2X2 Collective

Residency: January-February 2012

2X2 is a collective: four artists with disparate uses of the figure, at intersections of the social, political, and personal. We met through the New York Foundation for the Arts MARK program and quickly realized the potential for combining existing work and creating new pieces in response to each other. Our work runs from raucously satirical to disturbingly confrontational by way of the intriguing and ethereal.

We create objects, interactive and sculptural installations, video, and street performances. Our figures have agency, empower viewers as centers of process and experience, and co-opt them as complicit participants. We complicate and push against dichotomies and hierarchies: self/other, perpetrator/victim, rural/urban, black/white, family/stranger, performer/observer.

Project Statement
At Sculpture Space, 2X2 is developing a collaborative installation for Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ, which we will install immediately following our residency. The show will run from March 10th to April 14th, 2012. (http://www.aferro.org)

About the Artists

Ben Altman – “I torture myself in my basement”. The government won’t release torture photos; Ben Altman makes his own. He acts as victim, perpetrator, complicit witness. He screws or glues his segmented prints to dog-cages, bed-frames, wire mesh, and mirrors.

Christine Heller – "I cut, wrap, draw, knot, twist and paint". Family estrangement, personal tragedy and political outrage intersect for Christine Heller. Both painter and installation artist, she sees her installations as performance. She explores family and societal denial, paints faces – from family albums and news photographs – and draws bodies. She cuts figures from muslin, which thread around and through paintings and drawings, forming suspended figures that suggest shells, souls and shrouds.

Maria Driscoll McMahon – "I am a rural artist." Those five words carry a freight of stereotypes and prejudices. Maria’s work glories in and confronts this predicament. She works with wearable sculpture – suits covered with burdock burrs – video interviews of residents in her small upstate NY town, and drawings.

Sandra Stephens – “I turn identities inside out”. Sandra is fascinated by construction and reconstruction of identity: internally by the self, from the outside by stereotypes and visual culture. She uses video installations – the viewer as part of the piece, the piece responds to the viewer.

Maria Driscoll McMahon

Lockwood, NY
Residency: January-February 2012

"I am a rural artist." Those five words carry a freight of stereotypes and prejudices. Maria’s work glories in and confronts this predicament. She works with wearable sculpture – suits covered with burdock burrs – video interviews of residents in her small upstate NY town, and drawings.

The unlikely sculpting medium of burdock burrs is muse and metaphor for selves on the fringe: refuted, abject, left to waste. Growing most often in distressed soil, it is the invisible made monstrous to confuse your eye, ravage your hair and lay waste your fine clothes.

And yet, all the properties which render burdocks a weed can also make it a medicine. Herbalists tout the weed as a blood purifier, a tonic, a tincture…

In another body of work entitled "Still Life with Calving Iceberg," Maria explores the adolescent condition and identity formation through drawing and a metaphor that speaks to environmental devastation.

Maria has been drawing, painting and sculpting for many years. In 2010, she was a Crossroads Grant Recipient for a multi-disciplinary project entitled This Mad Attachment: The Burdocks Project which involved video-taped interviews with over 40 people from her home town on the topic of rural and urban stereotypes and the culture wars. The project included sculptures, drawings and street performance. This Mad Attachment was funded in part by The New York State Council on the Arts’ Decentralization program, administered locally by TheARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes.

Maria has exhibited her work in group shows in Brooklyn, Berlin and Binghamton among other places.

She received her MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College in 2008.

Ben Altman

Ithaca, NY
Residency: January-February 2012

Ben Altman began to think of himself as an artist some ten years ago – in his late forties – after a varied career that included towing icebergs, professional sailboat racing, and commercial photography. He explores political, social, and personal issues using his body, community, and way of life, often through self-imposed difficulties and absurdity. He has long been intrigued by the specious veracity, seductive power, and conceptual tensions of photographs. These concerns have led him to mixed media and interdisciplinary work: hand-made multiple and segmented prints supported by a variety of materials and objects; installations that use his skills in rigging, carpentry, and contraptions; and now video installations. He invites audience manipulation of and participation in his work, sometimes using the internet. He builds community and connections through audience participation in projects and trading schemes. He is interested and active in using art to create connections between communities within his local area of Ithaca, NY.

Christine Heller

Cooperstown, NY
Residency: January-February 2012

“I cut, wrap, draw, knot, twist and paint”. Family estrangement, personal tragedy and political outrage intersect for Christine Heller. Both painter and installation artist, Heller sees her installations as performance. She explores family and societal denial, she paints faces – from family albums and news photographs- and she draws bodies. She cuts life-sized figures from muslin fabric, that suggests shells, souls and shrouds, and she entwines wire and fence throughout her installations. “I want to convey unspoken complications in human relationships.”

Heller has exhibited in numerous one-person shows, including at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Great Barrington, MA, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, Wells College, Aurora, NY, the Arkell Museum, Canajoharie, NY, the Munson-Williams-Proctor School of Art, Utica, NY. Heller’s work was represented by the John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY from 2008 – 2011.

Group exhibition highlights include the Icebox Project Space, Philadelphia, PA, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY, the Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, the Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany, NY, and Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY.

Heller was awarded a University Fellowship from the Tyler School of Art of Temple University, Philadelphia, PA where she received her MFA in 1981. She has taught at Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY, SUNY Oneonta, Oneonta, NY, the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore MD and in the Vermont College Graduate Program of Norwich University, Montpelier, VT. She has received a fellowship at Virginia Center for Creative Arts in Amherst, VA. Heller was awarded the 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts MARK 11 Professional Development Program.
 

Sandra Stephens

New Hartford, NY
Residency: January-February 2012

Based in New York, Sandra Stephens creates video and video installation works to explore issues related to cultural and individual identity. She has exhibited nationally, mainly in the New York and Central New York regions at such places like the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse and the Munson-Williams-Proctor-Arts-Institute in Utica, New York. Her work has also been shown internationally in various locations including Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Triennale di Milano in Milan, Centre de Cultura Contemporania in Barcelona and Atelier-Haus/Galerie ZeitZone in Berlin. Sandra teaches time arts at PrattMWP in Utica, NY, and has taught at Hunter College, FIT and SVA in Manhattan.