Member Spotlight: Visual Artists Cornelia Jensen and Crystal Gregory showcase their studios at Madarts, Brooklyn, NY, May 14th and 15th‏

International Women Artists' Salon is honored to present visual artist members Cornelia Jensen and Crystal Gregory who invite you to visit their studios at Madarts in Brooklyn, NY, May 14th and 15th, noon to 6pm.  They join over 40 fellow Madarts artists for this open studio tour for the public.  This is a fine opportunity to see artists' finished pieces as well as work-in-progress and to see how they work.  

MOST - Madarts Open Studio Tour

May 14th and 15th 

12 to 6pm

255 18th Street

Brooklyn, NY

between 5th & 6th Avenue

"Sunset Crater Park"
Cornelia Jensen

latex paint on wood
2010
24" x 48" 

"Foot Traffic"
Crystal Gregory

Granny squares on footbridge

2010

5' x 75'

"Dionysus" 

Cornelia Jensen

Styrofoam packing material, plastic grass, fluorescent light

2009

18" x 13" x 9"d

"Foundation"
Crystal Gregory

Crochet incased bricks

2009

5' x 5'

 "Sagres"

Cornelia Jensen

Flattened rusty can, latex paint, butterfly wing, ladybugs, milkweed on wood and canvas

2010

10" x 12"

"Heirloom"
Crystal Gregory

Drywall, wood, and glass

2010

14' x 10' x 10'

Crystal Gregory 

Bio
www.crystalgregory.org
Crystal Gregory is a multi media artist creating works that focus
on urban landscape, home, and handwork. Her materials are domestic,
architectural, and organic. The art operates as both sculpture and
site specific installation. Lace and cloth and their collective
relationships to psychogeographies, domesticity, privacy and personal
space are the tools she uses to communicate within her work. Her
installations and component sculptures are hybridized spaces, fragile
and distressed. Her practice is divided into community outreach
projects, studio practice and public art.
 

Currently living and working in New York Crystal's work has been
written about in New York Magazine, ArtSlant, and Kipton Art. PS 122
Gallery hosted her for in a six week performative installation, On the
Fence. Other shows include Art in Odd Places, public art show, as well
as Giacobetti Paul Gallery Dumbo and Fair Folk & a Goat. She is
currently working with two architectural firms on permanent art
installations and has been given a grant for a public art piece from
the Department of Transit NYC. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts
from the University of Oregon with a focus in Fiber Arts. In the fall
she will attend The School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a Full
Merit Scholarship in the Fiber and Martial Studies MFA program.

Artist Statement

I use lace as the foundation of my work, giving structure to my ideas
and rhythm to my patterns.  Lace draws the eye to negative space,
delicately unveiling, revealing more than it conceals, using it’s own
emptiness as pattern.  Lace and cloth have strong relationships to
domesticity, privacy and personal space and at the same time this
material is incredibly charged with societal associations of class,
femininity, and sex.

As a multi media artist I am using the material ideas of lace to
inspect issues of the urban landscape, the home, and handwork.  My
materials are domestic and architectural and operate as both sculpture
and site specific installation.  I use antique lace and vintage damask
pattern to penetrate building material and create domestic sculpture.

Cornelia Jensen 

Bio

corneliajensen@yahoo.com

www.corneliajensen.com

Cornelia Jensen’s work ranges from figure-ground painting to found-object assemblage, often blurring the boundary between abstract and representational imagery. By juxtaposing natural and recycled objects in a reliquary format, Jensen references the relationship between human-made environment and human unconscious. Jensen has begun incorporating light into some of her assemblages. The added element of illumination, transforms our conception of what is a normal avenue to the sublime.

Jensen received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2009 while living in New York. Prior to 2003, she spent fifteen years in San Francisco where she designed and co-created venues for art and film including the Lola Gallery and the The Werepad. She has curated art and multi-media events, and worked on independent films. In 1988 she began the graduate program in Film/Video Performance at what was then called California College of Arts and Crafts. In 1987, she received a BA in Philosophy from Haverford College. In 1986 she studied at the Syracuse University Studio Art Program in Florence, Italy. She graduated with honors in Art from The Masters School in 1983 and received the Merriam Hewitt Art Award. Jensen started exhibiting her art at the age of four and was fortunate enough to come from a family that encouraged the study and practice of art. Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe and Korea and is in private collections in the United States and Europe. Jensen was born in 1965 and grew up outside of New York City. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

Artist Statement

 

Ranging from pure painting to stylized found-object assemblage, my work explores the context of the “thing-in-itself” in relation to its environment. I integrate paint and hardware with natural and recycled objects such as ladybugs, milkweed, tin cans and circuit boards. The juxtaposition of seemingly disparate objects and materials emphasizes their formal qualities, severing the association of each part to its own history. This transforms the individual elements into relics laced with a blend of sentiment and irreverence. The relationship between the natural and man-made materials decodes the evidence of the collective unconscious in our fabricated environment, and raises the question of what is meaningful or useless, beautiful or ugly, rare or common.

For my graduate thesis I did a study of James Turrell’s use of light. By creating the illusion of making space appear to have mass, his art distills the experience of our perception down to the moment of “seeing ourselves see”. His subtle yet transformative use of light as a medium inspired me to integrate light into my work to enhance the perceptual response to mundane materials. I create pieces out of found Styrofoam packing material with internally incorporated light. The light pervades the material, illuminating the piece from within, instead of relying on external directional or ambient lighting to make the work visible. This alters our perception of the material by adding a level of intangibility, which transforms our perception of expected avenues to the sublime.