Artists Talk With LVA: July 14 2022

Multi-disciplinary artist Colleen Toutant Merrill’s work examines the simultaneously personal and social history of textiles. Her adorned, embellished, and sometimes garish composite forms scrutinize the beauty and tension of our most interdependent relationships

She has exhibited her work here in Kentucky in  Lexington & Louisville but also in New York, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh, and at the International Textile Biennial in Haact, Belgium. Merrill has received grants from the Kentucky Federation for Women and the Great Meadows Foundation. She has been awarded fellowships for the Byrdcliffe Artist Residency in New York, and the Pentaculum Textiles Residency at the Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts in Tennessee. 

Merrill is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Bluegrass Community & Technical College and a part-time Instructor in Fiber & Material Studies at the University of Kentucky.

Her latest body of work, Day In & Day Out, opens at  WheelHouse Art  Saturday, July 16, 3:00 - 5:00 pm. The exhibition continues through September 3, 2022.

Artebella On The Radio: December 10

This week we will be speaking with Remi about her latest project, the ISEEU Mobile Platform. Tune in to WXOX 97.1 FM, or stream on Artxfm.com Thursdays at 10 am to hear Keith Waits talk with artists.

Tara Remington (Remi) is an American Multi-Media 2D/3D Artist whose processes include: public art, installation, printmaking, drawing, photography, and sculpture. Remi’s formal study: Ringling School of Art, Sarasota FL and Portfolio Center, Atlanta Ga where she studied graphic design, photography, and advertising. Her professional career began in the early 1980s in arts management, programming, instruction, and facilitation. Remi’s ten-year focus has been on collaborative 3D temporary and permanent public art installations and murals. Her work has introduced mixed media processes and art to a cross-section of age, gender, race, and socioeconomic participants. Remi envisions art as a mindful and empowering vehicle of change, informing the masses how creativity can be embraced by everyone and can be approached from many perspectives.

Vignette: Tammy Burke

Tammy Burke inside Navy and orange personal enclosure

Tammy Burke is a multi-disciplinary artist working on her MFA through the Hite Institute for Art at the University of Louisville. Her history shows a good deal of installation and performance work, and here she shows us a concentration on the tactile as well as visual textures of fabric in recent sculptural pieces. In her statement she explicates her unique take on materialism:

“We use materials to psychologically or physically transform us every day, to conduct daily living, by believing in them to catapult us to higher moments, and by designing an identity. I create constructions that comment on and respond to humans’ sometimes irrational, but deeply seated relationships to things, how people use things and materials to generate and reinforce meaning, to project beliefs and identities, and how fragile but potent that dependency is.”

"Marbled enclosure" by Tammy Burke, umbrella frames, fabric, paint, LED candles, blacklight, paper hand fans, ink, table, exotic plant, black light, 2017

“Possessions project meaning and construct identities. The body is a charged vehicle, unequally distributed, and the bearer of our intentions, delivering coded messages through possessions: adornments, positions, companions, vehicles, and domiciles. Regarding this, Russell Belk summarized Sartre: ‘the only reason we want to have something is to enlarge our sense of self, and the only way we can know who we are is by observing what we have.’* Possessions act to amplify, mask, or create the self. They describe and extend the self and have the power to transform a believer. Identity is a territory, which can be acquired or at least pantomimed through possessions and performance.”

“Materials embody beliefs and facilitate sacred acts. Rituals, among life’s daily routines, are intentional simulations in which the outcomes may not be certain, but desired and envisioned. The ritual process may be the totality of the experience, but through ritual simulation we manufacture transcendence. For the faithful participant, objects and materials used to carry out, or that are produced through rituals become cathected.”

“Cathexis involves the charging of an object, or idea with emotional energy by the individual. They retain residues of the encounter in the mind of the participant. The simulation hallows the materials as well as the faithful.”

“I provide sensory experiences through seductive constructions. They may be exotic spaces, imagery, and materials, or commonplace things thinly veiled with pageantry. These objects provide an opportunity to experience cathexis. In turn, the viewer-participant’s engagement cathects these objects and materials, a transformative process for the construction, just as the encounter may be for the visitor. The materials are the message, and momentarily, they deliver something greater than their parts. Momentarily, they look divine. For a moment they enable a transformation.”

"Tall black personal enclosure" by Tammy Burke, umbrella frame, wood, gold leaf, sequined fabric, 48x82in, 2018

Burke has kept a busy exhibition schedule while working on her MFA, most recently mounting an installation concurrent with the run of Eurydice, at the U of L Thrust Theater in January, and participating in the Artlink Regional Exhibition, Artlink Contemporary Gallery, Fort Wayne, IN, January through March of this year.

Hometown: Jeffersonville, Indiana
Education: MFA Candidate, Hite Art Institute; MA Media Communications, Webster University; BFA Painting, Herron School of Art, IUPUI
Website: tammymburke.com

Belk, Russell W. “Possessions and the Extended Self”. Journal of Consumer Research, 15 No. 2 (1988), pp. 139-168. New York: Oxford University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2489522.

Scroll down for more images

"Tall black personal enclosure" (detail) by Tammy Burke, umbrella frame, wood, gold leaf, sequined fabric, 48x82in, 2018

"Exponential" by Tammy Burke, cardboard boxes, sequin tarp, 9x12x8ft, 2018

"Big Dumb" by Tammy Burke, wood, cardboard, spandex, zippers, 62in diameter, 2017

"Navy and orange personal enclosure" by Tammy Burke, umbrella frame, wood, gold leaf, synthetic fabrics, 56x56in, 2018

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Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2018 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.

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