Month: February 2016

Ever notice how a small shift in perspective can transform the way you think about your job, relationship, insert-your-life-struggle-here?

Liz Rodda is a mixed-media artist who sharpens viewers’ abilities to reframe what they see by partnering two totally unrelated works in a mash-up of videos, sound and sculpture.

Unlike a traditional collage artist who combines varied media to build a single, unified work, Austin-based Rodda strives to maintain the integrity of each freestanding concept. That juxtaposition triggers a dialogue between the works as well as in the minds of its viewers.

Consider “The Vow,” a work in Rodda’s current exhibit, “Two Kinds of Luck,” on display at Second Street Gallery through the end of the month. In it, a neon-green yoga mat drapes casually across the floor, one end anchored by a silver-gray stone. Read the description and you discover the plaster rock has a bottle of Elizabeth Taylor’s perfume, Forever, embedded in it.

It’s a puzzle, all right. What’s the connection? Are we reflecting on what it means to find permanence on the social and spiritual planes? Our craving for immortality and the futility of fame? Or does it simply suggest that women who make it through yoga classes without a single drop of sweat disturbing their perfect hairdos also have perfume in their veins?

Beats me. But asking the questions to make new connections is the point of the exercise.

“I like contradictions and unexpected pairings,” Rodda writes in an e-mail to C-VILLE. “Context is significant in my work as a result. For example, placing one video beside another changes the way we see both. My goal isn’t to make something greater than the individual elements that are combined, but to see them differently through association.”

Influenced by psychology, philosophy and pop culture, Rodda’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions all over the country.

“I tend to borrow from a lot of different genres and styles—I draw from minimalism, pop culture, music and movies,” she writes. “My goal is to effectively blend genres and styles together when possible. This kind of mixing mimics my process—I spend a lot of time collecting video clips, images and objects and then pairing different elements to create some kind of tension.”

She spends the majority of her time collecting material she can work with and shuffling it around. “Sometimes I shoot video, but more often I use pre-existing video and audio I find online,” she writes. “The same goes with sculpture—sometimes I make objects, but much more frequently I find myself repurposing.”

As an example, she cites a video in her current show at Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum in San Antonio. “‘Turn Your Face Toward The Sun’ consists of scanned images from modern furniture magazines that pan and zoom slowly over time. The audio is made up of a girl chewing gum and whispering positive affirmations,” she writes. “The audio and video content are really different but somehow work together to give one another a new sense of direction and purpose.”

Rodda’s interest in teasing out relationships between ideas seemingly at odds with each other—really, making work that succeeds in spite of itself—is a product of her self-led exploration of her psyche as an artist.

“I studied English in college and then started making art in grad school directly after,” she writes. “It was a steep learning curve since I knew very little about contemporary art and had minimal art-making experience.”

After school was over, Rodda says, she met an artist named Frank Wick and began to zero in on the type of artist she wanted to become.

“Meeting Frank was pivotal for me not only because I later married him, but also because he showed me it was possible to take your work seriously without being too serious. He introduced me to John Waters and Slavoj Žižek, both of whom have influenced me at times.”

Her sources of creative input run the artistic gamut because Rodda is an assistant professor at Texas State University, School of Art and Design. As a result, she is exposed to and inspired by a wide range of works that she “might not make time for otherwise.”

But, of course, the real goal is that shift in perspective—a gift she gives her students whether they enjoy it or not.

“What I like best about teaching is getting to know individual students and exposing them to works and ideas that I know they will love,” Rodda writes. “At the same time, it is rewarding to show work that is challenging and harder to like.”

Last year for the month of October, fiber artist Jill Kerttula lived in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, lodging for free in a furnished apartment alongside three neighbors, among whom was a man who used paintball guns to track bears. Kerttula came to be there after being selected for the artist-in-residence program at the park, and spent her days walking in nature and taking thousands of photographs. “I use photography like my journal or sketchbook,” she says.

With eight to 10 million visitors every year, GSMNP is the busiest of the national parks—and Kerttula happened to be there during the busiest month of the year, because the changing fall foliage attracts more visitors. In addition to lodging, she was given a studio at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, though she preferred to be outdoors and taking inspiration from the sights and sensations of the Smoky Mountains.

Kerttula’s fiber art collection, entitled “A Walk in the Park,” is currently on exhibit at McGuffey Art Center until February 28.
Her objective in creating this series is to “reflect the beauty and details of the park.” She laughs when she considers that she lived for a month in a national park with some of the biggest vistas in the United States and yet was most interested in capturing acute details such as moss, fungus, rocks and a spider.

During the first week of her stay in the Smoky Mountains, it rained. The ensuing fog created a mystical environment that looked and felt like the forest primeval, she says, which became the title of her favorite piece in the series. Another piece captures raindrops as they fall into a creek and ripple out, with smooth stones sewn on to create the effect of looking down through water to the creek bottom.

Kerttula’s process of creating fiber art begins by editing the photograph online, then, once satisfied with the image, she has it printed onto cotton. From there, her art is based on traditional quilting, beginning with backing and batting layers, sometimes adding other layers or fabrics, like burlap or netting, and found objects.

Next, Kerttula moves the fabric through her sewing machine, what is known as free-motion stitching, like drawing with a needle. She then may also add some hand-stitching. The stitching, she explains, creates compression of the materials so that the unstitched sections puff out and add to the 3-D effect.

“It gives it texture and allows me to work with it in my hands,” she says, “almost like a sculpture.” Sometimes she also builds up layers and then cuts through them to create texture. “Quilting is still perceived as women’s art and folk art, and I want to work it into—and I do mean into, not up to—the world of fine art.”

Kerttula has spent a lifetime quilting and making clothes for herself and for her children. But before she became a fiber artist full-time she had a career in graphic design. After being laid off  (in her original home of Madison, Wisconsin) she supported herself creating upcycled and reconstructed sweaters that she cut and sewed, selling them at arts and craft fairs and on Etsy.

The National Park System has separate artist residency applications for each park, with varying requirements. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park seeks artists whose work “is engaged in issues that are relevant to the park’s interpretive themes,” which are diversity and abundance, continuum of human activity and refuge of scenic beauty.

Part of the requirement for the residency is for the artist to interact with the public and to share his or her artwork. Kerttula demonstrated how to create a quilted collage, and set up an en plein air leaf-printing workshop in the autumnal landscape, where children rolled ink onto leaves and printed them on paper.

Kerttula summarizes her experience of the residency as “a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself in the beauty of the park.” Next, she plans to apply for the artist-in-residence program at Badlands National Park in South Dakota and apply her artistic curiosity to a more barren landscape.