WHY : Exhibition Essay

Why?

“I probably wouldn’t want to live if I couldn’t do it.”
“I find tremendous fulfillment in doing it.”
“It makes me happy.”
“I do it for myself first, and then to connect with an audience”
“It’s all consuming, I sleep it, I drink it, it’s just total in making me the kind of person that I am.”
“The amount of joy it brings to anybody who encounters it.”
“It was the only way I could communicate, it was the only thing that made me go on.”
“It’s my first love, my first passion.”
“I try to make people see what I see.”
“It’s just something that I really enjoy doing.”
“I love to examine the world as it is, the world that’s overlooked.”
“It’s a conversation between me, the materials, and the people who get it.”
“I would do it no matter what.”
“I couldn’t do anything but what I do.”
“To explore things that I just don’t understand.”
“It allows me to think through my body.”
“It helps me communicate.”
“It keeps me very balanced, very happy.”
“I know I’m not happy if I can’t do it.”
“To engage with people and make them present for my audience.”
“To bring beauty into the world.”
“I’m searching for something.”
“It feels good.”
“It’s a way for me to express my ideas.”
“It’s a way to reach out to others.”
“To make something that can affect someone’s day.”
“To celebrate.”
“To engage the viewer and have that experience remain alive within them.”
“I do it as a release.”
“It helps me.”
“The same reason I take a fresh breath every day.”
“I need to create.”
“It makes me happy.”
“It chose me.”
“I have to do it to remain sane and human.”
“It’s freedom.”

Why.

As diverse as the works of those assembled for this exhibition are in materials, methods, and concepts, if we look deeper, threads of commonality emerge. We might express ourselves differently, but we’re by no means alone in this. It’s compulsion, it’s necessity, it’s for our health, it’s our way to communicate – it’s the same thing we’ve been searching for since humans could first ask such questions.

In better understanding why others do what they do, we of course, gain a greater appreciation for their particular work and its origins. More so, perhaps, it empowers us to look at ourselves through new eyes and discover the creative potential within all of us.

Nick Sousanis, Exhibition Director Work: Detroit
Detroit, Michigan, November 17, 2007

Elizabeth Youngblood

Dress Interfacing, 2007
Drawing
Homage to My First Seeing Instructor, 2007
Weaving

I’m Elizabeth Youngblood. I am an artist and a designer. As an artist, what I do is draw and also weave, and I think of my weavings in a lot of ways as drawing, at least the ones I’m doing currently. I also have a background of doing clay, as an undergrad. So, all three of those are very much in my sphere. I make a living as a graphic designer, and that’s print design.

Why I do what I do? I think I began making things because it was a conversation between me and the adults that were around me. I learned to sew with my mother and I enjoyed it. I probably enjoyed the companionship as much as anything else. It was fun to learn things, better still it was fun to have the thing after it was made. I also worked with my uncle in his woodshop and I was very comfortable by the time I was a young teenager with running power tools and I always enjoyed again what resulted from the making process. Same thing with clay in high school. I still remember the enjoyment of the first time I filled a mug that I had made with water and it actually worked. So I think that initially as a young person, it was the conversation between myself and an adult. Now making is real interesting to me because it’s more of a conversation with myself and with the materials. And then, if I’m lucky and it gets out there into the real world, it’s a conversation with the people who get it, who appreciate it and understand it, and to whom the work speaks for some reason.

Ed West

Jonathan (on right)
Ocean (on left) from the series So Called
Black and white photographs.

I’m Ed West, I’m a photographer. I come to photography through my undergraduate studies in art history, when I became very attracted to Dutch painting and scenes of daily life. As a photographer, I tend to be interested in people; most of my photographs throughout my history have been of people, either portraits or people in their environments.

The work that I’m showing at the gallery is a series of portraits that were made in South Africa of a particular community of people of mixed race in the western Cape. I published a book earlier on the people of South Africa entitled “Casting Shadows.” In terms of my photography in general, I want the work to be of use. To say that I want the work to be of use means that I want it to be useful to the people who I photograph. And it is useful to them in terms of representation, to represent, the people in the book are from formal settlements, squatter camps around the country, they generally don’t get the attention of photographers or of anyone for that matter. So when I went to South Africa, it was an opportunity to invest in those people, to spend time with them, and to represent them. In the work I made an effort to be honest in that representation.

