Hosanna Rubio

Making Meaning from Mayhem OR How to Over-Share at Parties

You know the people who you can tell have just had a “life”? Like, life with a capital L: Life. We smile till our cheeks hurt, but our eyes say we have seen some things. I am one of those people, whose casual anecdotes typically get one of two responses: “Wow, you should totally write a book”, or stunned silence followed by a slow escape. But if pop culture and a generalized knowledge of art history have taught me anything, it’s that I’ll never lack for experiences to draw from to make art.

If you have ever met me, chances are you know that I was raised in a Fundamentalist Pentecostal church. Our church leader had been prophesying the end of the world since the mid-seventies, and with every passing year the congregation became more emphatic that we were living in the end times. For as long as I can remember, I was taught not to fear death, but to welcome it. People would often tell me, always with a glow of religious fervor, “This isn’t our true life. Our true life comes after we die.” This constant discussion of death filled me with existential dread from such a young age that it drove me to seek out why something that was so reassuring to those around me could be so terrifying for me.

Morbid from a young age, I threw myself a funeral at age five. “Here lies Hosanna”

I developed a fascination with subjects that touched on the macabre, such as Vanitas paintings, which used imagery like bones and wilting flowers as reminders of man’s mortality. The word Vanitas was derived in part from Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” While the original Hebrew word “hevel” means a “breath,” or “vapor,” and symbolized fleetingness, later translations substituted the word vanity, which has Latin origins meaning empty, vain, and idle.

Hevel. Steel, sterling silver, copper, brass, enamel. 6” x 3.5” x 1”

In the Shadow of your Poison Tree. Steel, silver, copper, brass, bronze, laser etched enamel, tulle, acrylic, cigarettes, rubber. 18” x 6” x 2”

In Medieval Christianity, disease and death were seen as divine punishment, and it was common for individuals to examine their moral conduct to determine how they had brought illness upon themselves. In some form or another, this belief lives on today. I was never a healthy child. The other members of our church saw my constant injuries and afflictions as an indication of a moral failing on my part. This pressure to fear my pain and illness, to feel ashamed of it, drove me to try to find a way to redefine the situation for myself, to reclaim the beauty in the transience of life.

Keen Brooch Series: Shadow, Uphill, Void. X-ray, acrylic, paper, copper, brass, silver, steel, enamel, hair, wood. 7” x 3.5” x 1”

Prick. X-ray, acrylic, silver, copper, brass, bronze, rubber. 20” x 3.5” x 1”

Mourners. X-ray, acrylic, silver, steel, brass, rubber. 20” x 3.5” x 1”

This lecture and demonstration explores a body of work consisting of jewelry and sculptures that delve into personally significant issues such as mortality, religion, and gender, while also striving to push the boundaries on what constitutes expected jewelry materials and processes. I will share the techniques I have developed over the course of my studio practice, such as galvanic etching, which allows me to make my mark on the world just as it has left its mark on me.

We Came Together and We Came Apart. Cast silver and bronze, acrylic, X-ray. 2” x 1.5” x 1.5”

Creating layered, detailed pieces allows me to find balance in the chaotic, to attempt to exert control over the uncontrollable aspects of my life and in the world at large. While my experiences are not universal I hope to inspire an atmosphere of dialogue with my work to show that sometimes moments of pain and tragedy can offer us the greatest opportunities for beauty and transformation (And hey, it’s cheaper than therapy!)

Opening, Witness, Barrier. Enamel, china paints, copper, brass, steel, silver. 5.5” x 3.5” x 0.5”

I am so excited and honored to be presenting at the upcoming Yuma Art Symposium (can you tell??)

Come see Hosanna at Yuma Art Symposium!!

Register for Yuma Art Symposium 2020 HERE 

See Hosanna's  Webpage HERE

Judy Stone

Enamel Layering: 3 D Color on 3 D Form

It is my great honor to be chosen to be a presenter at the 2020 Yuma Symposium.

I have been working in my medium since 1972.  Along the way I have developed a unique composite of enameling techniques based on the contemporary work of the late Fred Ball and the teaching of the late Bill Helwig.

