Essays / CHRISTINA NAFZIGER

ESSAYS

Artist Residencies, Collaboration, and Alternative Models of Education

Artist residencies offer a place for artistic exploration, a space where artists can work and think collectively, and potentially collaborate with like-minded individuals as well. Although this environment sounds similar to a classroom, residencies often subvert the power dynamics found in traditional academic settings. Without a type of hierarchical knowledge structure, residencies often form an alternative learning space.

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Create! Magazine • 30th December 2020

Ahavani Mullen: Transforming Your Medium

In other pieces, she uses limestone, talc, and polystyrene to create forms on the wall that look like tectonic plates or heavy, hard stone. However, these forms are actually as light as Styrofoam, and are further abstracted by the artist’s use of...

Sixty Inches From Center • 15th October 2020

Artist Residencies, Collaboration, and Alternative Models of Education

In 2018, artists Julia Holter and Olivia Block came together to write and compose a new piece titled Whenever the Breeze, creating immersive sound by combining voice, instruments, bells, and recording of wind and water. The making of this piece...

Newcity Art • 30th April 2020

Breakout Artists 2020: Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers - Yvette Mayorga

Dissatisfied by traditional methods of putting brush to canvas, Yvette Mayorga creates paintings that push into a third dimension by building thick, icing-like layers that are literally caked onto the surface of the canvas. Impossibly ornate and...

Create! Magazine • 3rd February 2020

Jacqueline Surdell: Weaving Together the Unlikely

The artwork of Jacqueline Surdell is the result of an evolution, of revolution, of revelation. She creates her beautifully monstrous forms through an amalgam of woven rope, paint, metal, and the seamlessly imposed, unlikely material of exercise...

Create! Magazine • 24th January 2020

Aimée Beaubien: Pushing the Boundaries of Photography Into the Third-Dimension —

These photographs appear throughout Beaubien’s work. Her installation Hold Sway has a combination of her own photography and the photographs taken by Inger, fusing them together and creating a space for a conversation within the work, one that can...

Create! Magazine • 7th December 2019

Invisible Labour: Appreciating the Work That No One Sees

If you are an artist, chances are, you are sharing your work over social media—and if you are sharing images of your work, I can bet you’ve shared an image or two of a work in progress. And if you aren’t sharing these photos, it is hard to avoid this...

Create! Magazine • 5th October 2019

Artist Residencies and the Fight Against Rising Rents

In the face of a rising cost of living, it is becoming more and more difficult for artists across the US to find an affordable space to create their artwork. Like many other places, rent is on the rise in the place that I live (Chicago), and so having...

Feature Shoot • 12th July 2019

Pornosynthesis: Revealing the Sensual Side of Flowers

Catherine Losing and Robert Graves-Morris reveal a side of flowers you have never seen before in their sensual series cleverly titled Pornosynthesis. The project is a visual journey into the sexuality of plants, giving us a close-up view of the inside...

Feature Shoot • 11th April 2019

Magical Photos of Childhood Summers in a Small Austrian Village

In her project I am Waldviertel, Dutch photographer Carla Kogelman travels to the Austrian region of Waldviertel to the small village of Merkenbrechts, population less than 200. Here, Kogelman transports us into an eternal moment of fleeting childhood...

Sixty Inches From Center • 20th January 2019

Locating Your Practice in ‘Todros Geller: Strange Worlds’ with Curator Susan Weininger

Todros Geller, (1889-1949), was a Jewish-American artist born in Ukraine, immigrating to Canada and later Chicago in 1906, where he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He became a prominent artist during his time, having a hand in many...

Exhibitions on the Cusp • 19th October 2018

Curating Video in a World of Infinite Screens

Whether it’s to text a friend or binge watch a series, sitting in front of a screen has become a comfortable familiarity, one that is an integral part of our daily lives. Through technological advances, video is now accessed and used in endless...

Exhibitions on the Cusp • 22nd June 2018

Democratizing Art Through Exhibition: Work Ethic and Amateurs

To democratize art is to make it inclusive, to allow a wider audience to have access and participate. Art is often a field that causes many feel excluded from, that they are outsiders who do not belong to this otherwise unreachable and untouchable...

Exhibitions on the Cusp • 13th April 2018

The State of Curatorial Education

The title of “curator” has become increasingly present both in and out of an art world context and, perhaps in response, there has been a rise in popularity of curatorial programs in higher education. As public access to art and modes of viewing...

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