Laurel Terlesky has been practicing as a professional visual artist for more than ten years after completing her BFA degree, majoring in visual art (painting) from the University of Victoria. She creates canvases that are largely abstract in style built around an awareness of the human form and kinetic movement. Themes that have developed a language in her work are electricity & power, sustainable energy practices, spirituality, and the human body as it relates to the environment. Her paintings also challenge our awareness of space by illustrating optical, illusionary space or from flattening space by creating depth with solid colour placement. She currently resides in Squamish, British Columbia, Canada and has exhibited her work in Whistler, Squamish, Victoria, Vancouver, Montreal and San Francisco.

Laurel recently spent a month at an international artist residency in Barcelona, Spain working on future projects.

CONCERNING CHANGE

I am fascinated and intrigued by how we use our natural resources and how they affect our social structures. As a global community I see people coming together to foster new ideas about how to lessen our impact on our fragile planet. I am excited by the limitless possibilities we are embarking upon to change our lifestyle and communication. In my art I use a pop culture expression to illustrate a dialogue around how closely we are connected to our impact on our environment.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST

laurelterlesky.ca

In the studio at The Museum of Arts and Design as a curious visitor takes note of the process, NYC 2009.

Charles McGill is an African-American artist who lives in Harlem. He also plays golf, a game that is still, notwithstanding the ascendancy of Tiger Woods, popularly thought of as an economically advantaged white man’s sport. As an artist, he slyly conflates these different aspects of his identity.

Under the auspices of a fictive label, ”Club Negro,” he has issued a line of satiric mock-commodities for black golfers. For example, a commercial-style display promoting new, Africanized golf balls titled ”The Hard to Swallow Suite” offers brands like the ”New Spook” (”If you can’t beat them, scare them,” reads the ad copy on the shelf) and the ”Malcom X” (”Guaranteed to improve your game by any means necessary”).

Elsewhere, Mr. McGill presents various decorative objects for the clubhouse. A glass-doored rack contains rows of balls inscribed by hand with disclaimers like ”I was never on Soul Train” or ”I can’t jump.” A wooden plaque displays a golf club festooned with dreadlocks; another is entirely papered by reproductions of old photographs depicting lynchings.

The collision Mr. McGill craftily sets up between incongruous worlds — the one traditionally overprivileged and effete, the other disenfranchised and funky — is at once funny and sobering. New York Times – Ken Johnson

CONCERNING CHANGE

As with most sustained bodies or work, the golf-inspired theme happened quite by accident. The subject matter began showing up in my work after I picked up the game – it really was as simple as that. I saw the action of playing golf as creative, like “drawing” and composing space on the earth within a predetermined picture plane.

Each hole was its own framed piece of art. Only I felt like I was a part of the composition – inside the picture. There was a history of marks and directions that I could draw from memory later on in the studio. So I began experimenting with these memories by drawing aerial views of golf holes I imagined.

Shortly afterwards I began using golf objects as metaphors for a larger discussion of racism and identity. While I explored my own fascination with golf, I started to merge this passion with a more conceptual understanding of found object, the recycling of obscure Internet imagery, the Internet as “palette”, ethnicity, identity and socio-political dialogue.

Over the last decade I began seeing the golf bag as “found canvas”, as metaphor, as vessel and as the human form; I saw its potential as both object and subject.

Using the process of collage and “found digital imagery” I changed the identity of the bag while maintaining (or in some cases, re-establishing) its relationship to race and social differences. In the end, I want to create an object that is at first beautiful then thought provoking.

The two quintessential pieces from this body of work are, Arthur Negro I & II. Both are photo realistic, life-sized self-portraits. They represent my defining answer to the notion of Black Art, hence the name Arthur Negro.

CONTRIBUTING TO CHANGE

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST

Artnegro.com

Kim Coleman Foote is a writer from New Jersey. Her creative nonfiction and fiction has appeared most recently in Black Renaissance Noire, Potomac Review, Crab Orchard Review, and WorldView, and has been anthologized in Just Like a Girl, Woman.Period, and Homelands. Selected awards include the inaugural 2008 PALF Africana Creative Nonfiction Award to Ghana, a 2008 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, and a 2002-03 Fulbright Fellowship to Ghana. Currently based in New York, she is working on a memoir about Ghana and a novel about the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

CONCERNING CHANGE

A writer friend asked me recently if I’ve been changed by my latest project: a novel about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, told in different black women’s voices. The change actually began before the story came: ten years ago, I entered a former slave dungeon in Ghana and allowed visions of the past to haunt me. After having experienced the myriad challenges of my 20s, during which this novel grew inside me, I can say that my characters have taught me to have a less romantic but also a less cynical outlook on relationships. These women, who come from opposing social and economic backgrounds, grow to love and trust each other after initially despising one another. In essence, I hope to do the same as a writer: to invite readers worldwide to vicariously embody lives seemingly unlike their own, especially from cultures they have learned to mistrust or devalue. Change isn’t always an avalanche or a volcano eruption. It can begin even when we open ourselves to new sights, tastes, smells, and feelings. I dare you to stow away your stereotypes and enter the worlds I create, to witness how humanity—our similar emotional reactions to injustice, love, and the like—can unite us.

CONTRIBUTING TO CHANGE

Read an excerpt from Kim’s novel-in-progress, Elmina.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kim will be reading on Thursday, Nov. 5, 8pm at:
kiva cafe ~ rediscover your senses
139 reade st (2/3/A/C/E to chambers st.)
nyc, ny 10013
212-587-1198
www.kivacafe.com