Brent's statement

Art for me does not come particularly easy, it is a struggle, but it is a desire from within me and is something that challenges me on many levels. A question was asked to me: “Will you continue to produce art when projects are no long assigned to you in class?” This rightly challenged my thinking about how I tended to separate my art from the rest of my life. I did not even realize it, but at the time I didn’t truly see myself as an artist, but instead as a student trying to produce art for a grade. Reflecting on my years here at OSU, I have learned to look beyond the grades; art isn’t about the grade or how well I did in class compared to others. My art is an extension of me. Art is my life. And I look forward to continue producing art no matter where I go in life.

Anita's statement

Thinking back when I was young, I was fully of creativity in all forms of art. I drew cartoon characters, made a car out of a cardboard box, threw a blanket on me and acted like superman, made origami, ect. I'm sure most kids went through this phase, but as of right now I would still do all those things. I make art because it's full of limitless creativity. I don't think art can really be defined or judged. Everyone is unique, and so is their idea of art. Art is a visual expression that sometimes cannot be describes with words. That is how I feel art should be approached. I find most of my interest in video art because it really messes with reality and it has the ability to manipulate the impossible to possible. I am fascinated how experimental video art can be, and I want to continue to explore the abilities it holds. With my art, I want to achieve something memorable. I want to "wow" people and give them something completely new to look at. I'm not sure where my true passion for video resides in though, because I have interests in doing something like music videos, but on the other hand, I want to create something that sends a strong message artistically like a featured film. All I know, is that I put all my feelings and effort into any art project because it's a part of me. I want to share what I visualize with the world.

Jeanette's statement

Why art? ART has always been something intimidating but fascinating to me. Not because it is difficult, but because it has no central point of view. Every person has a differing view of what ART is. It can be difficult to look at another person’s work and think it strange or useless, and it is so intimidating because you never know whose point of view is “the right one.” It is that intimidation however that makes creating a new work so fascinating; to chance your point of view and be able to express the thoughts and ideas you possess in the way you choose, whether “right” or “wrong.” Why art? Because it is through art that I am able to step outside of the expectations of others and create a method of exposing any and every aspect of myself, from my point of view. That is why art.

David's statement

I make art because there is always an aspect of humanity that interests me. This aspect is normally a contradiction and my goal is not just expose a contradiction, but to explore and hopefully grow from the realizations that arise. It’s important to me to maintain the aspect of moving image art that creates a strong experience that is unlike any other art medium. It’s not my intention to change the world with my art, but I would like people to ask questions when viewing it and then arrive at a reasonable conclusion. After all, if I get people thinking, then my art is a success.

Brittni's statement

Art to me is not something that can be defined easily, because it is everywhere and has different meanings to everyone. But to be an individual and make art that is different from everything else we have seen, you have to be willing to take a risk. This is what I want to include in all of my art. I want it to be a topic of discussion, I want people to have good and bad things to say about it, because the more controversial something is the more someone will want to talk about it. Therefore, the more that someone talks about it the more they think about it and are able to form a better analysis of what that artist was trying to say or not say.

I also feel as if people have forgotten the small things in life, and I want to emphasis those small things to show how much fun they can be. Through the internet and television people just forget how much fun things can be without all the materials, and I feel as if it is important to remind others about simple times because it makes them value things more. This is how art can be different to me, if it emphasizes something small to make it more apparent to those who have forgotten about its importance.

Zepher's statement

Human history is filled with variations on a single activity: people using available resources to accomplish what they need to do, want to do, or are compelled to do. This activity continues today, the main differences being the variety of resources, and a bit more time freed up for the wants as opposed to the needs. The products of human activity are everywhere, some displayed proudly in homes, used every day, or bought and sold as commodities, others tossed in dumpsters, accumulated in sinks, or swept under shelves. All of these products, or byproducts, have the potential to tell a story about the person or culture that created them.

