SHOVEL, SPOON, AND BRAID

ACRE Residency takes place in a rural valley in central Wisconsin imbedded in a both agricultural and natural landscape. It provides artists with an opportunity for heightened awareness of the natural environment as well as an intentional community. This collection of artists plays with the themes promoted by the residency such as intentional lifestyle, sustainable labor, and meditation in the landscape.

Adam Wolpa and Josh Hoeks’ art production is a mode for enhancing one another’s lifestyle through a process of exchanging practical skills and perspectives. The activity of this collaboration is as simple as a conversation sharing new idea, introducing a new skill, or even bestowing a simple object. At the ACRE residency, their activities took the form of meditative bike rides through expansive fields, hours of carving wood into spoons and creating diagrams/instructions for projects to construct after the residency. During their physical time apart, they have been living and manifesting in their everyday environment with the same intention they developed at ACRE. Their ACRE Projects presentation is the material evidence of these lifestyle shifts and offerings of the projects’ residue to a larger audience.

Charlotte Woolf uses photography to explore various women’s relationships to their natural environment. Her work ranges from documentary style images of women in agriculture to her own meditations on environments of natural wonder. The images of this work track a feminine interaction with landscape through love and labor of the land.

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ADAM WOLPA is Associate Professor of Art at Calvin College. He is a founding member of The Printmakers Left, an international artists’ collective, which over the last fifteen years has been prolific in publishing, exhibitions, and performance, and in 2014 released Exquisite History 3: Visionary Workbook. Wolpa is an organizer of Wake Up Weekend, an annual gathering for animal-friendly food, art, education, and advocacy. He is the author of Hot Wind: Selected Writings 1996-2012, published in 2012 by Issue Press in Grand Rapids, where his recent solo exhibition Good Ghosts has just closed.

More information about Adam Wolpa can be found at adamwolpa.com.

JOSH HOEKS is an artist working through a confluence of sculpture, design and technology in order to intervene, interrogate and reimagine the everyday. Rather than seeing life and art as separate activities his work seeks to blur the envelops that regulate creativity, prompting a double move: one that opens-up notions of art from merely representation and closes-in on the everyday as full of aesthetics. In this way, Hoeks’s work attempts to ecologize rather than modernize suggesting that that there is no outside, no space that is separate from life. From here, efforts to change the world are connected to changing how we live.

More information about Josh Hoeks can be found at joshhoeks.wordpress.com.

CHARLOTTE WOOLF is a photographer from Charlotte, North Carolina currently based out of Chicago, Illinois. She graduated from Kenyon College in May 2012 with a B.A. in Studio Art and Women’s and Gender Studies. Informed by the unique wisdom and geometric expanse of the body, her work combines the creative and the documentary. She has worked on farms in Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio – experiences which inspired her to attend the ACRE residency in rural Wisconsin in 2013. Most recently, Charlotte spent the winter season working in Park City, Utah as a ski photographer, finding deeper connection to the earth through the landscape. Aside from a visual artist, Charlotte is a mover, studying yoga, ballet, and modern dance techniques. Charlotte aspires to continue her work throughout the world, not only through a camera lens, but also a progressive and adventurous point-of-view.

More information about Charlotte Woolf can be found at charlottewoolf.com.

LIZ MCCARTHY is an Artist and Curator based out of Chicago. She moved to Chicago in 2009 to Co-Found Roxaboxen Exhibitions and acted as curatorial director for three years. Currently she is a Curatorial Fellow with ACRE and actively shows her own work through out the city and greater midwest.

More information about Liz McCarthy can be found at liz-mccarthy.com.

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Tags: ACREprojects, AdamWolpa, CharlotteWoolf, JoshHoeks, Pilsen