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Spike Mafford is an artist from Seattle Washington who does photography. He has been featured in the Seattle Times newspaper and some local art exhibits. It not really that his photographs in particular are pushing boundaries, but his exhibit Braille does. The exhibit was in 2006-2007 at the Francine Seders Gallery in Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington. The installations included his photography with braille text. His landscapes and skyscapes, accompanied by the textural quality of braille text is beautiful. His work allows both the sighted and the blind to enjoy art in a whole new way. The text is written by Lisanne Dutton, Peter J. Vogt and Spike Mafford in a descriptive yet abstracted way and is allowed to be touched. The images and info are from Mafford's website.
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| "Mt. Vesuvius" Spike Mafford ultrachrome ink jet print, 2005 |
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| Erin Lauridsen, blind since birth, touches and reads the art installed at Francine Seders Gallery |
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| Reading "Smokestack" |
The next artist I wanted to talk about was actually featured in The Virginian Pilot for her paper works. Ruth Knowles Scarlott was self taught and created art for herself expression. Her work was briefly exhibited in The Charles H. Taylor Arts Center in July of this year. Scarlott's art is a mix of media, paper making, assemblage and collage. She was inspired by poetry and writing and the people in her life. Some of Scarlott's art was deffered from specific poems and conversations with her daughter about them. Her works themselves are very poetic with layers of meaning and texture. The article can be read here.
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Next artist is Natasha Sazonova who is from Ukraine but now lives in the US. She studied at the Fine Arts Studios at the University of Engineering and Architecture in Ukraine and later recieved her BA from the University of Connecticut in 2000. She now has a masters from 2008 in Graphic Design. She has done many exhibits in the United States in the Northeast. Her work is mostly composed of portraiture (of herself and others). They are beautiful, colorful works and her website has a lot more information about herself and about her art.
I've fallen for another artist, called Know Hope, who does graffiti type work. Here's a website and facebook. Its hard to find any specific information about this artist but I'll go ahead and show you one of my favorite works by Know Hope. >.> You'll notice... more braille.. i think it reads "relieve".
Another self-taught artist with a etsy page who also does things with braille and paints beautifully. The site is here, again... no info, but inspiring.Her works have a lot of color and texture which make them visually and tactically interesting.
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| "Joy" 16x20inches |
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| Walking Alone 18x24in |
Anton Parsons is an artist from New Zealand who graduated from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1990. He works in large sculpture with exagerated size of a concept. He likes using physical space that people have to navigate around creating a giving the installation a silent kind of stance in occupied space to enforce their meaning. His works have been displayed around New Zealand. Information was taken from his website and the images of "Invisible City" are taken from this blog.
The next artist interests me because of her concepts on mental illness and how stigmatizing it is and just the overall suffering of it is hard, but there is relief from it as well. Amber Christian Osterhout, who intended to become a doctor received BS degree in biology from Le Moyne College in New York. She then felt the need to express herself and returned to school to study art and graphic design, earning an associates degree from Sage College. She currently works as an art director at Shannon-Rose Design. When her brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia she created a body of work about his trials through the disorder. Her website with her information and images can be seen here.
Okay. Last one, I promise!
For this I'll basically just say that this is some collaborative work from artist Janet Manalo, and poet Suzanne Bruce. Also, that I want to do something like this with my work because I write and do visual art and will try in my senior seminar work to do something similar. Anyways, here's two collaborations by Manalo and Bruce and their website.
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