Assistant Professor James Enos and Alumna Jess Machacek Present at Columbus State University

Assistant Professor of Art James Enos and alumna Jess Machacek recently presented a virtual lecture at Columbus State University as part of the Department of Art’s Visiting Artists and Scholars Residency Program. Enos and Machecek were artists in residence from March 22 through April 11.

The Visiting Artist and Scholar Residency Program and the Summer River Fellow brings prominent studio artists, art historians, art critics, and curators to Columbus State University’s Department of Art for long or short term residencies. Residents interact with students and faculty, lead workshops related to their disciplines, and give public lectures on their work. They may offer a seminar on a topic within their area of expertise, mount exhibitions, or work with students and faculty on collaborative projects.

Collaborative artists Jess Machacek and James A. Enos draw upon an urgency surrounding tourism, redevelopment, and revitalization. Through interviews, fieldwork, and hybrid materials / media, their practice considers contradictory relationships to desire in order to expose how cultures of autonomy and complacency enable distance from critical civic and environmental learning. Those Gentle Waves of Pay Dirt is a research project that will culminate in an exhibition of sculptural works exploring material futures, irony, form, and dissatisfaction through a post-extractivist lens. Their project is interested in a set of conditions laid bare by the contouring of Columbus’s (GA) urban whitewater course and wave shaper, as well as the evolution of comparable sites of preservation, leisure, and decline; Oxbow Meadows; Providence Canyon; Callaway Gardens. They are concerned to show how material flows relate to movement and erosion in juxtaposition with enduring values placed upon surface design and expressions of architecture.

(b. Lafayette, IN, 1975) James A Enos is an Assistant Professor of Art and Chair of Studio Core at the University of Georgia. His research engages the built environment through experimental architecture and social practice in an effort to understand how public culture responds to change. Enos holds degrees in fine art (MFA, University of California San Diego, 2009), architecture (M.Arch, The NewSchool of Architecture & Design, 2005), and organizational leadership (BS Purdue University, 2001).

(b. Omaha, NE, 1987) Jess Machacek produces domestic objects and installations that propose notions of nature as constructed or shaped by processes of irony and familiarity. Her sculptural work plays with ideas of scale, modularity, and pattern in reference to artifacts blurred by modernism, industry, and commercial color. She received an MFA in Printmaking (University of Georgia, 2015) and BFA in Studio Art (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2011).