Michael Fels, associate professor of art, and Rick Earl, technical director for Cultural and Special Programs, are exhibiting collaborative painting machines at Visual Art Exchange in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The third collaborative project completed by Fels and Earl, Painting Machine explores the interaction between artist and audience but conflating the two seemingly disparate perspectives. The audience makes art by triggering Painting Machines, which create the canvas.
The artists become the audience as they watch others make their work all the while knowing the possibility for such an artistic interaction was facilitated by the artist-made Painting Machines.
“Our art making goes beyond canvas and pedestal,” Fels and Earl state in their artist statements. “The frame becomes part of the image, the pedestal becomes another medium. Electronic cords create both physical line and implied line through shadows cast on the floor, walls and other pieces of art. Along with the viewers, the gears, chains, pumps and steep produce art. At a time with painting seems superfluous, artmaking seems absolutely necessary. … Our intent is to discover the miniscule. With this discovery, the miniscule becomes monumental. The subtle becomes obvious. Questions about art and non-art become irrelevant. In many ways, the viewer’s alerted aesthetic sensibility is the art itself. The viewer’s movements within the physical space become the catalyst for how the work interacts with itself, the surroundings and the viewer.”
Exhibition runs November 6-24, 2009
Artist Talk on November 12 from 7-9 p.m.
For more information please contact Rachel at rachel@visualartexchange.org