Biography of:
Joe Feddersen
|
Feddersen's work investigates sign and cultural identity. This idea merges basic elements of basket designs from his ancestral home, the Inland Plateau region of the Columbia Basin, with urban imagery to speak to perceptions of land.
Says Feddersen, "my print work builds from a dialogue with traditional basket designs. The prints typically build complexity through layering signs. Carrying segments of patterns, the plates become the linear structures of the compositions. Each layer printed on top of another entwines in a labyrinth of a modernist aesthetic. These signs tenuously dissolve into an overall field while still maintaining direct ties to my native heritage.
The glass basket shapes reposition traditional designs with those of urban sources to heighten the relationships to land and culture. Parking lot and cinder block patterns replace traditional designs like the mountain, butterfly or star designs. Each placed on a blown glass traditional basket form. The newest suite of urban vestiges gain strength by pulling source patterns from the corporate world of Bridgestone and Goodyear tire Companies - each pattern carrying the name of a tire line. What was once the traditional source of a pattern like the markings of a snake track in the sand is replaced with a new mark made by SUV tire track. These new names touch on names that speak of a romanticized, idealized West.
A new series of works in glass started during a residency at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington are based on traditional fish traps from home in the Inland Washington State. They capitalized on the structure replacing the willow sticks with cane lines of glass and highlighting the openings with lip wraps of color. Like the prints, they draw on tradition, but appear modern in form."
Feddersen is an faculty member at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA., where he has been teaching for over 18 years, primarily printmaking. His work has exhibited throughout the United States, including solo exhibits at the Smithsonian's, National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustave Heye Center, New York, NY,; The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, Spokane, WA, and Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, OR; Feddersen is currently participating in Changing Hands 2 , a national touring exhibition.
Feddersen's work is collected in both private and public collections. Most recently the Whitney Museum of American Art purchased two of his reduction linocut prints.
|
HEARD MUSEUM
