Here's a little about the 4 of us and what we're hoping to explore in this project.
Jessica Bender is an artist living in Gig Harbor. She saved 18 hefty, meticulously organized photo albums and ephemera from the trash, after learning a deceased family acquaintance was survived by no other family member. She intends to translate this collection into a form that enables the lives and travels of this Mercer Island couple to be celebrated and memorialized through the experience of others.
Jessica works largely in mixed-media and installation. Her work was most recently seen at the Telephone Room Gallery in Tacoma. She has extensive experience in exhibition installation as well as fabrication for other artists. She currently works at Cornish College of the Arts and Tacoma Art Museum.
Tania Kupczak is a Seattle installation artist and filmmaker who makes work about weather and the emotional content of color. She's a Midwestern transplant who spent her teenage years \ raiding and reading her father's extensive collection of paperback sci-fi novels from 1970s. She intends to photograph the individual book covers in this collection on an upcoming visit, and catalog the images based on a self-invented system that is equal parts nostalgia and formal composition.
Craig Snyder was born in Tacoma to a tug boat captain for Foss Launch and Tug. He frequently snuck onto the tugs to spend consecutive days in the corner of the wheelhouse on Commencement Bay watching the tug work barges, rafts of logs and escorting container ships. His inherited obsession is centered around the tracking of the fleet of Foss tugboats. Starting with the naming of each boat for a member of the Foss family, his obsession continues with the tracking of which boats he has seen from a distance, which boats he has been on, which boats his father has worked on, which boats have carried their name from one generation of tug to another, which boats are still working tugs and which boats have been sold to individuals for recreation.
Craig’s art practice involves installation and experimental film and frequently revolves around site-specific aspects of art production and audience reception. Craig is an Adjunct Faculty member at Cornish College of the Arts and the past Curator for the Cornish Gallery, as well as the past Public Programs Manager at the Seattle Art Museum.
Ruth Marie Tomlinson is an northwest artist who was born in Tacoma and has a long history of installation work. In past work she has altered accumulations of images by isolating the information she is interested in. Tomlinson’s collection is an extensive series of snap shots of Mt. Rainer. Her intention is to translate the photographs into another format as a process of understanding the compulsion to repeat the same act of documentation over a lifetime.
