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Ploch Art Gallery Artist Profiles
DERRICK BUISCH Roadside signs, strip malls, graffiti, tattoos and product symbol designs are all fair game for the abstract paintings of Derrick Buisch. Buisch’s paintings are concerned with color and surface and are inspired by his immediate surroundings. His color represents a range of materials from the synthetic (plastic, bubblegum, crayons) to the natural (old walls, shallow pools of water, flesh). The palette also has a physical presence that might be called “both mouthwatering and sensuous.”
AMY RUFFO Methodical would be one way to describe Amy Ruffo’s drawings. Being exposed to the Great Plains and expansive horizon of her native Nebraska, Ruffo has developed a taste for a particular sort of line. She has identified this line in views of treetops against a clear sky, a mass of power lines and a detailed view of newly leafing trees. Ruffo uses her camera to capture and recall the lines she observes, then transfers the lines from photographs to her sketchbook where she works them extensively - as if in a conversation to get to know them. It is this working relationship with lines that allows her to create drawings that reveal the individual character and energy of each line that Ruffo so sensitively delivers.
WENDY MUKLUK For Wendy Mukluk there is more than meets the eye and it is apparent in her digital photographs. “I’m basically a historian… I draw what I can’t photograph,” says Mukluk. She sees the artist role being similar to that of a shaman, as a vehicle by which things from other realms can surface for everyone’s benefit. It is in a very holistic sense that Mukluk tries to record “the wonders all around us,” focusing especially on those that exist in “ordinary” objects. With a background in traditional photography, digital techniques, drawing, lithography, etching and painting Wendy is well qualified to, through painterly manipulations, impose her own sense of aesthetic and beauty onto her digital prints.
JEREMY WOLF Sculptor Jeremy Wolf’s objective is to strike a balance between the natural world and our increasingly artificial one. Wolf has adopted animals, for their easy personification, as a symbol of nature as a whole. By giving his sculpted animals human features and qualities, or having them interact with symbols of modern life, he forces us to consider them as part of our world. “I often create my artwork with the goal of blurring the boundary between humans and animals,” states Wolf. He creates standing sculptures as well as those that are suspended in the air, giving viewers the feeling that they are sharing the space with the artwork and not merely looking at it.
LAUREL LUEDERS Laurel Lueders takes photographs of what constitute personal symbols, then weaves them together creating a map that can be followed by a public audience. Her work is deeply layered with overlapping and emerging images, and deals with history, political situations, and an underlying element of inner disturbance. In describing her most recent work, Lueders said, “I went around Germany and photographed archeological dig sites of lost cities, many of them 1000-2000 years old. I was fascinated by this cycle....a city built over a city, how cities (and also people) go back to the earth, how it is built and rebuilt....both in a physical way and also symbolically.”
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