Jake Abraham - “Seed”

Jake Abraham is a sculptor currently working towards an undergraduate degree in studio art at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He employs various materials and methods of construction — both digital and analog — in the creation of his works, which tend to call attention to their own fabrication. His sculptural practice is an exploration of the built environment, often grappling with notions of with structure, gravity, furniture and architecture. These concepts are toyed with to create curious objects that emerge from a vaguely familiar, yet unidentifiable world. Jake is constantly looking for new materials and tools to play with, and he continues to expand the scope of his sculptural practice.

Generatively designed, Seed is an amorphous organic form, it’s surface bubbling with spherical volumes. The sculpture’s form and material evoke the primordial development of a cellular organism, yet it’s digital precision and robotically carved surface reveals an entirely different kind of growth.

Charles Allen - “Bound Sunburst”

Charles Allen is a senior at Wesleyan University studying sculpture and digital art production. Incorporating his experience with larger scale fabrication and architectural modeling, Allen explores the interplay of robotic mark-making and the touch of the human hand. Interested in the interaction between rigid structure and viscous organic forms, Allen combines digital fabrication tools and traditional sculpting techniques to create artifacts which play with materiality, spatial distortion, and illusions of motion and balance. The disruption of predicable linear forms by frenzied dynamic ones, and the structuring of irregular chaotic forms by harsh geometric ones are two paradigms essential to Allen’s practice.

Based around the concept of a flowing form sliced by an invisible bounding box, the preserved curved faces are engraved with fanned radial machine lines, extending out from algorithmically selected foci. These machine patterns, as well as the gentle sweeping motion of the form itself, pair with the pink and grey marbled stone to create a dynamic yet structured composition.

Chris Chenier - “Spanish Little Friar Tumbler (Pigeon, 24 frames)”

Inspired by the time-motion studies of photographers Etienne Jules-Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, Christopher Chenier studies the outcome of collisions between images and objects. Processing moving images through purpose-built software, Chenier pursues a generative approach to “form finding” that embraces chance operations and computation as allies in creative development.

Based on archival films, this project is a third manifestation in Chenier’s ongoing translation of moving images into sculptural objects. By “transcoding”found footage into the stone, Chenier attempts to rethink the relationship between nature ande technology. At the core of the sculpture hides an animated GIF. Beneath its surface a pigeon tumbles in an eternal plummet to nowhere.

Chris Coleman - “Reach An Unprecedented Accord”

Chris Coleman was born in West Virginia, USA and he received his MFA from SUNY Buffalo in New York. His work includes sculptures, videos, creative coding and interactive installations. Coleman has had his work in exhibitions and festivals in more than 30 countries including Brazil, Argentina, Singapore, Finland, the U.A.E., Italy, Germany, France, China, the UK, Latvia, and across North America. He currently resides in Denver, CO and is a Professor of Emergent Digital Practices at the University of Denver and Director of the Clinic for Open Source Arts.

A storm blocks the sun and invokes thew approach of chaos, but storms are also cleansing, offering a chance to start again. We never stop trying to create delineations between “us” and “them,” using physical borders as reminders of our supposed differences. At these seams where places meet, we exist in gradients, but the walls encourage violence by casting hard shadows.

James Conboy - “In the garden before the snakes”

«My interest in recent works is in the redesigning of found objects into Art works. The sculpture here started out as styrofoam packing material for a flat screen television. Now it is transformed into this marble sculpture. The juxtaposition from the styrofoam to marble has been very challenging and rewarding.

I studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. It is the first Academy to teach the fine arts in America. After graduating a few years later I moved to New York City and started showing my works in midtown and east village galleries. I am still living there and showing my works».

Carl D’Alvia - “Barboncino”

Carl D’Alvia’s work has appeared at various venues in the United States and in Europe including the deCordova Museum, Art Omi, Nathalie Karg Gallery, Regina Rex, Derek Eller, Feature Inc, Biagiotti Progetto Arte (Firenze), The Flat/Massimo Carasi, MARS Milano and Galerie Papillon (Paris) .Reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Flash Art, and The Boston Globe among others. He was the awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in 2012.

D’Alvia works in a sculptural idiom that is decidedly hyper-visual, artisanal and history laden. He’s developed proprietary sculptural processes that co-opt existing means of traditional and industrial production. The work draws on diverse sources that include megalithic monuments, toy design and the Baroque, while encapsulating seemingly antithetical motifs such as minimal/ ornate, industrial/handmade, comic/tragic, progress/ destruction and attraction/repulsion.

