doing. But, if one small facet has been done before, the challenge becomes how I can present that sub-body of work in a way that is cohesive with my overarching premise, and not making it look like I’m copying someone else conceptually. I don’t necessarily agree that “It’s all been done before”, but, as artists, it’s our challenge to take the everyday that we live in, and put our own spin on it.

What is your dream project? That’s a tough one – I’m really interested in the memories I have of images I shot when I worked as a photojournalist. Since the newspapers I worked for own the copyrights to the images I made while employed with them, I’d love to work with my memories of these images in some way. Conversely, I’d love to travel to London (which could arguably be my unofficial second home – I love it there) and do something with a series of underground dark, underutilized pedestrian passageways networked throughout the city.

This is the tenth in a series of interviews with each of the Sondheim Award Semifinalists. Finalists will be announced in mid-April, and will be on exhibit at the Walters Art Museum June 21 to August 17; those not selected as finalists with be exhibited at the Decker, Meyerhoff and Pinkard Galleries at MICA  July 17 to August 3, 2014.

Name: Nora Sturges
Age: 45
Website: www.norasturges.com
Current Location: Baltimore
Hometown: Stamford, CT
School: Bowdoin College undergrad and Ohio University grad

Current favorite artists or artwork: Thomas Nozkowski, Norbert Schwontkowski, and Honoré Sharrer are current interests.

What is your day job? How do you manage balancing work with studio time with your life? I teach painting full-time at Towson University. It’s challenging to find time to make art during the semester, and much of my work is done in the summers, but at its best teaching gives me energy and experiences I can use toward my own work.

How would you describe your work, and your studio practice? I enjoy imagining places and things, thinking about them and trying to give them life.

What part of artmaking to you like or enjoy the most? The least? I love realizing the image, but hate the painting part.

What research do you do for your art practice? I get ideas from so many sources that almost everything could be research. I look at a lot of art (old and new), and photos of any sort, and I read things that I think have the potential to be used in my work (though it’s often a surprise what ends up being useful). The past few years walking has been an important kind of research for me– I find that I notice my surroundings in a different way when I’m a pedestrian.

Do you think it’s just the slower pace of walking that allows you to notice things more, or do you think the act of walking making you more alert and able to observe? Is there anywhere you prefer to walk- city, suburbs, parks, etc? I go walking around where I live, and it’s usually a walk with a purpose– to the store or to work. There are definitely things one sees as a pedestrian that are hard to see from a moving car, but there’s also something different about one’s frame of mind when walking. I find that it makes me very open to ideas, perhaps from the enforced slowness of it. And walking the same route over time gives me a chance to really notice things. The most fruitful area for me has been Osler Drive in Towson, which is the dullest of roads. I’ve gotten parts of maybe ten paintings from things I’ve seen on Osler Drive.

What books have you read lately you would recommend? Movies? Television? Music? I’m a big fan of radio because I can listen while I paint. Radiolab and Studio 360 are great shows, and I love BBC Radio 4.

Do you ever get in creative dry spells, and if so, how do you get out of them? I often have times when I’m not especially inspired, and don’t feel like working, but I make myself do it anyway. I once had a long period, after I finished a body of work I’d been engaged with for several years, when I had no ideas for what to do next, and everything I tried failed. It was awful. But I tried to follow the advice I give to students who don’t know what to do– you can’t discover what to make if you’re not making, so just make anything. So I just kept making paintings (quick ones– going for quantity), and eventually I found direction.

This is the ninth in a series of interviews with each of the Sondheim Award Semifinalists. Finalists will be announced in mid-April, and will be on exhibit at the Walters Art Museum June 21 to August 17; those not selected as finalists with be exhibited at the Decker, Meyerhoff and Pinkard Galleries at MICA  July 17 to August 3, 2014.

Name: Dean Kessmann
Age: 49
Website: www.deankessmann.com
Current Location: Washington, DC
Hometown: Maryville, IL
School: Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (MFA)

Current favorite artists or artwork:  James Welling, Wade Guyton, Peter Coffin, Jennie C. Jones, Tom Friedman, N. Dash, Louis Cameron, and three artists who I’ve been close friends with for around two decades and whose work I greatly admire: Martin Brief, Jill Downen, and Jennifer Dorsey (my wife).  There are many, many artists in the DC metro area whose work I love and respect, but it is difficult to list a few of them without feeling horrible about not included all of the others.

