The purpose of Artist Statements demonstrated through artist statements
Laurie Frick, “Imagined Time”, found cut and handmade paper on panels, a series based on the memory and experience of time. 54 in x 72 in - 72 in - 96 in. 2008-2011
The art world undervalues artist statements. Many artists loath writing them. Critics love to complain about them. But a good artist statement can be disassembled and re-assembled for a variety of uses, from grant applications to instagram promo text. The value of versatility and modularity can not be underestimated in the online environment. In this context, the artist statement can make a viewer look more carefully, and a collector or grantor more inclined to part with their money.
I started offering artist statement webinars to give artists the skills to produce flexible text they could use for any purpose. Happily, that process not only produced positive results, but introduced me to so many talented new artists, that I feel compelled to share their art. I deeply believe in the work they have done and hope you gain the same joy I have digging into their art.
Let’s start with Barbara Nitke’s photography, whose work readers might have seen mentioned in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine and VICE . Her own words, though, best describe her relationship to the images. “The people I select to photograph generally reside on the dark side of life–sex workers, sadomasochists, genderqueer hedonists, crossdressers, gamblers, fugitives.” she writes. “They are my heroes and muses because, for me, they represent a high form of authenticity, acting out urges that most of us prefer to repress.”
Other artists write just as compellingly about their work. In a short quip on her website, Dulcee Boehm distinguishes her glitter corn dogs, and church karaokes from art produced in urban centers. “My work is from, not about rural places” she writes. Justin Levesque uses the internet’s interest in ice blue and polar ecologies as a means of critiquing cis male conquest online. ”I queer the contemporary re-performance of colonial image-making by producing and appropriating blue photos of blue places,” he explains.
Meg Stein observes that “banality is another word for the invisible”, as a lede into the idea that common objects reveal more about ourselves and gender roles than we tend to acknowledge. Melissa Staiger cites the broad arc of a rainbow as inspiration for her hard-edged paintings; Laurie Frick contrasts the cold computational qualities of data with warm colored patterns in her public art works, sculptures and collages; Monica Panzarino’s Nipulator, a custom built electronic bra, live processes the sound of her visitors experience. “‘The Nipulator’ addresses the relationship between the body and technology while playfully fetishizing the utilitarian nature of the nipple,” she writes.
Melissa Murray, "In a few short hours I would be five miles above it, in the cold steely blue of enemy skies." 2017
It’s always dangerous to indulge in generalization, but the most poignant statements I read tend to come from a deeply personal place. Melissa Murray’s statement about making paintings that respond to the demands of life and motherhood might offer one of the better example of this, “The work is about making new spaces where there is no room, facing death while creating life, losing yourself through transformation,” she writes. “They are about fear and the unknown.”
The beauty of this statement lies not just in its honesty but in its delivery. The statement gives the viewer information already within the paintings, but that could be missed with a cursory glance. Ultimately, Murray succeeds because she recognizes the purpose of a statement is not to add metaphor to art works already rich with them, but to unpack all that’s beneath their surface.
