Past Visiting Artist

My work comes into being through a great deal of non-linear or associative research, tangential explorations and an abiding love of the object, the well made, properly made, appropriate object. Just as much it is informed by a childhood spent exploring the cramped, overstuffed homes of elderly midwestern relatives, filled with books, curios and artifacts from their long lives. While my work may have a familiarity in expression or form, there is a half-cocked dream logic to the entirety. I am returning to these spaces in my dreams to interrogate these objects for their stories. Borrowing my subjects as I do from existing sources, I need to gain as much ownership of the work as I can. This manifests itself in my laboring over these projects, beginning to end, in every aspect. Every decision of refinement or finish, material choice, action or inaction belongs to me. In this Whitmanesque spirit, ‘out of the cradle endlessly rocked’ by a craft based work ethic, I feel the need to come to my finished product honestly, through the work of my own hand.

Ryan W. Kelly is an Associate Professor in WWU’s Art & Art History Department, teaching Ceramics and 3-D Foundations. Prior to that he lived and worked in Philadelphia, where he was a resident artist at The Clay Studio; a recipient of an Independence Foundation Fellowship, and a co-curator at Practice Gallery. His collaborations in dance and theater include credits in the Green Porno series by Isabella Rossellini.

With his sculpture, Porelli wants to provide access to an archetypal dimension of reality, condensing surrealist contaminations, Pop proliferations and archaic symbolism in his visual language. The anthropomorphic inventions that he elaborates produce an estrangement effect of the figuration, creating iconographic absurdities and a new mythology of the present. With his human repertory, Porelli emphasizes the critical issues of contemporary mankind and all the phenomena that underlie society, including the unsustainability of civilization as a development model and its incompatibility with nature.
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His sculpture becomes an example of cultural eclecticism and historical nomadism, representing stylistically the expressive globalization of creation. In addition to painting, Porelli’s work finds its preferred expressive technique in ceramics, both for the connection of this material with the ancestral roots of man, and due to its versatility, which offers him the opportunity to express current, modern and contemporary concepts.

Sculptures produced primarily with slip-cast or press molds, taken from historical figurines or 3-D scans of contemporary individuals, serve as a pretext to realize a transformation and arrive at a “sculptural subject” that is both individual and original. A constant of the variations that propel the sculptures towards continuous regeneration is the attempt to establish the stroboscopic range of human essence. A prolific group of complementary figures is formed that fills the void between two opposed poles of existence.

Porelli’s figures are an example of pure creativity that expresses an incessant impetus for discovery of the infinite nuances of which the mysterious world of reality is composed. They are a grand exercise in metamorphoses, transience and relativity of the creative process, that through an inverse process, converts the stereotype into the archetype.

Porelli has participated in artist residencies and conferences in America, China and Europe, including The Clay Studio and The Archie Bray Foundation in the United States, Jingdezhen International Studio and Blanc de Chine ICAA in China, EKCW in the Netherlands and the Woodman Family Foundation in Italy. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad (China, South Korea, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the USA). Together with Lori-Ann Touchette, he founded CRETA Rome, an international center of ceramics and the arts in 2012. In 2021, he was elected a member of the International Academy of Ceramics.

As a multi-medium artist Tara McCoy started making crafts at 12 years old.  In high school, Tara took arts and crafts classes with Alyne Stamper where she has since perfected her skills and techniques.  She is known for saying, “everyone’s an artist.” 

Tara has been the recipient of numerous awards at the Cherokee Fall Festival, as well as Oklahoma Art Shows, and at SWAIA in Santa Fe.  Tara teaches other artists how to work with different mediums as well as generating new creations at her home in the Birdtown community.