What is your day job? Associate Professor and Deputy Chair of the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at The George Washington University.

How do you manage balancing work with studio time with your life? Unfortunately, I do a terrible job at balancing work with studio time and family time.

How would you describe your work, and your studio practice?  Below is my one paragraph artist statement, which I find difficult to write because I often fail to see connections and/or differences between much of my work.
Studio visits are incredibly helpful in this regard, that is, getting fresh eyes and new perspectives on work that I’m generally too close to, thus difficult to see in an objective manner.  Here goes:  What remains consistent throughout my practice is an intense interest in the relationships between abstraction and representation, physical objects and digital information, compression and expansion.  Each new project builds upon and expands my larger body of work, while at the same time folding into it.  My goal is to create fresh iterations that fuse the lessons learned with happenstance that is part and parcel of the creative process.
The intuitive impulse in my practice is balanced with a more critical and reasoned approach.  If one looks closely at the subtle twists and turns that have led me from one project to the next, I hope that it is apparent that my meandering is with purpose.  I strive to create work that is intellectually engaging and visually striking, open to multiple interpretations without being overly ambiguous, smart and challenging without becoming pretentious or abstruse.  While my choice of media is, at times, made for practical purposes, these decisions are, more often than not, arrived at for conceptual reasons because materials have meaning.

What part of artmaking do you like or enjoy the most? The moment when it becomes apparent, at least to me, that project that I’d been thinking about doing for a while is likely going to result in work that is both visually compelling, and hopefully, conceptually engaging.  I also enjoy seeing the finished work up on a wall.  There is time spent between the beginning and end of projects that I find rewarding and exciting, but I tend to work out many details in my head prior to actually starting to make the pieces, so making the work sometimes feels like, well, work.  My training as a traditional black and white photographer taught me to pre-visualize the final print at the time of exposure, which, for better or worse, has spilled over into my current practice.

What part of artmaking do you like or enjoy the least?  Promoting the finished work is the least enjoyable to me.  Sadly, due to the serial nature of many of my projects, there can be a certain level of monotony between the early stages of making a piece and getting to the final result, as was alluded to in my last answer. However, this time spent doing repetitive kinds of tasks does, on occasion, allow for a project to evolve in unexpected ways, or at the very least, it opens up some mental space to think about the meaning of the work.

What research do you do for your art practice?  As an associate professor at GW my ongoing interactions with students and other faculty members certainly feeds into my practice as an artist.  I look at as much art as possible, which has been somewhat difficult the last few years due to administrative duties associated with my job at GW . . . I was Chair of the Department of Fine Arts and Art History from July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2013, and I’m now serving a one-year term as Deputy Chair (and I have the badge to prove it-haha).  Additionally, simply paying attention to what are generally perceived as fairly mundane activities and seemingly insignificant moments that make up much of our day-to-day lives often results in my discovering something worth exploring.  For instance, the project that I submitted to the Sondheim Prize, titled Utilitarian Abstraction, began when I started paying attention to, and then collecting the tiny grids of colors and patterns on cardboard box flaps of food packaging.  The actual purpose of these marks is to enable printers to match colors and ensure that the text and images remain in registration throughout the printing process.  However, while disassembling these boxes in order to place them in the recycling bin, I became intrigued by the somewhat standardized, yet surprisingly unique imagery that I continued to discover.  Shortly thereafter, I found myself imagining these utilitarian marks as miniature abstract paintings that had been hidden from view, smuggled into my home via the packaging of ordinary consumer products.

After scanning them, I dramatically enlarge the tiny source images, and then output them as archival pigment prints.  For this project, breaking down boxes for the recycling bin became part of my research.  Now that the project is well underway and the collecting has slowed down, I have obviously started thinking about this work in the context of historical precedents, especially Pop art, Op art, abstract monochromatic painting, and more recent trends in appropriation of imagery from contemporary consumer culture.

