Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford is a visual artist and educator based in Chicago. His work has been shown at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The UCSD Art Gallery, The Glass Curtain Gallery and The Hyde Park Art Center, among other spaces.  He has held fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center and the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting.  His work has been supported by grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Harpo Foundation, the Propeller Fund, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Sicily. He will be a Brown Foundation Fellow at the Dora Maar House in Menerbes France working towards an exhibition at the Schrott Center for the Arts at Butler University in the fall of 2015. Currently he is a DCASE/Joyce Foundation Studio Artist in Residence producing a collaborative public project with Faheem Majeed and Andrew Schachman called Floating Museum in partnership with the DuSable Museum of African American History slated to launch in summer 2016.

 

Garden Gipsotecas (2015) is a new site-specific sculpture made for Kelly and Craig Mitchell's yard by Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford. The artist proposes the artwork as an invented abstract twist on lawn ornamentation. The mixed media work originated from the artist’s thoughts about the mass production of classical sculpture used as contemporary domestic decor. One of the artist’s concerns in his practice is how common memorial statues can be revised through modern art to bring it into the future. Garden Gipsotecas addresses the wayward tendency of the cast and copy in our contemporary moment—from digital copies to mass produced garden sculptures available commercial sites, like  designtoscono.com.   

 

The classic bust form is complicated and made unfamiliar through repetition and casting using a synthetic construction material, insulation foam. The figure head is taken from a mold of Hercules' head inside the lion's mouth, which is a celebrated representation often found on Greek and Roman artifacts. The story of Hercules and the Nemean Lion has long been represented in art through the ages as parable of virtue overcoming vice - a common struggle in humanity that transcends the boundaries of time. For several centuries the respected craft of plaster casts of master works were collected and displayed in Gipsotecas or museums of cast sculpture. Notions of manual drift in artisanal cultures come into play, as well as questions about how we can understand a contemporary possibility for the copy that includes digital imprinting and indexing techniques. This, as Joshua G. Stein writes in his essay The Wayward Cast, “can foster a continual revealing of history through the act of reproduction… and a transformation of information through contemporary process, technique and ethos.”