Imagine for a moment that you live, work, eat, drink and party with the same person every day. You work in the same very competitive field, so you’re subject to personal criticism at any moment, and you’re probably subconsciously doing some critiquing yourself. You have the same friends. You do the same things with your free time. Maybe you even share a dog. I’ve seen some devout marriages and soulmates and whatnot in my lifetime, but this… this supersedes it all. Sculptor Johnston Foster and designer/sculptor Amie Cunningham are a tandem artmaking force, and they have been keeping it real for six years, no matter how divergent the paths their respective styles and work become. A sprawling Scott’s Addition studio houses their equipment (and most of the time, their persons, as they’re both workaholics) and offers them exactly what they want out of life: more time with each other.
 
Let’s flesh this story out. They met—Amie a painting/sculpture major at Parsons, Johnston getting his MFA at Hunter—in the romantic/insane/brutal environment of New York. Within weeks, it was on. School was school, and paired up with The City, it didn’t afford a lot of privacy or fresh air. So they moved. To the middle of nowhere. Amie is Canadian, so they took up happy residence in the family cabin in New Brunswick; it had no real means of heating or cooling, but they didn’t care. They stayed there in that cozy little spot (and I mean cozy—in the winter, they closed off two thirds of the house in order to stay warm) for nearly two years, making art and being crazy about each other. Amie started woodcarving and dreaming up plans for intricate, wall-length wooden tapestries, and Johnston prepared for a solo show at Rare Gallery in Chelsea, a place where they both would end up showing work. “Every day, we woke up and worked in our studio (which was the barn). I was building a giant cornucopia out of blown-out truck tires that I found on I-95 on my drives back and forth; the cornucopia was full of garbage. I made old pizza slices out of scrap wood, cardboard, some wood glue for cheese, some bits of red umbrella for pepperoni. It’s an important part of my process, making something from nothing, scavenging, finding new personalities in things,” Johnston notes. Getting engaged on the ice of the Belle Isle bay in the middle of winter… what else could they have done? It was idyllic. Fast forward to 2007, they’re getting married at a B&B overlooking the same bay, just before their move to our fair city.
 
Even better news? They love, love, love it here. Amie’s cranking out beautifully printed limited edition t-shirts (find them at Rumors on Harrison, at Plant Zero’s Gap Tooth Studios, or in her Etsy shop, thief.etsy.com). Johnston’s teaching sculpture at VCU, encouraging that environmentally-conscious attitude that beauty can be made from the discarded. Other than his current (third!) solo show at Rare Gallery, you can find his work, a show entitled Altered Beast, at the Center for Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach as of October 16. Rare also houses his Web presence at rare-gallery.com.



WEB | http://www.rare-gallery.com
WEB | http://www.thief.etsy.com

VERY PROUD OF YOUSE GUYS! IT’S ALL COOL!
  MUCH LOVE!!!