Artist statements and artist bio examples

Matt Suib:
This example references a specific body of work as well as how this work is situated within the artist's overall practice
Using the language and iconography of cinema as building blocks, Purified by Fire constructs an anti-mythic framework from which to reexamine social attitudes towards war, violence and morality.

Comprised of seamless video loops constructed from just a few seconds of iconic cinematic imagery and commercially available special effect stock footage, the individual works in the exhibition challenge the physical and moral gap that separates Westerners, and specifically Americans, from war and destruction.

Expanding on the artist’s previous investigations of Cinema as mythology, the work examines the mythos underlying an American mindset which demonizes foes, sanctions oppression, elevates militarism to a national value and facilitates a distinctly American notion of regeneration through violence.
Artist Bio:
Philadelphia-based artist Matthew Suib has exhibited installations, video and audio works and photographs internationally at venues including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Kunstwerke Berlin, Mercer Union (Toronto), The Corcoran Gallery of Art (D.C.) and PS1 Contemporary Art Center (NYC). His most recent exhibitions include Locally Localized Gravity at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), and the 2007 Moscow Biennale. In 2007, Suib co-founded Screening, along with artist Nadia Hironaka. Screening is Philadelphia�s first gallery dedicated to the presentation of innovative and challenging works on video and film. Screening is a project devoted to expanding access to these media and exploring ways that moving image culture influences our understanding and experience of the world. Suib is also a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellow, and a member of the Philadelphia artist-cooperative Vox Populi, where he has exhibited since 2001.

Brent Wahl: (notice 3rd person broad-based statement)
Brent Wahl’s photography, installation, and time-based media work focuses on conjuring the undercurrent of our reality; he is interested in connecting various cultural phenomenon, abstraction, magic, time, illusion, and the spectacle.
Artist Bio
Brent Wahl's photography, installation, and time-based media work focuses on conjuring the undercurrent of our reality; he is interested in connecting various cultural phenomenon, abstraction, magic, time, illusion, and the spectacle. He teaches photography at the University of Pennsylvania and his work has been exhibited at the Dumbo Arts Center (Brooklyn), Vox Populi, the Free Library of Philadelphia, Publico Gallery (Cincinnati), Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), Arcadia University Gallery (Glendale, PA), Wiess Tech House, (Philadelphia), Sackler Center Gallery, Guggenheim Museum (NYC), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Colorado), Hunterdon Museum of Art (Clinton, NJ), Pratt Manhattan Gallery (NYC), Columbia Museum of Art (Columbia, SC), Gibbs Museum of Art (Charleston, SC), and the Schafler Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). He received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and his BFA from Pratt Institute.

Roxana Perez-Mendez
As a multi-media/performance artist who works closely on the fragility of contemporary identity, I create and insert fictions about Puerto Rican achievements and monuments into the World’s meta-narrative. I use a wide range of tropes and models of modernization and globalization—i.e. embarking in a Space program, to juxtapose, reflect, deconstruct and isolate the strains of difference associated with Puerto Rican culture, class and geopolitical position, the strains that define one as the Other. The result of my work is a range of small, almost gestural forms, performances and monumental projects that hover in and document an everyday world where illusion and reality are confused.

Anna Neighbor (short version)
Anna's work deals primarily with ideas of privacy, trespass, absent presence, and the seduction of space. The photographic act is central to this investigation, and operates as a critical undercurrent in all her work.
Artist Bio
Anna Neighbor was born in Mingo, Iowa in 1977. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography and Imaging from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts in 2000. She received a fellowship to attend graduate school at Tyler School of Art where she earned her Master of Fine Arts in 2006. She works as an artist and currently teaches photography at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia and Rowan University in New Jersey.


CALLA THOMPSON
Puff

Artist’s Statement
In my work I examine small actions that beget small amounts of power, scrutinizing gains and losses. Always unresolved, my semi-narrative scenes suggest both the physical and psychological struggles of my characters. Conflicts are fixed mid-posture, leaving the viewer to decide if something has just occurred or is about to occur. The visual language and wry humor in my work is at once comforting and familiar, dislocating and suggestive.

In Puff, three masked characters stand holding their sides. The masks of the two nearest the microphone are joined, leaving them unable to speak aloud. The third masked character, without the use of the microphone, converses with a deer that uses a bugle to mediate its voice.
Artist Bio
Calla Thompson is a practicing artist and a faculty member at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She received her MFA in Photography from Syracuse University in 1999 and her BFA in Photography from the University of Ottawa (Canada) in 1996. Thompson's work is shown throughout the United States, Canada, and South America, including solo exhibitions at Soho 20 Gallery (New York), Open Studio Gallery (Toronto), and School 33 (Baltimore). Her group exhibitions include those at the Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse), the Korean Cultural Center Gallery of Los Angeles, Centro Colombo Americano de Medellin in associate with EAFIT University (Medellin, Columbia), Joan Grona Gallery (Texas), Arlington Arts Center (Virginia), and Maryland Art Place (Baltimore).