February 1, 2015

Welcome!

The dust is beginning to settle at our Outpost here in the Midwest. Welcome to the weekly dispatches from the Outpost Artist Residency Program! We are glad to be sharing highlights from our creative community here at Farmers Park in Springfield, MO, USA.

Why Outpost?

Starting a residency in the Midwest further strengthens the emerging trend of a contemporary art scene that is decentralized from the major arts centers located on the coasts, namely New York and Los Angeles. In essence we are at the front lines, pioneers at the edge of a new art-world frontier; taking place outside of the established major metropolitan centers at a new golden age for art making in America. From our humble Ozark mountain highland outpost we can share what we have already known, that the Midwest is the best!

What’s in Store?

We have many ideas and projects in the works with our resident artists, including temporary and permanent art installations, workshops and market mingles with the farmers market and the greater ozarks community, and the list is growing daily so stay tuned. We are also working on a podcast series to document the startup of a residency program, providing a candid, behind-the-scenes approach to both the exciting and mundane daily activities of launching this program.

We are calling this a beta residency program and everyone involved, artists included, are working together to shape and define the experience. This collaboration aims at creating a unique platform for creative activity here in Springfield, MO, USA.

What Happened This Week?

This is actually the third week of our residency, and the dust has settled enough for us to get into a routine. We meet daily for coffee to keep an ongoing dialogue and sense of community–feel free to drop in and say hello, just contact us through the website! The artists are planning for a series of workshops and public interactions, check out the calendar section of our website. We also celebrated a birthday this week with resident artist Ankica, who shared a homemade meal inspired by her home in Macedonia. Its okay, we had to google to locate it too! The artists will be living and making art at Farmers Park through the end of June, see you out there! Until next week.

J. Karl Lipscomb focuses primarily on sculpture, with reclaimed wood being his medium of choice.  Most of his process is done with power hand tools: skill saw, chop saw, jigsaw, belt sander, pad sander, and a 4 ½ inch disk grinder. During his residency Karl would like to create an interactive piece that provides visitors a space to sit or sprawl in the shade under a canopy comprised of geometric and organic forms, which rise and grow into tree-like shapes.

Kenneth Moore begins each of his works with a set of self-imposed guidelines that include a large element of repetition. Kenneth’s works are performative in nature, and carry the record of his daily act in paint.  The focus of his practice concerns itself with the everyday broken down into four components:  time, the political, the societal, and the individual. During Kenneth’s stay at Farmers Park, he intends to create between 150 and 170 works.

Ankica Mitrovska works with charcoal on gesso paper through the process of adding and subtracting. This process allows the work to stay in constant flux. In Ankica’s most recent residency, she began working on a new set of expressive mix media portrait based drawings on paper banners and would love to continue exploring the new approach here at Farmers Park. Ankica also intends to utilize her time here to research the idea of a residency, and its relevance, with the intent of starting up a live/work self-sustained artist residency in Skopje, Macedonia upon her return in 2015.