As an artist, I am interested in blurring the boundaries between the precious and the mundane, the known and the conjectured, the past and the present. I take the products of a past activity, and present an alternative history of how they came to be in the studio dumpster, or on the ground by a trail in the woods. I create it as convincingly as possible, not to deceive, but to challenge the viewer to at least question what they may take for granted.

Creating an object's story often involves combining ancient designs with modern motifs, but always in an attempt to expose something timeless. A contrived Greco-roman lead sling bullet inscribed with the Greek translation of “the South will rise again,” and cast from replica rifle bullets recovered from a Civil War reenactment shooting range, may not tell us anything factual about the Greeks, the American Confederates, or modern Civil War reenactors, but perhaps it can tell us something about the nature of war and animosity.

By creating artifacts we recognize and value from the past out of artifacts we discard and ignore in the present, I hope to address a wide range of issues including value cycles, the environment, consumer culture, and poverty. However, more so than any of these things, my work is simply about noticing the unremarkable.


Ret·ro·ar·chae·og·ra·phy –noun, plural -phies.

The science of creating a new past by allowing the products of an action to determine the action itself.

Jame's statement

As an artist, my intention is to make the world a more beautiful place in which to exist. Daily life is profound and fascinating if we allow it to reveal itself. I want to take the "mundane" and give it richness, the "banal"-- exquisiteness. These qualities allow for moments in our lives to teach us and bring our experience to a higher level.
As an artist I seek to connect and unite individuals through witnessing and engaging with my art. Whether I am performing on stage, choreographing, or shooting and editing a video I want to provide an arena for connection. By revealing and allowing my subject's humanity (that which makes them unique and interesting...i.e. the James-ish-ness) to seep out through my art, I wedge a crust of light into any feeling of isolation or withdrawal from society and each other.

Zach's statement

When I was 3 years old I would say “legs we’ll be, we’ll be legs”.
My name is 3axap Bakc which is Cyrillic for Zachar Vaks, which was
turned into Zachary Podgorny when I moved to America. As Zack
Podgorny I wanted to separate my self from the anti-Semitic Russians
who harassed me when I lived in Uzbekistan. Once, my downstairs
neighbor threatened to kill me with an axe.
More fond memories of Uzbekistan include smoking grapevines, eating
honey suckles, and walking around in the bazaars of Tashkent. These
constructions of my memories are now being processed through my
paintings, drawings and freestyles.While painting and drawing provides
a critical material investigation of my ideas, the performative
element of the freestyle embarrasses me.
I enjoy rhyming in English, and recently I am attempting to use the
Russian language even though it has been eroded because of my
Americanization.

Jordan's statement

My art seeks to expose ignorance. So often, our minds are clouded with ignorant ideas about life, love, and purpose. It is necessary to allow truth to be unfiltered and focused on these areas so that controversial arguments can be rendered moot. By exploring things for what they are, I hope to give insight to those who maybe naïve.

Christopher's statement

As an artist, I strive to make work that makes the viewer evaluate his or her own psyche. I like to dig within the mind to skew or bring to light issues or experiences that plague us as human beings.

Janet's statement

When I was a child, my father played the organ at church and my family went every Sunday to mass. I attended Catholic school all of my life, my very religious grandmother lived with us and reigned over our family with a rigid notion of right and wrong, and I distinctly recall visiting my mother’s parents and walking in on my grandparents sitting beneath the giant portrait of Jesus of the Sacred Heart while saying the rosary in hushed and chanting voices that both terrified and mesmerized me. These things have yet to leave my consciousness, and I am interested in making work that responds to these memories of my Catholic upbringing.

I am fascinated by Christian saints, particularly female martyrs, and the Virgin Mary and have found that their stories of passionate devotion to Christ, their denial of worldly pleasures and the destruction of their physical bodies through torture be a rich resource upon which to draw for my work. The fragmentation and deformation of saint’s bodies resonates with me as I struggle to make peace with my own upbringing that demonized the sensuality of the body and placed value on restraint and self-denial. I am intrigued by a religion that tries to deny the messy reality of the body, yet seems to embrace the grotesque in depictions of saintly martyrdom, in the passion of Christ, and in a weekly re-enactment of the consumption of body and blood. I wonder about the persistent connection I have to a religion that offers these dualities, and I am drawn to the beauty of its iconography and inherent message of love, and at the same time repelled by the brutal and restrictive way it often negotiates humanity.

