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The “SiteTime” Artists
Four artists will work collaboratively for two years performing additive and subtractive actions in a new exhibit in the Council’s Sculpture Garden. This installation will evolve over time, linked to the rhythm of changes in stacks of slowly drying cordwood. Physical constructions, video and sound installations, artifacts, and event-based movement performances will come and go between fall 2017 and fall 2019. One environmental sculptor, a designer, and a choreographer will express wood’s vital way of connecting our hands and our energy to the Earth as it rotates around the sun. Another sculptor’s work will stand at one entrance of the garden throughout the exhibit.
Justin Kenney
Justin hails from Boston and spent his early years in Melrose, Massachusetts. He moved to southern Vermont in 2001, where he studied and worked with oil painter Eric Aho. His first solo exhibition opened in 2004 at the Great River Arts Institute of Bellows Falls. In 2007, Justin traveled to Portland, Oregon and began working toward a degree in printmaking from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. He had numerous solo exhibitions during this time and received many awards, including the school’s Site-Works Scholarship. While attending college, Justin interned with Oregon sculptor Lee Kelly and contributed to many public artworks commissions. Justin graduated in the winter of 2013 and headed home to New England. He currently resides in Brattleboro, pursuing a career as a professional artist and exhibiting nationally. He is pictured here with his concrete sculpture, “Eating of Morals.”
Erika Senft Miller
Erika Senft Miller is a conceptual performance artist. She trained in dance theater and studied with Fe Reichelt, a master student of Mary Wigman. Erika holds a bachelor’s degree in communication, a master of science in physical therapy and a doctorate in dance education. Her work is about pushing to the edges, asking both the performer and the audience to look beyond the expected. It is an examination in real time of self, body, place, and experience; how they inform, shape, and define each other in the transitions, in the spaces between. Erika is always looking at how movement, habit, and intention shape how we experience and interact in our landscapes, both inner and outer. Erika has spent her entire life making site-specific work. The site defines the creative process that informs the performance and the audience’s experience. With each performance, every participant (both viewer and artist) becomes an active collaborator, and the experience is uniquely theirs, shaped by the space and the movement. Erika directed, choreographed, and performed “Salt” in 2016 which was nominated by Seven Days as one of the top ten exhibitions of the year, and has produced and performed numerous site-specific multimedia installations.
Nancy Winship Milliken
Nancy Winship Milliken is an environmental sculptor who creates site-specific work in urban and rural landscapes. Her work explores the tension of man in the landscape and his desire to belong and be a part of the landscape. She believes communing with the earth is where her art lies. Nancy’s environmentally performative sculptures reveal the actions of wind, rain, and sun as they transform shapes and alternative materials, adding an element of time. Her use of natural and industrial materials stems from her interest in rural art, agriculture, and sustainable living. These were brought together through the lens of a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2008 from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, with residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Along with installing her work in New England and New Zealand farmland, Nancy has shown in solo and select group shows, including the Boston Sculptors Gallery, the ArtSTRAND Gallery, the Christian Science Plaza in Boston, the Qorikancha museum in Peru, the Provincetown Art Association Museum, the University (of Massachusetts) Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Brattleboro Museum. She incorporates her sculptures into set design for Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield, Massachusetts. She has given guest lectures or been an artist in residence at several schools, universities, and galleries including Burlington City Arts, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Vermont, Marlboro College, Amherst College, and Hampshire College. Nancy is represented by the Boston Sculptors Gallery.
Michael Zebrowski
Michael is an artist, designer, educator, and founder of UP END THIS, a public art and design studio. His work explores art, architecture, and science through the lens of material culture. His education in architecture began at the University at Buffalo and culminated in a master’s degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2003. His body of work investigates the concept of architecture as an instrument to record time and space. He seeks to make work that reveals change in a built or natural environment with an intent to challenge perceptions of the world around us. Michael aims to have a viewer experience not only the physical work, but also to turn and look back out into the phenomenon surrounding the installation. He has taught art, design, and architecture at the University at Buffalo, Mississippi State University, Morgan State University, the Maryland Institute College of Art, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and is currently an assistant professor of fine arts at Johnson State College in Vermont. He has shown extensively in Vermont including a six-month residency at Spruce Peak at Stowe and a six-month residency at Shelburne Farms in conjunction with the “Of Land and Local: Watershed” exhibition curated by Burlington City Arts. Most recently, Michael completed a design and installation project for the Gibbes museum of art in Charleston, South Carolina.
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photo by Sam Simon
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