Marcela Erives - “Transizione”

Marcela Erives is a Mexican American artist born in Chihuahua Mexico, and raised in El Paso Texas, border land to Juarez Mexico. She received a Double BFA in sculpture and ceramics at The University of Texas at El Paso and is a current MFA student at Arizona State University. Her work explores anthropomorphic forms in fiber glassed foam and layering of bright colors in the attempt to create physical manifestations of the beautiful, and the grotesque. Through the lens of fun, her work showcases sexuality, and explores disidentification and the absurdities of social norms of beauty in form, from a queer point of view.

Marcela’s work originates from a series of drawing studies, and 3D scanned clay models. She further manipulates and enhances the form in a 3D modeling program. Her desire to collaborate with technology and robots to complete this piece was a central point of interest, by transitioning to a completely different way of working and approaching her work from another point of view to explore new possibilities. Her fascination with the long trajectory of going back and forth from the physical to digital approaches of art making has brought her to DSP.

Francis Fox - “Tree”

Francis Fox is currently a Professor of Sculpture at Boise State University since 1999. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Wyoming in 1997 and a minor degree in Geology/Geophysics in 1985. Beyond academic education, Fox gained sculpture skills and professional experience by working in several art-related fields including 5 years at Shidoni Art Foundry near Santa Fe, NM. In 2011 Fox was awarded an Arts and Humanities Fellowship to research 3D-digital technologies. His studio practice combines digital processes with traditional sculpting. Fox has produced several public sculptures throughout the American West and Boise, ID. He is passionate about collaborating with other artists and professionals to realize ambitious or monumental projects. His latest public sculpture “Mortal Process” was recently installed at Hangzhou Bay Park in Ningbo, China.

«Life emerges at interfaces. It flourishes in cracks, intersections, and transition zones. An abstract idea but my sculptures are extremely physical. Tree is an object grounded in form and the elemental material of marble. I use digital processes to abstract and then to reinforce the physicality of nature. I intend the sculpture to exists as if it grew from the interaction of natural forces and human intention. Tree suggests potential, growth, and the responsive awkwardness of life».

Olin Fritz - “Torsion”

Olin Fritz is a senior majoring in sculpture, working towards his BFA at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. He has also attended the University of Arizona, as well as Mohave Community College, where he completed an Associate degree in Visual Communications. When first starting, he was heavily influenced by stop motion animation, puppet making, and set design, which now inform his ceramic and cast metal sculptures. Predominantly figurative, Olin’s work still retains a theatrical quality, the figures seem as though frozen in action, as if they were a single paused frame in a film. The sculptures themselves, fired in clay or cast in bronze, feature attached mixed media collages and found objects. They reflect the way a character may be created by a group of artists for a film.

The figure, realized originally in clay, was 3D scanned and later altered digitally, and portrays a gaunt male figure who’s swollen arm is contorting and writhing painfully, as if frozen seconds before a climactic ending. Evocative and expressionistic, Torsion is inspired by a personal story, where, at the apex and crossroad of an all-time low, the path is realized through the lens of the artist’s Christian worldview.

Karena Graves - “Freedom Airs”

Karena (Kidd) Graves is a current student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro obtaining a BFA in Sculpture and Ceramics. Their work consists of clay, metal, and found objects. They create structures by investigating architectonic forms and shapes that they have experienced from looking at houses, buildings, and buildings in the process of construction.

Freedom Airs is a piece relating to the Air Jordan sneakers’ social status within the African American and sneakerhead community. This piece is dedicated to the power dynamics of the Air Jordan - how they have caused many cases of violence and death but how they also have allowed Black individuals to feel as though they mattered in American society where they are at times seen as less than.

Heather Hansen - “Serpentine”

«The grace and beauty of the human form in motion is at the heart of my artistic process. Growing up in a rural mountain town in Idaho and learning dance in my sister’s school, this fascination began early. After a university dance scholarship and a BA in Theatre Design, I moved to Japan to study Butoh dance with Kazuo Ohno. This became a formative time for my artistic vision both aesthetically and philosophically. There, I developed a rigorous approach to the reduction of elements to their most essential meaningful form while maintaining something raw and untamable. For me, process is art, and the body is the first point of access to the observations of the mind, whether it’s visual art or dance, high technology or Stone Age art tools.

