18th Street Arts Center

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By ajones, April 1, 2011 4:34 pm

April 1-May 30, 2011

“Drawing was my first love.  I was three when I decided that I would be an artist someday.  From kindergarten to college, I was always involved with art in some format.  As a college student I received a B.F.A. in sculpture from Ithaca College.  I worked mainly with found object. Technically my degree was in ” found object and sculptural installation”.   My interests in that medium were economically based due to my position as a student who only worked part time.  My interest in the public installation part was largely due to a need to be acknowledged but I also found the medium to be very transcendental for me.  I would work with things I found or that were donated and they would grow into something else.   Through the installation process I was able to see others interact and react.   An idea was born.  Not one that came purely from my mind and desires but one that was put forth by the object itself.   I enjoyed the communion and the growth we all shared, the object, the viewer and myself.  The animation of the object and its transcendence into art was and still is my favorite part of working with found objects. I have been a professional tattoo artist for the last eleven years.  It has taught me so much abut myself as an artist and the art process itself.  Tattooing has been my main medium since I started.  When one is working on skin there is no room to walk away if things aren’t going how you projected they would.   In addition;  the canvas wants to know how it’s going.Tattooing is an art form that requires one to be organized and have a very efficient plan of execution.  Until I started tattooing I hadn’t made the connection with the art process in quite the same way.  My sculpture was always very process oriented.  I’ve always liked knowing how things were put together:  the places where different things come together to create a whole.  These are the things that excite me about art.  The process in tattooing is one not easily seen in the final product.  This is different from the medium of found object sculpture.  I am looking forward to taking what I’ve learned through tattooing and applying it to the sculptural medium.  I’m certain that my experience within the tattoo field will aid my joints and junctures in the studio to be.”

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By ajones, April 1, 2011 4:12 pm

April 1-May 30, 2011

Amy Justen became an artist because she found so many things that were difficult for her to express through language: insights gleaned about the human condition through observation and meditation. She focused her studies on the human figure during her education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, through the mediums of painting, printmaking and sculpture, always with the goal of further understanding humanity and herself.  Toward the end of her time at the Art Institute, she moved away from figurative work and became immersed in mixed media sculpture and installation, melding the elements of earth, air, fire and water in sculptures made of welded metal, handmade paper, beeswax and human hair.   She considers herself a very process oriented, visionary artist, meaning that she would have a “vision” of a finished project and then work backwards figuring out how to bring this vision into fruition. She has worked as a professional tattooist for 15 years and have mastered the medium, with forays back into the fine art world, mostly through painting, still exhibiting the work on at least a yearly basis.  Her work is in private collections throughout the country and adorns the bodies of thousands of people throughout the world.  She plans to use her time at the 18th Street Art center to meld the two mediums:  bringing together the art of painting with the aesthetics of tattooing with works on paper, and to create some small scale sculptures that she can see in her mind’s eye and now need to figure out how to bring into fruition.