Most recently I have been altering slip-cast statues of saints and the Virgin Mary through combining them with parts of other molds. I replace the heads with heads of other animals, I mask over faces with colored under-glazes or gold luster and in doing so hope to subvert the idea of how these icons function in the context of religious statuary and Catholic beliefs. I leave the seams exposed to echo the mold making process, but also to suggest the fragmentation of the martyred saint’s body, and its reduction to a collection of parts. I also use the seams to frame intimate spaces in which to carve, hollow out or fill with color, the placement of these spaces shifts from figure to figure, creating a visual narrative across a congregation of individuals.

My work reflects my attraction to the space between the beautiful and the monstrous, between the vulgarity of the body and the purity of the spirit, between the order of ritual and the irrational nature of faith

Jeff's statement

I create and adapt. I dismantle and destroy.

Ale's statement

Currently I am a second year student at The Ohio State University, working toward my MFA in Dance, where I am focusing in performance and choreography. My choreographic processes are based on questions that drive me to generate a piece. Currently, these questions include: cultural differences, human relationships, and society. Once an idea is in my head, I start asking more questions regarding that motivation. I then improvise in the studio in search of movement qualities. I am intrigued by culture, with people’s interactions, and with small details, and the use of movement to generate a reaction in the audience. My motivation is my needs to feel and say something, which I base introducing a problem and issue. I am interested in pieces that make me think, and that moves me as a human being. In my work, I create physical, emotional and spatial tension, through using text, simplicity, and ambiguity. As a performer I like to immerse myself in what I am doing, and work to obtain the quality of the movement that the choreographer wants. Dance is an amazing and important tool in my life that I like to share to the world.

Jame's statement

As an artist, I like to make my art to make people laugh. I think humor is probably one of the few things that everyone can agree on. Just like a smile is universal, humor is too. Whether or not someone smiles or laughs at the same thing, something will always make them laugh and smile. That’s why I think humor is so important. That’s also why much of my art has a strange childish side to it. To me it seems that when you grow up, you lose a lot of the things that would have once made you laugh and smile, and quite honestly if everyone really had a choice of growing up would you really choose to? That is what I like to do with my art, to make people laugh at something that maybe they wouldn’t have thought of as being funny and to bring back a little bit of being a kid again.

John's statement

As I sit down to write this, I am humbled by the task. How do I say what I want to without sounding trite? In other words, its all been said before…


I want to create to counterbalance those who destroy. I want to intrigue. I want to entertain. I want to provoke a response, good or bad. I want to notice and be noticed.


I want all of this but need none of it. I only need to produce.

Cole's statement

As an artist I work to relay concepts and ideas to others and express myself through various media. Art is more often than not a loaded issue proposing a question or striving to deliver and answer. Sometimes art should just be created for the purpose of having a good time and giving an individual a sort of playground. I believe that from time to time a person should not worry about providing some sort of enlightened statement but instead give society something to laugh at.

Make sure not to take yourself too seriously all the time.

Ray's statement

Keep it simple. Although I enjoy the complexity of many artworks, I've learned in the past few years that my personal style is to avoid "overdoing it". When I can finally look at a piece and be happy with it, I stop myself before I begin adding unnecessary features that detract from the work. What I've found is that the simpler a work is, the more ways an observer can interpret it because there is less to narrow down their perception of it. Sure, I've made complex pieces before that have taken weeks, pulling all nighters to get them finished, but I've never been as satisfied with those pieces as I have been with a painting that took me no more than a few hours. It consisted of a hippo floating on a cloud over a plain blue sky. When I completed that painting, I realized what direction my art was heading, and I didn't have a choice.

