Last Friday, Mike Calway-Fagen, and Education Consultant, Josiah Golson, spoke with in the Studio with Sarah Tortora. Sarah will be a participating artist in a 2-person exhibition with Mike Holsomback, which will run in our 2021 exhibition season.
Sarah and Mike spoke deeply about the theme of "love and trust" as things that we aspire to in our day-to-day and our practice. But how do we each hold the emotional spaces for those powerful themes and maintain the spaces where we make the things we make?
Activity: Love and Trust
On a blank piece of paper, draw a 2-circle Venn Diagram, allowing the circles to overlap in the center. Draw them big enough so that you have plenty of room to write within the spaces.
Imagine that the space (or partial circle) to the left is the studio or office for your work.
Sit with this place and contemplate the work you do, the things you make, and the mindset you hold when working. Write a real or imagined schedule, agenda, or day-in-the-life description of what it's like to practice and work in this space.
Imagine that the space to the right is the studio for your Heart.
Sit with this place and contemplate what it is for your Heart to have a studio space in which to practice. Write an imagined schedule, agenda, or day-in-the-life description of what it's like to have a studio for your Heart to develop its practice of love and trust.
Imagine that the center space that both circles share is the intersection of your work on things and your pursuit of love and trust.
What do both studios share, what do they not share? Are there more ways where you can connect the work of one space with that of the other. Writing this part is optional.
Clip on Love and Trust
About Sarah:
Sarah Tortora (b. 1988, New Haven, CT) received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and served as a Lecturer of Contemporary Art at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia while in attendance. In 2016, Sarah mounted solo exhibitions at GRIN (Providence, RI), Reynolds Fine Art (New Haven, CT), and CAS Arts Center (Livingston Manor, NY). Sarah has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Ox-Bow School of Art, among others. She was the 2015-2016 Alice C. Cole '42 Fellow in Studio Art at Wellesley College, and currently is a yearlong artist-in-residence as the Visual Arts Coordinator at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont.
https://www.sarahtortora.com/
Resources:
Sarah Tortora // The Grid Book // Rene Descartes and the Cartesian Split // George Simmel: The Stranger // Wabi Sabi // From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual // The Box Man by Kobo Abe // Dangerous Emotions by Alphonso Lingis // Die by Tony Smith // Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau // Collapse by Jared Diamond