Janet Van Fleet, Boat, wood, paper, antique photographs, brass, annealed steel wire, 14" x 14" x 6"

American, playing from Barre, VT, USA

Janet Van Fleet is a self-taught Vermont artist who produces two distinct bodies of work. Her wall-hung works, called Circular Statements, use buttons and other disks in wire grids, and have been described as the architecture of spacetime. She also creates freestanding figurative works, known as Curious Lifeforms, assembled using wood, wire, and found objects.

Van Fleet grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago, then went on to earn a B.A. in Psychology and an M.A. in Education. She is a founder of Studio Place Arts (SPA), a three-story community center for the visual arts in Barre, Vermont, where her studio is located. She has been a Vermont reviewer for Art New England, and founded Vermont Art Zine with the late Marc Awodey. The Vermont Council on the Arts awarded her grants in 1996 and 2005 for the creation of three large installations, and in 2010 she traveled to Nagoya, Japan for On the Planet, an exhibit in connection with the UN Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity.

janetvanfleet@fairpoint.net www.janetvanfleet.com

Thoughts on the Telephone process

This was such a good idea, and a pleasure to do! I would have preferred to have "gotten the whisper" from someone working in a completely different medium -- poetry, dance, music, or even painting. The piece I translated was using familiar materials and so I didn't really have to struggle or suffer, and it was even more of a breeze as I have recently begun to work with historic photographs, so it came together really quickly. I have previously worked with Vermont pianist Michael Arnowitt in a performance where we each did improvisations responding to the other -- I worked with an overhead projector and colored shapes. I think it's great to do these cross-disciplinary conjunctions. More, more!