Aaron's Statement

Art, for me, is a modality of social constructions. It is the ability to assert a sense of the unimagined and re-envisioned, whereby we all engage in perceived realities. These realities, based both in aesthetic perceptions and through theoretical constructions of meaning, are pathways to the social configurations in which we live and inhabit. Art provides important outlets for understanding the worlds of culture in which we live.

Laura's statement

I don't really feel what I make is art. It is more like therapy. I get these thoughts and feelings inside of me, and the only way to relax or get through my day is if I expel them. I guess what I am trying to say may sound selfish. But I make what I make for myself primarily, then maybe for other people. I cannot count the times that I've painted a painting or wrote a short story, never to show it to anyone else. I was compelled, driven to create it, but not for any fame, fortune, or attention. I do not like too many eyes on me. I feel like I have enough eyes on myself already. I used to put contact paper (the kind you line drawers in old houses with) on the walls of my bedroom, that way, when I woke up in the night with one of those ideas that drove me crazy, I would not have to stew until morning. I would grab the Sharpie on my nightstand and run over to the wall and just get out what ever it was: a word, a phrase, a picture, a scene. I feel weird making art as an assignment, because my brain never works that way. Which is why, even though I love art and all forms of it, I could never bring myself to be and art, creative writing, etc, major, because I have to do things on my own terms, which means on my own time. I let it flow when it's there. You can't squeeze water out of a dry rag. I have no idea if this paragraph explained why I make art. I suppose, like most of the things I create, it has meandered into something else. But maybe that is art too.

Bol's statement

As a self-taught artist, my most significant source of inspiration is the unforgiving nature of life itself–to overcome odd challenges in the pursuit of safety and comfort. In life, I live art. With each new artistic accomplishment, my life has experienced positive and lasting change, which motivates me to create more.

As young boy in a Dinka village in Sudan, I made toys of clay soil for entertainment. I never anticipated that I would eventually learn three-dimensional computer modeling techniques. At the age of six, I used art to record a personal dairy as civil war tore apart my village, separated me from my family and exposed me to different countries and harsh wilderness (as one of 35,000 children known as the Lost Boys of Sudan). Despite my young age, my mind still retains all of the snapshots and nightmares that clung to my eyes, especially the everyday battles between real-world predators, the unforgettable final memory of my village and the cruel acts of the government. I illustrated many of these events with stick figures drawn in charcoal and natural pigments upon walls, cardboard, soil and any other available surface in the refugee camp. My drawings provided clear explanations of our hardships to journalists visiting the camp that couldn't understand our language. After the start of my basic schooling, my creativity flourished through imagination, memory and observation. My skill was recognized and implemented to illustrate educational images, scientific diagrams, local emblems and contagious disease awareness posters for the community.

My artwork predominately functions as a universal language spoken in a new community to share a message that extends beyond what words can express. My current art intertwines traditional and modern techniques in conjunction with visual and conceptual aspects. I have immersed myself into art culture to examine the relationship between various media, possibilities, values, nature, diversity, culture and development in art. I am investigating art-making traditions and analyzing how society changes through art. I see the positive impact of digital media in my current work as I execute various renderings using traditional styles. The enrichment of digital media has stimulated my mind, particularly in dealing with all available chances, ongoing theories, practical and trans-formative concepts.. The enjoyment and excitement of seeing things in unique perspectives, especially with computer modeling, four-dimensional video and digital image manipulations fuel my current art exploration.

Nicole's statement

My work investigates ways of recreating cultural narratives through the poetic use of styles and conventions that have come out of Western traditions in ceramics, sculpture and architecture. Both of my parents were avid collectors of an array of types of collectable objects, ranging from model tractors and cars to coins, books and Santa Clause figurines, giving me a particular closeness to the complications of how objects come to symbolize cultural and personal value systems. I am interested in exploring how the sets of signifiers present in Western traditional formats such as the bust or the neo-classical ceramic platter combine to reinforce colonial and class power relationships. Through a process of focused abstraction that is generated in part through referencing a large range of historical influences, and through displacing an object through its representation in different media, I test the limits of the socially generative power of traditional symbolic formats.

