Abstract Expressions

Artists: bruce savadow & JESSICA hoffman

BRUCE SAVADOW ARTIST STATEMENT

I was born and raised in Baltimore Maryland. I started photography in the early 80’s after many years of drawing, water color, pen and ink, painting, collage and doing some sculpture. While taking a course in silk screening at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, I found I liked the technical and mechanical aspects of the process to achieve an artistic goal. After earning an Associate of Arts Degree from the Community College of Baltimore and a B. F. A. in Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art, I gravitated towards photography as a way of recreating the printing process found in silk screening. I enjoyed the control and creativity in every aspect of photography. For me, just taking the photo was only half of the artistic product. So many of the aesthetic decisions are made in the darkroom or digital darkroom. I honed my darkroom and photographic skills working for sixteen years at various newspapers as a photojournalist and as a freelance photographer.  My concentration now is fine art photography.

JESSICA HOFFMAN ARTIST STATEMENT

My artistic training is in photography, video, and book arts. I am not bound to any one medium, preferring to let the initial idea of a project dictate the medium most appropriate. The link between my work lies in the structure of narrative. I am most comfortable as a storyteller, whether that involves creating a story, recording a story, or interpreting someone else’s story. Found objects that are based on communication and memory, such as a letter, a photograph, or an audio recording, inform my work. I am interested in the disconnection and/or reconnection to the original object that exists after its function and context are deconstructed. My need to explore these various means of creating narratives, has lead me to where I am now, which is a hybrid of text and image installations that references language and books and draws upon my interest in still and moving imagery.
The pieces in this show are abstracted photographs of trash found on the beach in Seaview, WA while I was at the Sou’Wester for a residency through Short Run Seattle. The images were printed on a dot matrix printer using 3-part paper. This method of printing gives the objects an otherworldly feel.