Serpentine was created with dance in virtual reality, carved by robotics, finished by hand, and informed by the breath-taking experience of being in the heart of the Apuan Valgli marble quarries. There, the scale of the human form is minuscule in relation to our inventiveness and desire to create. The body is our most primitive yet sophisticated tool. I think of dance as sculpting the space displaced by my movement pathways, and the quarry feels like an incomprehensibly grand example of this».

Jon Isherwood - “Sbocciando”

Isherwood’s work has been widely exhibited in public museums and private galleries internationally. He has had more than 20 solo exhibitions and has been featured in many group exhibitions, including the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy; The McNay Museum, San Antonio, TX; The Derby City Museum, Derby, UK; and Kunsthalle, Manheim, Germany, The national Museum, Beijing, China; The DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum USA, Villa Strozzi, Florence and in Belgrave Square, London, UK. His work can be found in more than 25 public collections and received over 30 commissions in the public and private sector. Reviewed include The New York Times, Art in America, ArtNews, The Washington Post, Sculpture Magazine, Partisan Reviews and in The Guardian and London Times UK. www.jonisherwood.com

The tension between shape, pattern and skin that characterizes Isherwood’s work is further reflected in the tensions surrounding his technique and material. His sculptures are the result of a unique process in which the ancient and the modern confront one another: Stone, the oldest and most sensual sculptural material, is carved with the help of high-tech methods. This allows Isherwood to attain an uncompromised precision in his treatment of the incised surfaces, which play with and against the swelling, fleshy, soft and yet substantial character of his organic forms.

Kelly Johner - “After Venus: Sella Donna”

Born in Alberta, Canada, Kelly Johner lives on a farm North of Edmonton. The relationships between agriculture, ecology and the natural environment are key sources of inspiration for her work in sculpture and drawing. Kelly received her MFA in Sculpture at the University of Alberta in 2007. She has since devoted her time to developing work in her studio on the farm, teaches in the department of Art and Design for the University of Alberta in Edmonton and works as a Research Assistant for the installation artist Lyndal Osborne. Kelly has shown her work in local and provincial shows in Alberta, British Columbia and has work in various permanent collections.

«Some years ago, I salvaged an old saddle tree headed for the land fill. I was intrigued by the figurative nature of its form, its resemblance to the female body, and the beauty of its utility and function. The saddle tree is both the inspiration and object/subject of my work. For the Digital Stone Project, I was interested in taking two human made objects steeped in historical meaning; a Venus torso and a saddle tree form. Combining, morphing and compressing them together in marble brings a contemporary and innovative way of working the stone that is also layered with historical content».

Marilyn Langevin - “Undaunted”

Marilyn Langevin, is a former professor in speechlanguage pathology and now a 3rd year student in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at the University of Alberta. She studied art history in Cortona, Italy for a term, attended the 2018 summer undergraduate residency at the New York Academy of Art, and took summer painting workshops at the Burren College of Art in Ireland. The human form and expression of internal human states underlie her current work. She explores the interior world of woman who find themselves at that melancholic moment of knowing that they must leave something behind and heed the call to do whatever it takes to move on. Undaunted speaks of the unbounded intestinal fortitude and intuition of woman who do just that.

Undaunted is a marble form of a dress made of paper that needed to be soaked in water until the moment at which it behaved like cloth. If not soaked long enough it defied penetration of needle and thread; if soaked too long it tore. In making Undaunted in marble, Marilyn explores finding a similar moment of transcendence. In this case, the moment of optimal balance between perseveration of the natural calcite crystals and the rendering of them into a cloth-like surface.

Mary Neubauer - “1. The Earth’s Molten Core”

Mary Neubauer’s work addresses mathematics and the natural world. Her background in traditional methodologies is paired with new modes of digital production, resulting in artwork that is first realized via programming and the virtual world. Her sculptures and digital images have appeared in numerous international exhibitions and symposia. Public art projects include interactive installations involving light and sound. Neubauer’s interest in remote sites and the evolution of data gathered from geophysical sensors led to her participation the expeditionary Arctic Circle 2016. Creative residencies include Garfagnana Innovazione 2013- 2019, Anderson Ranch, the Tyrone Guthrie Center, and the John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry Residency. She was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, and was a Fulbright Fellow (Cambridge, England). She is a President’s Professor at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Mathematics becomes a visual language in this series of work. The rotation of Earth’s molten core is observed and recorded by a polar satellite. And an important measure of climate change, the seasonal extent of ice formation in our northernmost seas over time, is modeled in a series of small data visualizations. Resembling landscapes, these small sculptures record daily sea ice formation since 2006, from the MASIE study, conducted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado.

