Focusing on artistic process and the impulse to explore and experiment that typically happen privately inside an artist’s studio, ProcessLAB is designed to engage visitors in conversations about creative pursuits centered around artworks that are being developed in real time. The gallery features studio experiments, rough drafts, and multiple iterations of projects that each artist feels is ready for public interaction but have not yet found a final form.
Since its founding in 1977, The Fabric Workshop and Museum has been dedicated to supporting the artistic process, collaboration, and experimentation. For ProcessLAB, our staff of professional artists are working alongside Paper Buck, Michelle Lopez, and Sa’dia Rehman to help develop the projects, host public conversations and demonstrations about potential material explorations, directions, and, most importantly, ways to move each project forward.
Buck, Lopez, and Rehman are all engaged in their own artistic pursuits and have distinct practices, but their projects are united by central themes of environmental disaster, climate change, violence, isolation, and colonial ideologies. In ProcessLAB, the artists share an open-door space held for iterative thinking, exploring the relationships between ideas and materials, patience, magical thinking, and the role of community in creative pursuits.
Paper Buck (he/him) is an interdisciplinary visual artist, printmaker, and writer. His recent work is focused on place-centered research that critically explores white settler constructions of conservation, ecology, and the “American Landscape.”
Michelle Lopez (she/her) is an interdisciplinary sculptor and installation artist. Her work examines collapsed political and social structures by inverting cultural tropes through her process of building. Her research and exploitation of industrial materials within her work exposes the finite and sometimes invisible boundaries of our own embedded societal constructions. Lopez is a material manipulator, a conceptualist, a builder, who researches cultural phenomenon and its material to push it out to its Nth-degree. With that comes an inventive spirit by stretching the industrial processes of crafting consumerism in all of its many forms.
Sa’dia Rehman (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. Their work explores structures of the family, the nation, and the border. They center familial history to expand on harm and survival.