Cory Imig

Cory Imig's current studio work is a process of organizing and categorizing information. Meticulously noting everyday situations, Imig allows the viewer, and herself, to reconsider the mundane and imagine the infinite possibilities of association. She notes interactions among other people and her relationship to the world that surrounds her.

In addition to her studio work, Cory is currently focused on PLUG projects, a curatorial collaboration located in Kansas City's Stockyards District. Amy Kligman, Misha Kligman, Nicole Mauser, Caleb Taylor and Cory all share the mission of bringing fresh perspectives and conversation to the local art community. Their goal is to energize artists and the public at large by exhibiting challenging new work, initiating critical dialogue, and expanding connections of artists in Kansas City as part of a wider, national network of artists. The PLUG team are also finalists for the 2011 Missouri Entrepreneur Celebration Innovation Award. This is another instance of the local arts community working at an organic level to perpetuate the city's cultural growth. Having received initial funding from a Charlotte Street Foundation Rocket Grant to begin the project, their inaugural exhibition "Living Arrangements" opened to the public in September 2011.

Before reaching this point, Cory attended Savannah College of Art and Design to study jewelry design, which she quickly realized was not for her. She had already fallen in love with the city of Savannah and had no intention of moving back to Kansas City. While there, however, her interest changed from metals to fibers and was soon immersed in the fibers department at SCAD. Cory's view on fibers as a repetitive act; sewing, knitting, weaving, all involves doing the same motion over and over again to create structure. The work that came out of her BFA at SCAD was diverse. Performative, sculptural, and conceptually-based, her pieces were usually not involving fiberous materials at all.

The day after graduation Cory moved to Richmond, Virginia to attend the Virginia Commonwealth University post-baccalaureate program. It was the first time she had unrestricted time and a designated place just to focus on making work. At once overwhelming, it enabled her to learn a lot about who she could be as an artist. After VCU, Cory came back to Kansas City for a couple months before spending the winter in Johnson, Vermont at the Vermont Studio Center. She attended residencies as a way to further her education in studio based art practice which she felt was left out of her SCAD education.

She returned to Kansas City where she has lived for the past three years. During this time, Cory has been a resident at the now-defunct Arts Incubator and Charlotte Street Foundation Urban Culture Project Residency Program Cory's work allows the viewer to reconsider the mundane and imagine the infinite possibilities of association. It therefore becomes a process to follow instead of a series of intuitive decisions that need to be made. By creating a rule, the artist disappears. She organizes and categorizes information - meticulously noting everyday situations, interactions among other people, and her own relationships.

A recent example of this process is her show, "Strangers Like Us" which opened September 2011 (almost simultaneously with the opening at PLUG projects) at Project Space Gallery. In this she contacted people sharing the last name Imig. The request resulted in just over 100 responses from Imigs living in the United States. A family of Imigs' from Nebraska, whom Cory had never met before, came to the show's opening. This show is a good example of the simple act in communicating these everyday relationships and their place in the world.

Embracing the belief that "fibers" is not a material set, but is defined as repetition, allows Cory to maintain a very meditative studio practice. Most of her work allows her to fall into a rhythm by repeating the same action continuously. Without this process of using her hands, Cory says she tends to become very anxious. Making work allows her to "think clearly and function normally."

Her process begins with an idea, followed by an established set of restraints. Whether it's observations over a set period of time or collecting something indefinitely, Cory uses everyday activities as source material for her work. Much of what she creates is based off of her everyday routines. It usually starts with mundane subject matter. The work happens, or the artwork develops, when she figures out why these things are interesting to her in the first place.

One example is "Conversations: August 16, 2011." Cory hid a voice recorder on herself for an entire day and recorded everything that was said. She then transcribed that information and painted her side of these conversations onto a wall. One of the interesting aspects in this work is the time that it takes to complete the piece. She chose a normal Monday with nothing particularly special happening that day. After recording the days' conversations, she was forced to sit and listen to the entire day again to accurately transcribe everything. The text was then meticulously painted onto a wall where it became a vast field of various lines and marks.

From a sales standpoint, Cory understands there is a place and market for everyone's work, whether it's painting, installation, performance or sculpture. In the past, she has been asked to produce work that is more "sellable", but sees trouble in the integrity of that approach. Starting to explore other facets of interest in art allows Cory to find ways to sustain her studio practice, whether those activities are curating with PLUG projects or teaching art to children at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. As an individual artist, Cory continues to figure out the best way to sustain her practice. It takes a lot of time and energy to piece together jobs around her studio schedule. The ideal situation, she believes, would be a full-time teaching position which would satisfy a number of artistic interests.

Cory has recently begun a new body of work that focuses solely on formal aspects of art in a very nontraditional way. She has always had an interest in time and exploring different elements of time. The sculptures she's making now are "forcing me to examine the idea of time from a new perspective. I am excited to see what develops with this body of work and the different directions it takes." With PLUG projects she has the chance to curate, which, she says, "to be honest, I am still trying to figure out exactly what that means. I am excited to start to define it for myself and figure out how it fits into my art practice. I have come to believe that an important aspect of curating is writing. Writing is an important tool I use to help me see."

Cory is a Spring 2010 Artist INC Fellow.

You can read more about Cory Imig at her website.

Written by Blair Schulman, 2011.