Daisy Nolz - “The Slouchy Balloon”

Firmly rooted at the intersection of art and technology, multidisciplinary artist Daisy Nolz weaves together traditional practices and emerging media in her Arizona based practice. With interests ranging from dance to 3D animation, and from literature to rapid prototyping, Nolz’s recent projects combine digital software and foundry casting in an exploration of process and material. Determined to manifest digital objects in physical space, Nolz employs software developed for cinema and gaming development as well as 3D printers, and data visualization software throughout her work.

The Slouchy Balloon is the result of a fabric simulation Nolz developed using industrial software intended for digital animation and special effects. Originally developed for a project in Nolz’s foundry, The Slouchy Balloon is less a conceptual or narrative gesture than an invitation for interaction and play. Please touch.

Kimberly Redding - “Mine!”

A California native, Kimberly receives her encouragement from an ocean breeze, sand between her toes and twinkling seawater. Intertwining precious stones and metals into Kimberly’s artwork allows her to encompass multiple media such as fine jewelry, paintings, drawings and sculptures into visions of tangible art. Encompassing 23 years in the medical field, from an emergency medical technician to managing medical facilities, Kimberly decided to accept the challenge of higher education. An undergraduate student at Arizona State University (ASU), Kimberly is completing her bachelor’s in fine arts (BFA) and minor in psychology. Kimberly’s thesis for Barrett, the Honor’s College at ASU, is a proposal for master’s and Ph, D. programs in Art Therapy. Consequently, Kimberly utilizes her artistic influence to help others heal through visual arts and art therapy.

Demonstrative nautical inspirations present Kimberly’s Mine! with poise amongst reality and a world for caprice. Action in repose, Mine! implies the octopus’ attempt to plunge into the oceanic depths before the last tentacle has the ability to grasp her newly found discovery of the amethyst sphere; abiding the breaking wave. Mine! is an internal argument between one’s dangerously persistent appetite for treasure and the welfare of survival.

Tristan Ryer-Parke - “Closer to the Bartender”

Tristan Ryer-Parke is a junior at Bennington College studying sculpture and digital arts. He creates sculptures which shroud personal and social issues in the allure of robotic movement. His work relies heavily upon digital fabrication, highlighting the power in modern industry. Once magnetized by industrial prowess, the viewer is faced with the environmental and social impact these materials and processes have on us. His recent work uncovers sinister actions hidden within the Teflon industry and the effects on Ryer-Parke, his family and town.

Closer to the Bartender is born out of the hidden electrical and computational control that drives industrial robotics. Although robot arms seems to easily replace the working human, every movement must be programmed, showing a lack of autonomy. Closer to the Bartender sketches a new type of robotic form in an industrial setting. It aims to give us a glimpse of the future in which a stone carving robot can move as organically and easily as we move a finger.

Sumit Sarkar - “Invisible Transparent”

Sumit Sarkar is a British sculptor and painter working with digital and analogue techniques, taking inspiration from religious iconography, science fiction and street art, with recent work focussing on abstracted sculptural form after a lifetime of figurative work. New technology is at the forefront of Sumit’s practice and recent projects include the use of video mapping, motion capture, virtual reality and multi material 3D print. Sumit has exhibited in various solo exhibitions around the UK, and international projects including a recent residency and exhibition at the Colombo Art Biennale in Sri Lanka. Sumit has directed public collaborative art projects in Shetland with UZ Arts, in Exeter with Mischief La Bas and in Finland with Spearfish. Sumit also works as a designer, curator and workshop leader. www.kriksix.com

Sumit’s sculpture looks at the bringing together of various digital sculptural techniques and playing with the relationship between robot and human; using two kinds of marble, fused with multi-material 3D printed parts sculpted around the milling simulations from the 7-axis robot arm. Sumit’s work is funded by Arts Council England, the next phase of the project will see the work existing in Virtual and Augmented Reality where it will come to life with 3D animation and digital projection.

