Each year, RISCA presents a fellowship and a merit award in 13 disciplines. These grants encourage the creative development of artists by enabling them to set aside time to pursue their creative work, and celebrate the amazing artists that make Rhode Island home. In the spring grant deadline, fellowship and merit award recipients are selected in 7 disciplines: crafts, film & video, fiction, poetry, play & screenwriting, photography, and three dimensional art. Over the course of this week, we are pleased to introduce you to the 14 award recipients.
Jungil Hong
Fellowship Recipient in Crafts
Jungil submitted fiber works that are based in the sound of the loom weaving translated into binary code. The panelists described this work as visually striking, and appreciated the relationship between the abstract visual product and the creation process.
Jungil Hong is a Korean-American visual artist. Since graduating RISD in 1999 with a BFA in Ceramics, she has been immersed in a strong community of artists and musicians in Providence RI. In the thirteen years of studio practice between receiving her BFA and returning to RISD for an MFA in Textiles, she developed work that incorporates printmaking, collaging, casting and metal. A professor helped her
understand a philosophy of creation in which one’s hand is present in every aspect of making. As an undergrad, this idea of constructing the rope to suspend the object was revolutionary, and it fueled her curiosity to learn multiple processes.
“My interest in how an idea is manufactured has shifted as my work branches out into the textiles industry. It is vital for me to develop and understand relationships with manufacturers and producers, and this understanding helps build a new language to incorporate into my practice; a practice with themes rooted in systems and relationships.”
Chris Taylor
Merit Recipient in Crafts
Chris submitted primarily cold worked glass pieces. The panelists commented that this work takes craft technique and history and moves it forward into the contemporary art space in a surprising way, and that this work is inviting and inclusive by its familiarity.
Providence, RI artist Chris Taylor turns the mundane into the extraordinary. For twenty years, Taylor has been close-copying readymade objects in glass such as bubble wrap, Styrofoam, soap, plastic, and paper. These objects combine his interests in subversion, irony, and humor with beauty, elegance, and a reverence for the tradition of glassmaking. What is unique to Taylor’s practice is that his objects exist as both sculptures and functional parts of the home. Taylor aspires to expand his audience,
allowing his viewers to indulge in the tactile nature of these objects outside of an art context, by transforming his sculptures into functional objects that can be experienced physically in the everyday. Taylor was a part of the group exhibition Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder at MASS MoCA in 2016, where his bubble wrap sculptures Apparent were on view.
Chris Taylor’s work transforms the daily conventional experience with things into a sculptural and performative art interaction. Particularly examining glass tradition and conventions, Taylor’s projects have included learning to blow glass upside down. Taylor teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.