Bios:
Ry McCullough is an artist and educator, working in Tampa, Florida. He earned his Bachelors of Fine Arts from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio where he concentrated in the areas of printmaking and sculpture. Upon completion of his undergraduate work he served as the Director of Sculptural Studies as well as teaching printmaking at Stivers School for the Arts. McCullough received his MFA in Printmaking and Book Arts from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. He currently is serving the Department of Art + Design as an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at the University of Tampa. McCullough has exhibited nationally, internationally and is the founder of the Standard Action Press Collaborative Zine Project.
Nick Satinover is an artist and educator based outside of Nashville, TN. He holds BFA and MFA degrees from Wright State University, Dayton, OH, and Illinois State University, Normal, IL, respectively. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Frans Masereel Center in Kasterlee, Belgium, Kala Artist Institute in Berkeley, CA, the Tofte Lake Center in Ely, MN and Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA. His work has been exhibited widely nationally in solo, group and juried exhibitions. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Middle Tennessee State University. He keeps a tidy home with his wife, sons and rescue animals.
small_bars is their collaborative conceptual art projects which operates as an on-going conversation, factory and archive
Statement:
During the spring and summer months of 2020, nearly all of the continental United States was in quarantine, taking refuge in their homes in an attempt to limit the spread of the Corona Virus.
In late April, small-bars had agreed to take on a project now known as, Remote Work Day. It began as a venture to create audio and visual works that would reflect our shared experience of conflating all of our activities into the home with our respective families. RWD has resulted in an 8-hour audio track with accompanying video and printworks, as well as a 27-minute EP titled, PART TIME. Verité sound recordings, photographs from our daily activities, and archival material, were combined with lo-fi musical improvisations. This reflected the paradoxes of our situation; the state of being together and apart, present and absent, static and frenetic, private and oddly public. Typical within the creative collaborative practice of small_bars, we looked toward our shared experiences as past residents of Dayton, Ohio. This locus of revelry allowed small_bars to absorb a decidedly Daytonian vocabulary, drawing upon a rich archive of historical references of challenge and triumph, from the great flood of 1913 to the Wright Brothers contributions to aviation. This state of looking back to move forward is one of self and collective reflection, an attempt to locate oneself with the intellectual and emotional resources of lived experience.
The audio and visual selections included in the portfolio, TRACKED PRINTS/LAYERED SOUNDS, draw upon the groundwork laid by the RWD project. The fusion of the historical/archival with the immediate/quotidian invited the discussion of the Wright Brothers’ workshop experiments and basement explorations as generative material for these selections . Prototype Wingform (title of the audio and print works) speak in the vernacular of collage, mixing the didactic and the poetic to create analogs of inquiry and reformation.
Websites: http://smallbars.art
Instagram: @small_bars_small_bars
@nicksatinover
@rymcculloughstudio