Why I’m an artist? I come to it honestly. My father was a painter and a sculptor. I think like all children, you look for a space that’s not occupied, and as a consequence I became a photographer. Photography gives me an opportunity to be in the world and to engage with people, which is really what I’ve been drawn to. I want to know about other cultures, I want to know about other people’s lives, I want to participate in those lives, and to know that despite cultural differences, there is something at base that connects us. In the work, the hope of course is that that connection is made with my audience and that I act as the intermediary for that exchange. Not everyone has the opportunities that I’ve had to travel and to visit these different countries and cultures. And if I can make them available in a way that is empathetic and that makes them present for my audience, then I think I’ve achieved some success.

The larger goal is that we all have to find some way to contribute to the world, and I think that’s part of our responsibility as human beings to be a force for the good, to do something that’s affirmative. So I think earlier in my career, when I was more concerned with art for art’s sake, I found that this way of being is more satisfying because of the connection to people and because of the opportunity to really learn. If we think about making art, we’re thinking about being put in the position of the perpetual learner, the person who has to find ways to say things, which have been unsaid. Art is really the best opportunity for that. This is not the repetition of a task, as many people’s lives are forced to repeat tasks. This is really an opportunity to be involved with continual invention and renewal. This is a most positive place to be, and we can’t overlook the virtue of being someone who brings beauty into being in the world. So I think that’s part of my motivation. Thank you for your time.

Nick Tobier

Marches for Visitors, Cars, and Passers-by, 2006
Band Uniform, Photographs, Marching Band

I’m Nick Sousanis. I’m a hip-hoppapotamus.
I’m Nick Tobier. And what else was I supposed to say?
I’m a Libra.
I teach here at the school of art & design here in scenic Ann Arbor.
I’m Nick Tobier. I’m Nick Sousanis. I’m Nick Tobier. I am.
I’m Nick Tobier, and I like sliced bread, and walks in the woods, and kissing in the rain. If you like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain. “I was getting tired of my lady.”

Take 10.


I’m Nick Tobier, and I do things in public. I also do things in private, but maybe we won’t talk about that. I say I do public performances, that’s how I’ve been describing my work recently. Most often I describe it as Situational, not Situationist, but Situational. That is if there’s a situation, I’ll try and do something to disrupt it, and if there’s no situation maybe I’ll make one up.

Why do I do these things? Why do I act out in public? I think, for the most part, I’m aware of this time when I used to go to my studio all the time, and I’d walk through New York where I grew up, where I was living, and I’d see all these amazing things in the street and I’d open this big door with a padlock and I’d go inside my studio and I’d make wood things. Wood sculptures that had absolutely nothing to do with what I was walking through, but was what I did in the studio. What I realized at a certain point, was that I had a studio life that was completely separate from the life around me that was the parts of it that were engaged by walking through the city and wandering and getting to know people and getting lost. So I gave up my studio. Which I always think, was either the bravest thing or the stupidest thing. And I just started to work on the street and being responsive to whatever I came up against. The first thing I remembered doing was finding myself trying to cross the street, the snows had melted, and there was this enormous puddle that actually had become sort of a lake. I watched people walk to the middle of the block so that they could get around the puddle. So I made a bridge to help people cross puddles. The projects that I do now I think are an outgrowth of those things that were utilitarian. They seemed to have an urgency and a purpose, that is, I could make something that would affect someone’s day. And they were structural. Like the bus stop I made in Detroit, it provided a comfort or service. But I also do things that are services of different sorts, things that are more celebratory. Choreographed sequence for a group worker/dancers in a wading pool in Toronto. Because I think those things are utilitarian as well. I think that celebration is something that we have less and less of in everyday life. If I can bring something to the public realm that is celebratory then that does become part of everyday life. And I think that sort of in a nutshell what I’d like to do is open the possibility that everyday life can be quite extraordinary if someone is willing to step out of daily routine and do something that seems at first eccentric but maybe after a while you can’t live without it. Maybe you can.

Gilda Snowden

Bright Stars at Night: Green Chair, 2006
Acrylic on canvas.


