Stuart Artist Residency Sculptures
Photo collage of daily sculptures, found, conserved and donated post-consumer materials and natural objects.
Dimensions variable.
2024
Stuart Artist Residency Grid
Photo collage of daily installations, found, conserved and donated post-consumer materials and natural objects.
Dimensions variable. (Approximately 40 x 40 x 12" each.)
2024
Stuart Artist Residency Dates
Photo collage of daily date collages, found, conserved and donated post-consumer materials and natural objects.
Dimensions variable. (Approximately 24 x 15" each)
2024
Stuart Artist Residency 2025
I was honored to be chosen as the 2024 Stuart Artist in Residence for the Department of Art and Design at South Dakota State University, Brookings. I spent the month of September using the Ritz Teaching Gallery as a studio in which to pursue three projects that would coalesce into an exhibition within the space.
For 15 of the 28 days of the residency (September 11-25), I created a daily sculpture and collage using materials culled from my own daily purchases, scavenged from the campus grounds, and donated by students, faculty and staff to a cardboard box outside the gallery door.
I utilized the first week of the residency (September 03-10) to prepare for this process. I used large sheets of conserved corrugated cardboard to create numerical stencils 0-9, and hung 15 empty shelves, evenly spaced, around the three usable walls of the gallery.
Beginning on Monday September 11th, I began pinning templates for the day’s date onto the wall by the leftmost empty shelf. I then populated the negative space of the stencil with saved, found and donated materials, both post-consumer and natural. I then removed the stencil and began creating a sculpture that would fit on the left-most empty shelf. Upon completing the sculpture, I placed it on the left-most empty shelf and photographed it with the day’s date and with details of all components. The following morning, I posted all related photographs to my Instagram accounts (@stylefarmer and @stylefarmerstudio) and began the process anew until all 15 days of the process were represented by a date collage and sculpture.
During the same 15 days, I also created geometric panels using corrugated cardboard from computer boxes donated by the design area, and plastic clamshell packages culled from my own daily purchases and from donations from the campus community. During some of the last days of the residency (September 23-26) I combined these panels to create a 60” diameter geodesic sphere. During this same period, I tasked SDSU sculpture instructor Erik Ritter’s students with creating small recycled-and repurposed-object sculptures. These sculptures were then placed within the plastic containers on the surface of this sphere, transforming these containers into make-shift vitrines.
The fourth wall of the gallery was mostly windows, making it relatively unusable for showing work, but also affording the campus unlimited visual access to the unfolding project. These windows were flanked by some useable wall space, which was utilized in the last 4 days of the residency in the following way:
On the southwest wall, using dozens of earplugs culled from two years working in an envelope factory, I fashioned a wall drawing. This drawing was a representation of a dome created in early 1970’s New York by inner-city youth under the direction of the community action group CHARAS, Micheel Ben-Eli, using plans created by famed geodesic architect R. Buckminster Fuller. On the northwest wall, I affixed the 10 positive cardboard letters from the daily date stencils. The 10 stencils themselves were leaned against the west wall of windows, completing the installation.