Sgraffito through liquid white from Fred Ball’s Experimental Techniques in Enameling 

I work mainly on formed copper.  Most of the vessel shapes are cut and then rejoined with woven copper wire, copper rivets, and copper tubing. 

sewing a copper bowl

I call these "destructed" vessels Burnt Offerings because they not only represent my homage to the medium and the power of heat and fire, but also they challenge me to heal what has been destroyed and hopefully make it more beautiful. As I began making my vessels several years ago I was not conscious of the Japanese ceramic tradition of Kintsugi which is about healing broken vessels. In time I began to see my vessels as representing my attempt to make a broken world whole again, much like the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam.

 Kintsugi vessels

The vessel form, which is dimensional, has taught me to look at my enameling as narration much as historically vessels have contained some form of narration.

 Keith Haring ceramic vessel

The fact that my enamel narration is frequently on both sides of my vessels has created the challenge of finding balance and harmony between the enamel and the form. It is always exciting when I succeed.  

I work in thin layers of enamel in which I try to evoke the looseness of painting on canvas. I see the layers as creating 3-D color which reflects and refracts light through and off of the various layers and the copper.  Light, optics and dimensionality are everything to me.

 Ball Study 3

Hermioni 3

See more of Judy's work HERE

Find out how to see Judy at Yuma Art Symposium HERE

Daniel Kariko - Suburban Symbiosis

Insectum Domesticus 
"A Micro-Bestiary"

I would like to introduce a project that investigates our relationship to suburban landscape through micro images of locally found insects and other arthropods. My series of photographs Suburban Symbiosis: Insectum domesticus (2011-present) utilizes the combination of Scanning Electron Microscope and optical Stereo Microscope, in order to achieve a “portrait”-like effect inspired by the tradition of 17th Century Dutch and Flemish painters. 

Dryopthorine Weevil 

Insects find way into our homes no matter how vigilant we are in our effort to keep the nature on the outer side of our windowpanes. Most people, on encountering an insect in their home, will poison it, squash it, or quickly usher it out the door. During my investigation of suburban experience, I started recording the indoor wildlife consistent with the environment my subdivision occupies. 

Pill Bug

In the Southeast of the United States, where I live, the seasons can be measured by the occurrences of different insect swarms. About 84% of known animals belong to the Arthropod Phylum. Zoologists estimate that number of insects species alone could be as high as 10 million. Taxonomists name and describe about 2000 species of insects annually. Unfortunately, in spite of their numbers and variety, they are vanishing at an alarming rate. Many species of insects will become extinct before they are even discovered, due to habitat loss, climate change, and other environmental issues. From newsworthy bee colony collapses to recent noticeable absence of dead insects on our windshields, some species fell by 75% to 90% in the last 20 years. As they are not charismatic megafauna, theirs is a silent extinction.

Owlet Moth

These little (and sometimes not so little) home invaders are natural product of our own occupation of their habitat. As we keep expanding our subdivisions to the outskirts of towns, we inhabit recently altered environments. This project investigates the results of our habitat’s expansion into rural areas and relationships between suburban landscape and it’s inhabitants- both human and insect.

Red Carpenter Ant 

This project started in 2011, a year after I moved to North Carolina suburbs, and started finding small Carpet Beetle larvae in my rented duplex. Shortly after, I was given a chance to use scientific imaging equipment at the biology department of my university. Insects I photograph are found during my daily routines, either at home, or at work, and are titled after an unspecified location, and a partial date, further hinting on the style of presentation of a scientific specimen. 

Dermestid Larva

In general, this project investigates environmental and political aspects of landscape, use of land and cultural interpretation of inhabited space. This anthropomorphic presentation of our closest, often invisible, co-habitants in a humorous, quasi-scientific way, is an invitation to consider the evidence of the human impact on the landscape as we constantly redraw boundaries between us and the natural environment. In the age of popular “citizen science”, this project is an honest and “tongue-in-cheek” endeavor by an artist to observe a near-by natural world from an unusual angle. 