My name is Gilda Snowden. I’m a painter. I paint many things. I paint pictures of tornadoes, flowers, chairs, lots of things. I mainly work with encaustic, a wax paint from antiquity.

I do this because they make me happy. I do this because I’m obsessed. I paint, I take photographs, and I draw, and I need to have these things around me. The paintings smell good. Photographs are documents of my whole world. It’s almost like I’m obsessed with capturing these things: sunsets, flowers, trees, chairs, cracks in the sidewalk, but you can’t paint everything. So I do paintings of certain subjects and that slows me down. That makes me see the world around me in a much more organized way.

It is important for me to document and save and preserve. I started doing it with pictures of my family. And now I am so afraid that if I don’t document everything around me that my vision will be lost and I want to pass that on.

Sintex

Ghetto Boy, 2007
Spray Paint.
Plutonium G Spray Cans


My name is Sintex, I’m from Detroit. I’m an artist by nature, graf, graffiti, illustration, 3D animation, I take part in all of these things, the creative side of me. I’m always into art, it’s been my first thing, my first love, my first passion in life is to be an artist. I take more to graffiti because it’s more visual to pedestrians and regular people on the street, just to see something, to make them stare, make them glance, or however, to keep seeing. A piece of mine is something satisfying to me, as an artist even though without money or payment, I know I can still do what I do and love, and people still take kind to it.

Why do I do what I do? Mostly because it comes from my heart, it comes from my soul. My imagination is pretty huge, so whatever I think about or see, I try to make people see what I see, in the sense of how my imagination fits, however I want to put art on a wall, or on canvas or on a piece of paper or on a computer screen. So, it’s always coming from my imagination. My passion is first and foremost, everything I do, everything about me, is for the sake of art. I paint all the time. I draw all the time. It’s just something that I really enjoy doing. I am an artist living, and living within art. There is really no limitations how that can be put or explained.

Stephen William Schudlich

The Urban Explorer’s Data Companion, 2007
Blank book.
Creative Process Rationale Tree
(with Nick Sousanis)


My name is Stephen William Schudlich, I am an adjunct instructor at Wayne State University and at College for Creative Studies. I teach illustration and graphic design.

What I do, is I create maps, charts, installations, that are constructed from data that I go out and I collect when I walk and I drive around the city of Detroit. Social sort of material that I see, things that speak to what’s going on, what’s not going on, different sort of information like that. And a lot of times these pieces are put together in a very clinical, scientific way in a chart as a means to make it accessible to people to look at.

The reason I do it, I think, largely comes from a historical notion. As a child, I can remember driving around with my father, going from here to there, east side to west side, whatever the case may be. I’m a fourth generation Detroiter. And so we spent a lot of time within the city of Detroit. We would drive around and my dad would always take what was called the “long way.” The long way always facilitated a visual candy store of things to see. Whether it were people on the street, great architectural buildings, the ball park, Eastern Market, Michigan Avenue, all that sort of stuff. And so the long way facilitated that. And a lot of that notion still exists in why I do what I do. I enjoy those trips, I enjoy driving through the city of Detroit, through its urban areas, through its blight-affected, ghetto sort of communities, and I like to look at that stuff. I have this fascination with these places. And I like to record the visual stories and the material that I see there to the extent that I take my son with me on these trips now. He’s only three. He probably won’t remember a lot of it. He does remember, however, when he sees a house that’s broken, he will tell me, “Dad, that house is broken.” And so he has a real keen awareness of that. He also says that, “They need to fix that house.” My son is probably one of the smartest people in the car on those trips. I walk around a lot, I drive around a lot, I look at this information, and I want to make it available to people. I’m not an activist, I don’t have a political agenda, but I do enjoy the idea that perhaps some of these charts and installations can be put before people who may have a voice or may have the ability to affect a positive change in a community that clearly needs so much of it today. And so that’s a little bit of the driving force also of why I do what I do. But I truly believe that I would do it anyway. I would do it if I was doing it for pay. I would do it no matter what. It’s in me historically, it’s in me genetically. I have this, this fascination with this city that I was raised in, and that my ancestors were raised in and had such a foothold in. And so I think that that probably sums up the best way I can, why I do what I do.