Announcing Our 2024 McKnight Artist Fellows
Please join us in congratulating the 2024 McKnight Book Artist Fellows, Wen-Li Chen and Karen Wirth! Wen-Li Chen is an interdisciplinary visual artist, art educator, and designer whose work is rooted in poetry and family history. Karen Wirth is an artist and educator who works within book arts, sculpture, and architecture with focuses on shape and form.
Wen-Li Chen
Wen-Li has shown her works internationally and nationally. Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Central Library collected two of her artist books. She was a finalist for the Jerome Early Career Fellowship (2020-2021). She has received grants, fellowships, and residencies, including Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Support for Individuals, VAF (Warhol Foundation), Lanesboro Artist Residency, and NCAF (National Culture and Arts Foundation, Taiwan). In addition, she has done projects and collaborated with several international organizations and creative individuals, such as the Ministry of Culture (Taiwan) and the Taiwan Academy (NYC). She received her M.Des. with a focus on photography from The Glasgow School of Art in the UK. She is an adjunct faculty member at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, teaching experimental typography and critique seminars. She previously taught at UW-Stout for graphic design, 2D design foundation, and art photography.
Work
Artist Statement
Formally trained in foreign language and literature and inspired by cinema, poetry, familial history, and personal experience, linked—by blood—to a dying indigenous Taiwanese tribe. Shifting under the constant flux of a small sociopolitical environment considered, by some, not to exist (Taiwan). With these inheritances both tethered and untethered, she cannot help but explore through fragments, further eroded by a wide array of media, mediums, platforms, methods, and internal motivations. For the “cross” in cross-disciplinary is the only way she knows how to express the feeling of being lost in ongoing intergenerational conflicts, to the confusion/conservation of identity, amid the loss of persistent anchors to memory and facing questions of authenticity itself.
The action of taking pictures binds memories and experiences onto a continual growth. Not unlike attempting to find comfort in motherhood, a way of being reconciled to memory by the promise for another future. My pictures—always made on the go—are simply a way of examining myself engaging in this world.
That being said, the intention of making is different from taking. The moment of taking a picture is also the evidence of its passing. Image making attempts to reengage the trace left in an image, the plasticity found in reorganizing memory and intention. However, no amount of altering can completely erase that initial sense of passing, death as a picture.
This intense gravity toward manipulating things already past is due to my own insecurity toward authenticity, continually de-centered by the dramatic shifts in generational norms and values commonly found under the rapid development of East Asia. Any attempt to relate to Taiwan from the perspective of being a woman finds my mother’s generation increasingly abstracted and my grandmother’s heritage nearly extinct (Indigenous Taiwanese).
Medium into material and back into becoming another medium. Photography and the photograph bridge in their countless reflections, intentions and personal memories in order to bring something back, namely an impossible security in being a Taiwanese woman. A half-blood offspring of dying people (Kavalan) populated more by old amateur photographs than those living today.
Karen Wirth
Wirth has received leadership fellowships from the Bush Foundation and American Council on Education, and artist fellowships from the Bush, McKnight and Jerome Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, NY State Council for the Arts, and Minnesota State Arts Board. Wirth holds an MFA in sculpture from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and a BFA in art education from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a professor emeritus at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she served as the interim president, the vice president of academic affairs and the chair of fine arts.
Work
Artist Statement
My work combines form and space, object and language, reading and deciphering. One thing leads to another, a slight change, a shift in a letter, or scale, and you find yourself in another place. I am drawn to metaphor: how objects represent themselves and something else, and how to decipher those relationships.
I explore a very broad sense of place through close observation, research, and human experience, which takes form primarily through books and sculpture. Architecture, science, and the natural environment inform the work. As analogies, they allow me to develop ideas about space and experience, presence and absence, revelation and concealment. Curiosity and restlessness fuel my approach to work and life. I am an avid traveler and reader, and both are integrated into my research.
Jurors
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