What books have you read lately you would recommend? Movies? Television? Music?  I’ve read and/or have been reading the following books: Contemporary Art: 1989 To The Present (Edited by Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson), Living and Sustaining a Creative Life (Edited by Sharon Louden), James Welling: Monograph (James Crump), Wade Guyton: OS (Scott Rothkopf), and The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (Lyle Rexer).  My wife and I have been watching some of the academy awards winners online at home, since with two kids we rarely get to see anything on the big screen.  We also just finished watching the HBO series True Detective.  I’ve recently replaced a 20-year-old stereo and speakers with new components, so I’ve probably been spending the most time listening to music these days.  I’ve been listening to Tame Impala (Lonerism), Arcade Fire (The Suburbs), Vic Chesnutt (At the Cut), Yo La Tengo (Fade), Animal Collective (Centipede HZ), Sigur Ros (Valturi), Wilco (The Album), and Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks (Real Emotional Trash), among others.

Do you ever get in creative dry spells, and if so, how do you get out of them?  These days I rarely get in creative dry spells because it is difficult for me to find enough time to complete the projects that I have underway.  However, when this does happen, I simply carry a camera with me on my walks to and from work and make pictures of anything that I find even the least bit interesting.  Most of these images never see the light of day, but they serve a more important purpose of getting me through the dry spells.

How do you challenge yourself in your work?  Like most artist, I want my next project to be better than my last one.  I try to make work that, to some extent, grows out of my overall practice as an artist, while simultaneously making subtle moves into new territory.  Most recently, I’ve been making work at a significantly larger scale than anything I’ve done in the past.  Some of the images in Utilitarian Abstraction are as large as 5 feet by 23 ½ feet.  Also, I’m working on another project (A Layered History of Art: From Semitransparent to Opague) in which the final piece will be approximately 5 feet high by 40 feet long.

What is your dream project?  Ask me in the morning.

This is the eighth in a series of interviews with each of the Sondheim Award Semifinalists. Finalists will be announced in mid-April, and will be on exhibit at the Walters Art Museum June 21 to August 17; those not selected as finalists with be exhibited at the Decker, Meyerhoff and Pinkard Galleries at MICA  July 17 to August 3, 2014.

Name: Jim Condron
Age: NA
Website:  www.jcondron.com
Current Location:Baltimore
Hometown: I was born in Long Island and spent my childhood in Wilton, Connecticut
School: I earned a BA in English and Art from Colby College, Waterville, ME, attended the New York Studio School for three years, and then got my MFA from MICA’s Hoffberger School of Painting. I have studied with my mentor Rohini Ralby for over 20 years.  It’s through her spiritual guidance that any ounce of authenticity has come through in my work. She’s a great painter herself.

Current favorite artists or artwork: Giotto, Fra Angelico, Sassetta, Leonardo Drew, Forest Bess, Jackson Pollock, Hannah Wilke, Kathy Butterly, Chris Martin, Carleton Watkins, and Yayoi Kusama. Most recently blown away by the William Kentridge installation and the fourPieros at the Met.

What is your day job? How do you manage balancing work with studio time with your life?  I am an adjunct professor at Towson University, MICA and Stevenson University.  I make things in secret, in a closet.  If I have more space, I take it over.

How would you describe your work, and your studio practice?  I paint stuff and glue things together until it looks better than anything I have ever seen before. Sometimes I will ponder how to resolve the sock I have included in a piece for a few weeks before adding fur and color.

What part of artmaking do you like or enjoy the most? The least? I enjoy finding things and creating something meaningful from fragments of materials, then naming it.  I hate it when I start to know what I am doing.

What research do you do for your art practice?  I don’t do research, I just look and look and look.  Actually I do research, I look into glue guns and spray paint; and tennis shoes–a complicated matter.

What books have you read lately you would recommend? Movies? Television? Music?  I have no time to read and I don’t watch television and don’t go to movies.  I sometimes listen to music in the car.

Do you ever get in creative dry spells, and if so, how do you get out of them?  Last year I quit painting.

How do you challenge yourself in your work?  I look for strange materials and try to make them into something coherent.

What is your dream project? Big breath-taking work.