Jay Silverstein - “Look it Up”

Today, the average weekly screen time for an American adult – brace yourself; this is not a typo – is 74 hours – and still increasing. On those screens, I receive my pop-conscious postmodern fiction. This genre is built on ideas – traced back to the fifties and sixties – which reject grand narratives; There is one True God, History is Progress, Peace on Earth. Postmodernism lacks that optimism. It is steeped in cynicism, irreverence, moral relativism, and irony. It is an excellent critical tool, but its deployment is more slash-and-burn than carful pruning. Jay Silverstein’s artistic output addresses the hip, cynical transcendence of sentimentality with a compelling alternative, embracing maximalist selfsincerity. Look it Up – a sculpture made with the direct intervention of machine – fuses ancient material with futuristic processing. It even shows you how to use it.

«A great existential crisis remains ever on the horizon. As my art practice relies ever-more heavily on digital intervention, I have come to realize that my ability to make work may someday come to an end. Not by death, not by disfigurement or by dissolution of will, but by lack of technological sophistication. I need equipment built by other people to create. In order to combat my terror, I’ve made this sculpture; an operator’s manual for some near-future gear».

Molly Sullivan - “Sphere that eats itself”

Molly Sullivan is an undergraduate student studying Architecture and Economics at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Her work examines the processes and technologies used to enforce bureaucratic institutions, utilizing their mundane familiarity as a basis for experimentation. She also works with small scale design-build architecture, creating spaces designed for, and built by, the human body.

Sphere that eats itself seeks to respond to the mechanical processes the marble goes through during its time on the mill. Made exclusively of simple spheres warped and twisted around each other, the work gains a natural and organic presence from basic functions of modeling softwares. The viewer, through careful examination, may begin to identify these individual forms and the implications of a much more complex set of systems lying just beneath the surface of the stone.

Gabriel Vinas - “Santa Lucía dell’Afarensis”

Gabriel Vinas is a Cuban-born American artist whose work leans heavily into the evolutionary sciences. He is currently a part of ongoing collaborative research in biological anthropology conducted at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and is completing his sculptural graduate studies at Arizona State University in the United States. Starting from printed CT-scan data, or research-quality castings of ancient human remains, Gabriel uses a blend of modern technologies along with traditional sculpting techniques to anatomically resurrect the various discovered individuals in our evolutionary past. Through scientific publication and museum displays, it is his aim is to optimize the methods within the field of anthropological reconstructions as well as challenge historical biases and misconceptions regarding the depictions of hominins. This work is pushed into new contexts within his studio art practice to bring the anthropological narrative to a different audience and explore how an evolutionary understanding can add to contemporary conversations.

The model for Santa Lucía was sculpted as part of the aforementioned research conducted in Adelaide Australia. A skeleton was printed using fused deposition modeling from the scan data of a 3.2 million year-old specimen known by many as “Lucy.” As part of the research, the anatomy was sculpted by Gabriel in collaboration with PhD candidate Ryan M. Campbell and consulted by Anthropologist Maciej Henneberg to produce a reconstruction of Lucy. Using a resin copy of this figure as the base, Gabriel then sculpted the veiling and drapery using clay. This model was laser scanned and executed in marble at Garfagnana Innovazione.

Pat Wasserboehr - “Pink Progression”

Pat Wasserboehr is a sculptor and a professor in the School of Art at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has served her visual art program as a Department Head for over a decade and has taught sculpture fundamentals though graduate courses for over three decades. Her sculpture has been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States, China, Germany and Spain. She is the recipient of numerous UNCG grants and scholarships. Most recently, she received the UNCG Faculty First Summer Scholarship, the Globally Engaged Research and Creativity Grant from, UNCG, and ArtsGreensboro Regional Projects Pool Grant. In 2019, she is an artist in residence with the Digital Stone Project/Garfagnana Innovazione in Gramolazzo, Italy. Additional residencies include Salem to Salem at Salem Art Works in Salem, New York, Universiy of Massachusetts studies abroad program in La Napoule, France, and at the University of Georgia’s study abroad program in Cortona, Italy. In July of 2019, she will attend a stone carving carving workshop in Eberding, Germany.

«My sculptures represent my efforts to transition from representational figuration to abstract or symbolic figuration. The composition show a progression of objects. A head-like object is in a central position and two other torso like objects flank it. The forms feature flat planes, rounded volumes, and lines that are arranged to suggest body parts. The marble was selected for its fleshy color resembling a skin color, and pays homage to the artist Brancusi and to the Art Deco movement in design».