Lindsay's Statement

My art is humorous and witty dance that is framed through the lens of the camera. There is movement in the human body, camera and editing all creating an experience for the viewer rather than a story. A distinct play on perspective and scale is often used as the dancers appear larger or smaller than they really are.

Steve's statement

I come to art from a world of standards and protocols. Information and organization dominate the landscape. In this world color, tone, shape and perspective have no meaning. This world is hidden by wrappers, boxes, buttons and knobs; all helping to mask the dirty details. Creativity and technique exist, but generally go unrecognized and unappreciated.
Despite their drastic differences, I am starting to see similarities between my world and the world of art. Experimentation, iteration, practice, calculation, processing and improvisation all work in both worlds. Both worlds also seem to have limitless possibilities, directions and methods of implementation.
I am not a complete foreigner to the world of art; something more like a tourist. For years I have been exposed to the works of many artists of all different levels, but never have taken an active roll in making art. It's strange for everything you make to be right there in the open, no wrappers, no boxes, no disguises, no cover. It's a bit uncomfortable to have your ideas criticized, defend your methodology and justify your decisions. These are the lessons that I hope to take from my foray into the world of art.

a statement

I am interested in this, that and everything in between. I wonder why that guy is wearing two different socks? Who kicked over that port-o-potty? Was there someone in it? Why did they use two different types of pavement to build that new road? I always want to understand more about the decisions people make in this world which in turn affect everyone in one way or another.

My day job is a photojournalist, so my instincts as a photographer is to document the daily life of people. It is hard to push away from that at times. In my art photographs I try my best to break away from my standards of a photojournalist by at the very least looking for something that is not normally covered for a newspaper. Many of my art projects are still a documentation of daily life (like photojournalism), but I tend to focus in on the small topics of life that go without notice.

I am in the middle of documenting tip jars and the personalization of them. Some places have simple jars, while others have large tubs with cute or dumb sayings on them to entice the customer to toss in their spare change. Another project is the documentation of what is very close to most people but goes unseen: underground tunnels, area's above ceiling tiles, etc.

Artists Statements seem to be hand in hand with art in general. Always changing, always staying the same. I could look back on this artist statement in 10, 5, 2 years and be somewhere else completely in my mindset as an artists, but to me, that is such a big part of art. Some artists can go about doing the same style and be successful for a lifetime, while other artists always have to adapt and re-think themselves to propel their creativity. I don't know which mentality I will follow, but I doubt many other artists know either.

a statement

It is true that 2-D artworks are objects, but they have traditionally been noted less for their flat qualities and more as a window into an illusionistic world. For this reason, 2-D work has always been of more interest to me than 3-D work. 2-D works present spaces and things that are both there and not there. While 3-D works also present representations, they share the same physical space as our bodies. 3-D works can also be regarded as bodies or subjects in our space. Audience members cannot enter into a 2-D space in the same way. While our bodies can share the space of a 2-D work, we cannot physically enter the spaces that are also represented or implied.

I have also been drawn to 4-D video practice. Video documentation has the ability to capture moments and events. Once captured, these framed moments can be relived from the cameraperson’s viewpoint. While videos share our space on a television or screen, the people and places captured are not actually there. As with 2-D work, we cannot enter into the represented space. It is only an illusion of movement through a progression of still frames.

This complex relationship between real/representation has been a persistent thread in my artistic explorations. My current artistic practice involves documenting how people interact with and relate to spaces using mapping tools. My work is also interested in interaction between the past and present in spaces. Ephemeral interactions are marked, traced and mapped. I want to imply absence and accentuate space through the dashed line, and yet accomplish this using a very physical, non-precious thing. I hope to highlight and also collapse perceived space using 2-D drawing strategies in a real space. I aim to facilitate drawings in and on the space, the objects and subjects.