This is the seventh in a series of interviews with each of the Sondheim Award Semifinalists. Finalists will be announced in mid-April, and will be on exhibit at the Walters Art Museum June 21 to August 17; those not selcected as finalists with be exhibited at the Decker, Meyerhoff and Pinkard Galleries at MICA  July 17 to August 3, 2014.

Name: Tommy Bobo
Age: 30
Website: iamtommybobo.com
Current Location: Bolton Hill, Baltimore
Hometown: North Augusta, SC
School: MICA and University of Kansas

Current favorite artists or artwork: Liz Magic Laser’s Absolute Event and Rutherford Chang’s 100 White Albums

What is your day job? How do you manage balancing work with studio time with your life?Currently, I am a full time student with two on campus jobs. I am big believer in taking at a minimum one day off a week. Keeps my head clear and my wife happy. Also I make an effort to stay on a 9-5 schedule. Sometimes it is just better to leave something to be done the next morning. It keeps my momentum up.

How would you describe your work, and your studio practice? My work is an examination of the different qualities of projected light in between the bulb and the screen. I use lots of projectors, lenses, and diffusion materials. My studio practice is based on experimentation and trial-and-error. I burn through a lot of ideas pretty quickly.

What part of artmaking to you like or enjoy the most? The least? I love that first burst of an idea and those midway through epiphanies . It’s like falling in love. When you just can’t wait to get to the studio everyday. I loathe editing documentation of the work. It feels like a postmortem.  Also I have to spend a lot of time in the dark, which during winter gets quite hard.

What research do you do for your art practice? Right now I am reading specs on different types of plexiglass. I really like new materials, but it requires a lot of reading and experimentation. Amazon reviews are my lifeline to a certain degree. I also read a lot: art history, theory, film history, and novels. When I am working with film as a source material I end up watching a lot of movies looking for particular little details.

What books have you read lately you would recommend? Movies? Television? Music? Book= Wild Ones by Jon Mooallem – It’s about the lengths we will go to in order to save endangered species. It is a beautiful and heartbreaking book.  BBC Made for TV Movies based on true stories= Holy Flying Circus- Which is about the release of Life of Brian in the UK. The Challenger- which is about Richard Feynman’s investigation into the Challenger explosion. Music= Lambchop’s ‘Mr. M’ and the remix version ‘Mr. N’ Television= Community, Broad City, and Bob’s Burgers

Looking at your work (especially the balloon pieces, and the Sound of Music supercut) how important is a sense of humor in your work? How do you see it working with the main themes in your work, especially considering how some of your recommendations approach this? (especially Bob’s Burgers. SO GOOD.) I have to admit that contemporary art is pretty absurd. The fact that I like to express my innermost thoughts with slide projectors and balloons is funny in of itself. That balloons in question also look like 3 foot long phalli which just makes the point clearer. With all that said I don’t I set out to make humorous work. When I have tried to make funny work, it has usually been painfully unsuccessful. The humor that is in the work is more a reflection of my personality and playfulness in my studio practice.

About eight years ago there was a William Wegman show at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. It was of mostly non-dog art, self portraiture, paintings and video mostly. It was a revelation for me to see such earnest work that was funny. Here I was a goofy kid right out of undergrad trying to make overly serious work about all the darkest parts of my life. I went to see that show 10-15 times. It took a while, but eventually I felt freed from having to be so serious all the time.

Do you ever get in creative dry spells, and if so, how do you get out of them? Dry spells are inevitable. I try not to let it get me down. Usually I try to bring something new into the studio, a book or material. Often I find myself rereading a book I’ve read a dozen times before, and find something new in it that triggers something. It is just about being open and letting connections happen.

How do you challenge yourself in your work? By bringing in new materials and technologies. If I am learning I am working. Also by not being 100% satisfied.

What is your dream project? Big dream: To reinstate the artist-in-residency program at NASA. They have all the best toys. I am not sure what I would make but It would likely involve radio telescopes and weightlessness. Medium dream: To do an installation piece at the Uptown Movie Theater in DC. It’s where 2001:A Space Odyssey premiered and played for a complete year. Every movie is made better by being seen there.