Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Featured Arkansas Artist: Steven Wise

The Arkansas Studies Institute houses four art galleries, including a retail gallery, featuring the work of Arkansas artists and art related to the state. This post is part of a bi-weekly series featuring ASI gallery artists.


Steven Wise


Biography
Steven Wise lives and works in northwest Arkansas, where he teaches art at two elementary schools in the Rogers School District. Wise earned a BA in art history from Swarthmore College in 1991 and received an MFA in painting from the University of Iowa in 1998.

In the past five years, his work has been included in six solo exhibitions, ten group exhibitions, and ten juried exhibitions. His work has been exhibited in the most competitive exhibitions in his home state, such as the annual Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock (2000, 2003, 2004) and the Arkansas Arts Council’s annual Small Works on Paper Exhibition (1999, 2004, 2007, 2008, 2009). In 2004, his drawings were accepted into the Viewing Program of the Drawing Center in New York, New York.

Artist Statement
Paintings speak with pictures, not with words.

I have developed a process for making images. This process routinely involves establishing a set of limitations before I begin a body of work. First, I impose a set of restrictions on my activity of painting, drawing, or printing so that I must operate within a narrow range of formal possibilities. Second, I choose a finite number of works to be completed as a suite of related images. I have structured my activity of work so that I can concentrate on material, touch, texture, and surface.

Form is a consequence of the activity of work. Form becomes content. Although many projects have subjects, content is neither prescribed nor assigned to individual works. But rather, content is discovered while making images under a controlled set of conditions imposed on my activity of work.

I have mapped a plan of action based on the letters of the alphabet. Each letter represents a body of work. Each work is labeled with a letter and a chronological numeral (A01, A02, A03, A04, etc.). The project is named alpha/beta. If I complete one letter of the alphabet each year, I will finish my life/works/projects at the age of 58.

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