Cuckoo Wasp 

The “portraits” are composites of a number of exposures with Scanning Electron Microscope and Stereoscopic Microscope completed in collaboration with East Carolina University’s Imaging Core Facility. I carefully arrange the LED lighting, small reflectors and diffusers, creating portrait-studio lighting on a micro scale. Multiple images from two separate microscopes are combined in order to “stack” the various focal distances and achieve an optimal focus for my “models”. 
At this point, the series consists of close to 80 images of commonly found insects and other arthropods.

Cicada 

The book of my images, titled Aliens Among Us: Extraordinary Portraits of Ordinary Bugs is schedule to be published on March 2nd, 2020 by Liveright Books. It contains 68 portraits of arthropods, each accompanied with a full-body illustration from artist Isaac Talley, and fascinating character descriptions from entomologist Tim Christensen.

For more information about Daniel and his work, please click HERE

For more information about attending Yuma Art Symposium please click HERE

Yuma 2020 Presenter - Marie Bergstedt

There are so many things we can try to make better. Thanks to Yuma Art Symposium for giving me an opportunity to think about it with you.  I will focus on the theme of Amendments in a presentation, a brief demonstration and with a few artworks in the West Gallery of the Yuma Art Center January through February 2020.

It could be said that all of my artwork is just a set of self-portraits.  I say that because they are all about people and conditions I have seen. Those observations affect me in my own particular way and I sift through them to a portrait and story of someone who has experienced what I noticed. But, I know my interpretation cannot be taken as the “truth."  It is just the way I work it through, with a hope for something that can apply to the experience of many others and may be just a bit better or have a touch of humor in what usually begins as a negative concern.

"Triker" 2009

Hand crochet and wire sculpting with gut, button work, 

recycled parts of metal tricycle, and reconstructed antique doilies

Most of my adult life was invested as a development director in not-for-profit institutions. I needed a dependable income to insure that I would be able to support myself and save enough to convert to a full-time art career. Fortunately I found jobs where I was in close contact with many creative people who kept my brain busy thinking even when I had little time to set my hands in motion.

Once those hands got to moving, I found that what I really wanted was to skip the formal art techniques I had studied over the years and find a way to use the more personal methods I learned as a child…sewing, knitting, and crochet.  I was thinking about stories from my childhood and issues that seemed very personal, but also universal.  To me these hand techniques seemed the best way for me to tell those stories.  So, I began.

"Countdown" 2008

Hand crochet over wire sculpting

My first fiber artwork fingered through painful childhood memories and were actually often self-portraits.  I moved through health issues of friends and family, my homeless brother, my foster mother’s aging and death, and untold tales of mysterious relatives.  In every case, telling the story was a growth experience for me, both in resolving an issue and expanding my artistic approach. Each personally known story also had a more universal application that I hoped could reach others with hope and sometimes laughter.

"Mikey of Mallory" 2012 

Hand crochet, stitching and button work

In recent years, my thoughts are more focused on obvious current questions: border issues, the role of women, and gun violence, along with continuing health and aging. Always there is a relative or friend whose experience fits the issue.  

I hope you will join me in unbuttoning stories and brokering amendments for a positive journey forward.

Marie Bergstedt working on "Fit" 2018

 Hand knitting, crochet, and stitching

For more information about Marie Bergstedt and her work  PRESS HERE

Marie will present her work at the 2020 Yuma Art Symposium

Hope to see you there!

Danielle James

From the months of December to August if you happen to drive south over the run down St. Georges bridge crossing into what some would call “slower lower” Delaware you might notice a strange looking site on the side of Route 13. A large white old style farm silo that looks like it crawled out of the depths of hell sits silent waiting for the last weekend in September to emerge. Through the years it has been the recipient of many a facelift, including most recently a set of  flashing red eyes, but since 1996 this regional road side anomaly Frightland Haunted Attractions has been scaring the daylights out of its customers every Halloween season.

This was also the place I called home every October of my formative years. I worked in the “make-up trailer” every weekend from (6pm to 1am) turning some 200 seasonal employees into witches, zombies, ghouls and clowns to haunt the 1,300 acres that made up the Frightland compound. One of my best jobs was one of my first jobs and I realize now that this job offered me something at 17 years old that some people never experience in their entire lifetime. The feeling of being in love with what you do everyday. I will never have a job like it again and never feel the pride of making a grown man run away screaming in terror at the simple sound of of my clown bicycle horn.

