Telemetrics: Drawing Translations began with charcoal drawings on paper, which were then converted into digital information, and finally re-rendered by three-dimensional software. This series of translations allow for a close exploration of the drawing's topography that is similar to the viewpoint of an exploratory rover. The imagery from this digital landscape was collected, exported, and translated into the mediums of print, painting, and video. This body of work was developed in reference to the telemetric systems that are currently in use to explore the cosmos. Space telescopes convert a physical stimulus (light) into electrical signals, or raw data. In order to be analyzed and understood, that information must be converted into a file that can be read over multiple representational platforms, both numerically and visually. Interpreting these data requires translation, which occurs at several levels as the astronomers prepare the data for interpretation. The resultant images, especially those presented to the public, have gone through several stages of adjustment for both informative and aesthetic reasons. In Telemetrics: Drawing Translations, the drawings function as the phenomena of the universe, all of that which can only be understood through telemetric analysis. The drawing's primacy in this system is established through its physicality, level of resolve, and the amount of interpretable information it contains. The derivatives of the drawings mirror the entropic nature of translating information across formats. Tone, contrast and an emphasis on the physical manipulation of material in the drawings formally reference the Rocky Mountain School paintings of the American West. The paintings of Thomas Moran, Albert Biertstadt, Thomas Hill and others allowed viewers to experience the sublime through an environment that was distant and imagined. It is in a similar way that telemetric systems allow us to experience otherwise untouchable places, even if the representations of these far off places is exaggerated or inaccurate.

My paintings rely on discovery-- excavating into the surface to find the painting beneath. I work in an actual space that dimensionally inhabits the picture plane. The process begins with acrylic paint applied in thick layers, creating a sedimentation of color that is later unearthed. The painting emerges as I carve, gouge and dig away dry paint to reveal and investigate a world in paint alone. The process allows for a journey through the depth of the paint, subtracting and adding to the supports until the painting is ultimately resolved. I see the layers of paint revealing their own history, some layers becoming more significant than others. Thousands of paint chips are made in the creation of each painting, which become remnants of the process. Embedding these discarded chips into my next painting allows for a sense of shared history. Some of my process is predetermined, mapping out color layered substrates and other aspects of the painting arrive through an element of surprise, thought the process itself. I want the viewer to see the painting in multiple ways - in the way our memory allows us to experience the same place again in a slightly different way. The imagery comes from fragments of memories that I have collected throughout my life. Most of the memories are related to experiences that I have had in nature and with the people around me. I grew up spending my summers at my family's cottage on the Alleghany River in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Everyday I would stare at the hills with my cousins and play across the river on various large rocks. We began to create a language about our landscape that we spent so much time discovering, naming our special places, growing up thinking hills were mountains. The series of landscapes come from my desire to be in a space of awe. When I was studying abroad I took a trip to Crete Greece. Arriving in the night made me feel anxious about a place unknown to me. My hotel was disappointing and far from the downtown, I suddenly wanted nothing to do with where I was. Frustrated by my predicament, I went to bed. In the morning I stepped outside to find that I was on the beach with mountains in the distance. I was in shock; I had never felt such relief in a reaction to a place.

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For us, the practice of art is extremely important because it provides us with a method for interrogating everyday life - a chance to break with what has been normalized through the routinization of life so as to ask ourselves: is this the best we can do? From here, everything becomes the subject of critical reflection whether the institution, the food you eat, your working relations, or your sexuality. So for example, we ask: how are we organized by Art School, the infrastructure, professionalism, academic standards, curriculum, etc. and in what ways does this determine our ability to imagine and act upon more egalitarian ways of being? In an attempt to answer such a call we are seeking to develop a set of tactics that may help expand a sense of ecology - that notion of interconnectivity that seems so difficult to comprehend yet crucial to the survival of the human life on earth - as well as expand a sense of art in which art is not merely representational but an integral part of how better worlds can be inhabited.

Drawing from interdisciplinary sources my work is focused on site-specificity, process, and how we orient ourselves within our landscape. Often searching to locate myself, I look to the potential of environments as conduits for performance and sculptural interventions. The outcome of my research varies from performance and installation, to sound, video, and drawing. Enticed by the relationship between the body and its surroundings, I utilize marks, light, movement, and ritual. Absurdity and fantasy often enter the work, through my unseen labor and created personas, creating a dialog between our symbolic and animal selves.

The MFA thesis of Matt Janechek sets out to examine his design workflow in the context of transportation design. This work is loosely interpreted to include to the process of exploration, problem solving, deconstruction, repetition, routine and failure.

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My interest in the history of craft as it relates to women and craft in the context of contemporary art led to a more specific personal curiosity about colonial stitched samplers. The incredible skill and patience young colonial stitchers exhibited, layered with the revelatory nature of stitched samplers, sparked a desire to understand them more thoroughly. This thesis is a hybrid product that includes both writing and research about my interest in colonial stitched samplers, craft and contemporary art, as well as ongoing work on three stitched samplers inspired by both colonial schoolgirl samplers and contemporary artists whose work builds upon the tradition of the stitched sampler.

I aim to depict alternate realities built by human error and misunderstanding as they apply to the natural world and natural systems. They are alternate realities informed by (mis)observation; both my own and that of others; individual figures both historical and fictitious that in some way embody the desire (and often failure) to shape and understand the world around them. These figures are in many ways stand-ins for myself, as well as my own artistic practice, and in telling their stories I seek to illuminate failure, futility, and imperfection, in their most poignant, beautiful, and absurd expression. Borrowing specific and obscure instances in human and natural history and themes from science, literature and myth, I strive to reproduce these mutable realities as narrative etchings and drawings, which combine visual clarity and readability with a high density of minute linear detail. Drawing is a form of translation and a form of labor, a means of synthesizing numerous, seemingly disparate topics. It is an attempt to bridge a gap, fill the space between perception and what is perceived. Through the labor of my hand, science and fiction, history and fabrication crowd onto a single page, the narrative and the encyclopedic exist side by side, become equal and indistinguishable. I seek to act as a translator and moderator between complexly layered histories and you, the viewer.