Last Map: Mirror, Last Map: Beacon, Last Map: Crosslit, each gouache and ink on paper, 11.5″ x 8.25″, 2010

I completed 3 more Last Map drawings in Iceland to total 30, which has been my goal for some time now.  These latest drawings reflect my icy surroundings at the time I made them.  Hopefully I can exhibit all 30 together in the near future.

Although I prefer to display them all simply taped to the wall, the wear and tear isn’t good for the drawings, so I need to get them framed.  I have some ideas for framing them that should provide for some interesting installation opportunities.

In other news:

-I am pleased to have been mentioned in the 12.17.10 Chicago Tribune article about the best Chicago area art of 2010.  Apparently there is an image of Bring in the Light in the print version, though I haven’t yet seen it myself.

-Also, Nicole Pietrantoni (who I met and collaborated with in Iceland) and I plan to be working together again soon under the name Island Projects.  We hope to have a website up and running in the near future.

-Some of Amelia Earhart’s bones may have been found on Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific Ocean.  Here’s the full article.

When I arrived in Iceland, it was my plan to make some gouache paintings of small, contained worlds, like the glassy images in these two pieces: Last Map: Osolith and Last Map: Divisadero on white or blue paper.  However, on my first day in my studio, I found a collage of images from the Icelandic landscape left by a previous resident.  As it depicts a self-contained world, I decided to copy it in gouache, as a sort of collaboration with this unknown artist.  These are just studio snapshots.  I will add more professionally documented images of the piece to my website when I get home.

Here are some images from my solo exhibition We are running… at Northeastern Illinois University’s Fine Arts Center Gallery.  Much of this work appeared in my recent exhibition in at Pterodactyl in Philadelphia, but the postcard installation with the bottle of ash is new.  The postcards are manipulated exhibition announcements from both solo exhibitions, mounted on Scrabble tile trays.  The bottle contains sea glass and volcanic ash from the base of  the Eyjafjallajökull volcano that erupted in Iceland this year.  Exhibition details follow the images.

Amy Sacksteder: We are running…

October 4th-October 29th

The work included in this project is derived from the last moments of Amelia Earhart’s life and is used as a springboard to examine and confront mortality. The title is an excerpt of Earhart’s last words. The work is also influenced by the artists’s June 2010 residency in Iceland.

Artist Talk: Friday October 29th, 11am
Reception: Friday October 15th, 6-9pm

The Fine Arts Center Gallery
Northeastern Illinois University
5500 N St. Louis Ave
Chicago, IL 60625

The Gallery is located on the NEIU campus inside the Salme Harju Steinberg Fine Arts Center. Park in the lot the west side of campus via the entrances Foster or Bryn Mawr Avenues.

Directions here.

To see invividual images of pieces in the show, visit this page on my website.

I have some work in an upcoming show curated by Andrew Thompson (drawings and an installation). Here’s a sneak peak of a new installation in the show, with exhibition info to follow.

Museum, Monument (where we can go to save ourselves), transparency collage, sand, painted plaster and foam islands maquette, transparencies on projector, 2009-10

Sub Terrain

What lies below the surface of the physical, the perceptible, and the quantifiable? Invisible forces of the subconscious simmer until they come to a head in subtle circumstances of serendipity or in violent disruption, sparring with the perceived logic of life.

Sub Terrain is an all-media exhibition that invites artists to give vision to the invisible and explore the landscape of the immaterial and its convergence with the physical realm.

Artists:
Debra Broz, Mira Burack, Ginger Chase, Susan Evans, Rachel Frank, Matt Frieburghaus, Lauren Harlowe, Megan Heeres, Melissa Jones, Julie Lambert, Amanda Lechner, Ryan Molloy, Barbara Neri, Manisha Patel, Judy Rushin, Audrey Russell, Amy Sacksteder, Madeline Stillwell, Cedric Tai, Sally Schluter-Tardella, Amanda Thatch, Christopher Ulivo, B.J. Vogt, Scotty Wagner and Morgan Morel, Graem Whyte, Audra Wolowiec.

Work: Ann Arbor, 306 State Street, Ann Arbor, MI

Exhibition runs September 10th – October 5th
Opening Reception: September 10th 6-9 pm

Come out to the opening if you can!

Experiments with postcards from the show.  I am starting to love multiples. The materiality of them is very satisfying in person.

Here are images from my show Our Improbable Existence at Pterodactyl in Philly.  Here is more info about the show.  The show was made possible by the support of the Philadelphia Art Hotel.  To see individual pieces, peruse recent blog posts or visit my website.  Off to the opening!

Yesterday I was inspired to finish the rest of the drawings on photos to make twelve total.  All of them are either liquid gold leaf or ink on a digital photographic print.  They’re either 15″ x 20″ or 20″ x 15″.  Again, excuse the poor documentation.  Here they be:

Here is the press release for my show at Pterodactyl sponsored by the Philadelphia Art Hotel.  Install Thursday, opening Friday.  I’m pasting the text below for better readability. Here’s hoping the five people I know in Philly and the rest of the city make it out to the opening!

The Philadelphia Art Hotel and Pterodactyl present an exhibition:

Amy Sacksteder – Our Improbable Existence

August 13th, 2010
8pm
3237 Amber St.
5th Floor North
Philadelphia, PA 19134

Amy Sacksteder attempts to reconcile vitality and mortality (and the accompanying celebrations and mournings that reality elicit), both her own and with that of others’. To quote Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, “we try as best we can to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence.” She thus distills momentous experiences into and through her artwork, which in turn, becomes a place for mourning and celebration; a place to explore and engage the tension between vitality and mortality. Her work has been sited on contemporary art blogs such as my love for you is a stampede of horses, and has been published in New American Paintings. Amy Sacksteder exhibits regularly nationally and internationally. She has attended residencies through the Ragdale Foundation in Illinois, the Pouch Cove Foundation in Newfoundland, the Residential Art Centre of Cantagal in France, and the Hungarian Multicultural Center in Budapest.

Most recently, she attended a residency program through the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists (SÍM) in Reykjavík to prepare for a solo exhibition at Northeastern Illinois University in the fall. She will return to Iceland in November to continue the research and creative work she began there in June. Amy Sacksteder received her MFA from Northern Illinois University in 2004. She lives and works in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she is an Assistant Professor of Art at Eastern Michigan University.

Here are some new blue drawings and drawings on photos.  Once again, sorry about the quality of some of the images.  It’s hard to get a good shot of the photos.  Documentation-quality images will be up on my website sometime in September (hopefully).

Out of the Blue and into the Black 2.1, liquid gold leaf and ink on photographic digital print, 15″x20″, 2010

I sent this piece off to a group show in Budapest today.  It is the first of a group of drawings on photographs.  Although I know of plenty of other artists doing this, my friend Abbigail Knowlton Israelsen, for one (who does it quite well, I might add), it’s a new turn for me.  I am going to work on them at my residency in Philly, for which I  leave in the morning.  Since its such a long drive, I am going to make a pit stop in Pittsburgh to eat at a veggie diner and see what’s on at the Mattress Factory.