In the summer months I would volunteer to work on updating the existing buildings and help to build new places for the next attraction to live. Sometimes I would be asked to use hundreds of donated books to create a hidden door library in what we called “Idealia Manor” or using a cherry picker (for the first time) go up 20 ft in the air to paint the stripes on the “circus tent” on the clown set that was part of the hayride. This place gave me purpose in my dreary high school life. My first opportunity to work with a diverse creative team to create a visual experience that was unique to that place. I was extremely proud to be able to contribute to what I was convinced (at the time) was the only cool thing in Delaware. Nowhere in the world is like Frightland. It is now 10 years later and I feel like I can still say that with one hundred percent certainty.

Every time I take one of my road trips I prefer to drive on non-interstate highway systems to absorb a bit more regional culture of the location I am traveling through (and to see less Cracker Barrels). I see hundreds of places that were once like Frightland. Dinosaur World in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, The Land of Oz in North Carolina, or Bushkill Park in Philadelphia. All of them once thriving unique whimsical business’s now quiet, but still standing with a patina of chipped paint, rust and time. For me these are places of inspiration and act as monuments to the people who dare to go through with a crazy dream. 

Hand sculpted concrete and chicken wire dinosaurs. A highly curated garden wonderland inspired by the Land of Oz (complete with yellow brick road). This is not your soulless franchised Dave and Busters entertainment, this has love attached and can only be experienced at one place in the whole world. I love everything about these places, right down to the hand painted menu boards at the snack stand. These locations encapsulate a specific type of commercial art (before tech) that grabbed hold of our collective imagination and never let go. The type of Willy Wonka business sense and creative stubbornness necessary to pull off a drive through dinosaur park in the Ozark Mountains is something I admire and believe is very important to conserving our regional history and identity as Americans.

It’s the haunted houses, the diners, and the UFO museums that compose the DNA of my America. In my jewelry series “Mile Marker” I create miniatures to commemorate these fading locations and the interactions I have there. Every person at each BBQ shack, juke joint, diner, hotel, and roadside attraction can provide an opportunity for a valuable exchange of lessons and these exchanges serve for me as a catalyst to make more work. I am afraid my generation is losing their adventurous spirit. My work attempts to connect to the human part of us to inspire people to turn off their GPS and pickup a road atlas.

Danielle James will present her work at the 2019 Yuma Art Symposium

See more about Danielle's work HERE

See more about the 2019 Yuma Art Symposium HERE 

Sydney Scherr

Mohan’s Chariot: A Journey into Divine Creativity

I want to thank the Presentation Committee for selecting “Mohan’s Chariot: A Journey into Divine Creativity” for this years Yuma Symposium. It is an honor to introduce your audience to the extraordinary history, and experience, of the chariot maker. 

In the Hindu religion chariots are used as traveling temples, called temple cars, that are used to bring temple festivals and prayer to the community when the community members are unable to find their way to the temple. Chariots are made with a sense of reverence and devotion that is breathtaking to see and feel: it is considered a blessing to work on a chariot and I now know this is true.

I was invited to join a team of silversmiths from Tamil Nadu, India, to participate in the creation of a chariot for Sri Ganesar Alayam, a Hindu temple in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I am the only women in the world to have been given this honor as this is a specifically male creation made by those who have learned this ancient art at the feet of their fathers and grandfathers.

In addition to being a chariot maker, I documented the process of creating this splendid moving temple that is 22 feet tall, weighs over 1 ton of silver and is comprised of many thousands of chased and repoussed silver panels, 7000 hand made silver nails and 102 large enamels. It is the only chariot in the world adorned with enamels, and these were my contribution to this remarkable rolling temple. To witness and participate in this creation, and the lively environment where it was made, is to enjoy the embrace of a community of metalsmiths so rich in similarities yet distinctly culturally unique. This journey is not only in recognition of the historical and spiritual depth found in Mohan’s studios, this journey describes a familiar thread that engages all creative individuals. It is the intuitive connection to work and working that compels us as artists

Sydney Scherr will present at Yuma Art Symposium 2019

See more about Sydney's work HERE

See more about Yuma Art Symposium HERE