SkowheganTALKS:  New Lecture Series Organized by the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture Features Conversations between Contemporary Artists

Matt Keegan and Paul Ramirez Jonas
April 5, 2008 at 3:00 pm
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101

New York, NY   March 12, 2008 – SkowheganTALKS, a new lecture series organized by the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, features conversations between some of the most influential visual artists working today.  The series debuted to a standing-room-only crowd on February 2, 2008, with a conversation between video artists Shana Moulton and Alix Pearlstein.  The series continues on Saturday, April 5, with a conversation between multi-media artists Matt Keegan and Paul Ramirez Jonas.

SkowheganTALKS features recent alumni of the residency program of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in conversation with artists who have been faculty members at Skowhegan.  While the association with Skowhegan is the common factor among the artists, the conversations are not intended to focus on the artists’ respective experiences at Skowhegan, rather they will address subjects of broader interest including the participating artists' current and past work and the challenges and opportunities that are characteristic of working as an artist today.  Another significant aspect of SkowheganTALKS is that the conversations will explore the mentor-student relationship, a model that is becoming increasingly important for young artists in New York and worldwide.  Because most of the conversations will pair artists who met at Skowhegan when one was a participant and the other a faculty member, the speakers will have direct mentor-student experience with one another upon which they can draw.

Matt Keegan attended Skowhegan in 2001.  He creates large-scale text-based works, photo-collages, photographs, and prints that often involve themes of identity.  The identity of figures represented in his photographs and sculptural collages is often undisclosed or altogether void. His text-based works play with the indexical nature of words such as “I” and “we” in patterned repetition.  Keegan also superimposes, inverts, and shifts his text, which creates a simultaneously visual and semantic transformation of words and phrases. In so doing, he creates a space in which the viewer is able to determine the referents of his work in personal and variable ways.  Keegan has an upcoming exhibition in the Fall of 2008 at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis. His work has been exhibited recently in New York at D’Amelio Terras Gallery, Wallspace Gallery (in collaboration with Leslie Hewitt), Nicole Klagsbrun, and White Columns, and in Chicago at Gallery 400. He is also the co-publisher of the annual publication North Drive Press.

Paul Ramirez Jonas was a resident faculty artist at Skowhegan in 2000.  The themes of time, expiration, and memory are central to his work.  In his projects what looks like invention is but re-enactment, and what seems exploration is but walking in someone else’s footsteps. However, not unlike a musician reading from a score or an actor performing from a play, the pre-existence of a text does not preclude passion, enthusiasm, humor and new meanings. Ramirez Jonas has upcoming exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; National Maritime Museum Greenwich, London, England; and the Pinacoteca Do Estado De Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Skowhegan enjoys the benefit of having an exceptionally talented group of alumni and former faculty who maintain a strong connection to the School, and on whom it has drawn for speakers for SkowheganTALKS.  Recent graduates include some of the most exciting emerging artists working today, and Skowhegan’s faculty has always included a wide range of renowned mid-career artists. 

SkowheganTALKS is organized under the auspices of the Skowhegan Alliance, a group of young alumni who organize activities and projects for the benefit of Skowhegan. 

Future SkowheganTALKS include:

Sanford Biggers and Paul Pfeiffer
Saturday, May 3
P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center at 3:00 pm

Ellen Altfest and Robert V. Storr
Saturday, May 31
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center at 3:00 pm

Skowhegan would like to thank P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center for hosting SkowheganTALKS.  All events are free with admission to P.S.1.

Founded by artists in 1946, Skowhegan is one of the country’s foremost artists’ residency communities, providing visual artists with a collaborative and rigorous creative environment for the development of new work. Since 1946 Skowhegan has brought together almost 4,000 artists—many of whom are among the country’s leading artists—as students and faculty for intensive nine-week summer residencies at the School’s picturesque 300-acre lakeside site in rural Maine.

For more information about Skowhegan, visit www.skowheganart.org.

For directions and information about P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, visit www.ps1.org