COMPARING THE ARTIST STATEMENT AND BIOGRAPHIES OF THREE ARTISTS

Below are examples of short artist statements often used as an opening for a longer statement. Most artist statements change with each project or exhibition. ARTIST STATEMENT: MILLIE WILSON I think of my installations as unfinished inventories of fragments: objects, drawings, paintings, photographs, and other inventions. They are improvisational sites in which the constructed and the readymade are used to question our making of the world through language and knowledge. My arrangements are schematic, inviting the viewer to move into a space of speculation. I rely on our desires for beauty, poetics and seduction. The work thus far has used the frame of the museum to propose a secret history of modernity, and in the process, point to stereotypes of difference, which are hidden in plain sight. I have found the histories of surrealism and minimalism to be useful in the rearranging of received ideas. The objects I make are placed in the canon of modernist art, in hopes of making visible what is overlooked in the historicizing of the artist. This project has always been grounded in pleasure and aesthetics. BIOGRAPHY: MILLIE WILSON Millie Wilson is an artist whose work has been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, London, Rome, Olso, Oporto, and Melbourne. Exhibition venues include the Matthew Marks Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum of Art, White Columns, Jose Freire Fine Art, Drawing Center, Fischbach Gallery, Sonnabend Gallery, Thread Waxing Space, Tang Museum (Skidmore), Hayward Gallery, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, RomaMuseo del Folklore, Serralves Foundation, Walker Art Center, Neuberger Museum of Art, ICA (Boston), Carnegie Museum of Art, SITE Santa Fe/Museum of Fine Arts, Center for Fine Arts(Miami), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New Langton Arts, Yerba Buena Art Center, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, UCLA Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Laguna Art Museum, Ruth Bloom Gallery, Patricia Faure Gallery, Mark Moore Gallery, James Kelly Contemporary, and in various other galleries, including university and community museums. Wilsons work is in numerous public and private collections, including those of the the UCLA Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Orange County Museum of Art, The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle),The Disney Corporation, Eileen Harris Norton, and Peter Norton, Jacob and Ruth Bloom, Patti and Frank Kolodny, Alan Hergott, and Tom Patchett. She has received numerous grants, including an NEA Visual Artists Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, City of Los Angeles Artist Grant, California Arts Council Fellowship, Art Matters,Inc.Grant, and a LACE Artists Projects Grant, has been published in a variety of contexts, and has taught and lectured throughout the U.S. and Europe. She has been a member of the faculty of the Program in Art at the California Institute of the Arts since 1985. ARTIST STATEMENT: KAREN ATKINSON My work for the past 20 years has used revealing aspects of history, which have a profound impact on our contemporary culture today. In the current climate where many believe history has no relevance, I find myself continually returning to those aspects that are often hidden or misrepresented in the official recordings for posterity. In my varied and diverse approaches to making art; installations; public, curatorial and web projects, the context of the work has an impact on the works relationship to the viewer. My work ranges from the context of the street to museums, movie theaters, to presentations of sound through parking meters. Often focusing on the trappings of power and the rituals needed for its effect, or evoking the traditional distancing of the supplicant by those in power, giving voice to those who are often unheard, or revealing the power of language through history. The work takes on various forms intended to draw in the viewer as co-author and witness, create new and unpredictable cycles of thoughts and associations, providing an experimental chance to challenge ones perceptions, perspectives and assumptions.

My current project, Prisoner of Love is a multi media installation with a projection of a 41 minute Director movie on a glow in the dark screen made by the artist. There are bus benches for comfortable seating, and a sound track with multiple interviews, music and sound. When the images are projected on a glow in the dark screen, it charges the screen so that when the image changes, it leaves a trace of the image before it, often affecting the image which comes next in a way that history does the same. Prisoner of Love is a multi layered story about the my great aunt and uncle, who were married illegally in 1934, in Tijuana, Mexico. She was Caucasian (Danish American), he a Japanese American. They were included in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Although my grandfather grew up with a Japanese American as his best friend, when his sister married, she was shunned by her brothers and sisters. When the local newspaper found out about their marriage a few years later, it hit the front pages of the local newspaper. This project is a complex layering of stories, revealing the contradictions inherent in the lives of this once close knit family, and their subsequent recovery from extreme bouts of racism. Art remains as a strong contender of how we share our thoughts and ideas. Throughout history, art has survived the tidal wave of information, and remains an unpredictable source of imagination. It has the possibilities of changing ones thoughts, opening new ideas, and borrowing through received ideas so common to our educational system. I have no grand illusions that art will create a revolution in the traditional sense, but have witnessed the powerful changes it can make in an individual. Just one new idea can change a persons perception. The world may not change in an instant by art, but its slow and insipid spread into the active part of our brains lives to tell the tale. It may leave the studio and make its way around the world, and yet come back to the studio where any thing can happen. The use of materials in my work is calculated. I am often looking for avenues of the unexpected. An ironic twist to images or things you might expect. Or their combinations. Provoking a participant to new and perhaps unexplored territories. BIOGRAPHY: KAREN ATKINSON Karen Atkinson is a media, installation and public artist, independent curator, collaborator, and has published and guest edited a number of publications. She has exhibited and curated internationally including South Africa, Australia, Europe, Mexico, Canada, and throughout the USA, and exhibited in the Fifth Havana Biennial in Cuba. She was a co-founding director of Side Street Projects in 1991, a non-profit artist-run organization in Los Angeles which is still up and thriving today. She has been a faculty member at CalArts since 1988. She is the past Board President of NAAO, the National Association of Artists Organizations. She has served on the board of directors of LACPS, Side Street Projects, Installation and serves on many Advisory Boards of arts organizations. Atkinson currently teaches classes and workshops titled Getting Your Sh*t Together and has created software for visual artists of the same title. Her company GYST Ink, is an artist project. www.gyst-ink.com ARTIST STATEMENT: SAM DURANT My artwork takes a critical view of social, political and cultural issues. Often referencing American history, my work explores the varying relationships between popular culture and fine art. Having engaged subjects as diverse as the civil rights movement, southern rock music and modernist architecture, my work reproduces familiar visual and aural signs, arranging them into new conceptually layered installations. While I use a variety of materials and processes in each project my methodology is consistent. Although there may not always be material similarities between the different projects they are linked by recurring formal concerns and through the subject matter. The subject matter of each body of work determines the materials and the forms of the work. Each project often consists of multiple works, often in a range of different media, grouped around specific themes and meanings. During research and production new areas of interest arise and lead to the next body of work. BIOGRAPHY: SAM DURANT

Sam Durant lives in Los Angeles and teaches art at California Institute of the Arts. His work has been widely exhibited internationally and in the United States. He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Kunstverein Dusseldorf, S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium, and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand. His work has been included in the Venice, Whitney, and Moscow Biennales and will be featured in the upcoming Sydney Biennale and Bienal de Arte Panam in 2008. Durant is represented by Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan, and Paula Cooper Gallery in New York where he has had numerous exhibitions. His work has been extensively written about including seven monographic catalogs and books. In 2006 he compiled and edited a comprehensive monograph of Black Panther artist Emory Douglas work. His recent curatorial credits include Eat the Market at the Los Angeles County Museum and a survey show of Emory Douglas (MOCA 2007). He has co-organized numerous group shows and artists benefits and is a co-founder of Transforma Projects/New Orleans. He has received a United States Artists Broad Fellowship and a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Grant.