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The Quality
without a Name

To seek the timeless way
we must first know
the quality without a name.

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About

© 2015 Robert Fraher

There is a central quality
which is the root criterion of life.

This quality is objective and precise,
but it cannot be named.

The search which we make for this quality,
in our own lives,

is the search for those moments
and situations

when we are most alive.

We begin by understanding
that every space,
is given its character
by certain patterns of events
that happen there.

1X

Claire Abitz

Founder & Owner of Standard Projects
tailor, sculptor, painter

Claire Abitz is an artist and entrepreneur. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture with an emphasis on casting and metalworking from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Claire’s early post-graduate years were spent traveling as a decorative artist for an interior design firm based in New York. In 2014, she established Standard Projects, a multidisciplinary maker studio, in Hortonville, WI. The building in which she chose to house the studio is the former Hortonville police station. The facility includes a variety of workspaces, a storefront, and a gallery, as well as a visiting artist program. Claire's more recent endeavors include building renovation, sign painting, and leather working.

Creating along a spectrum ranging from art to product, Claire's work is primarily informed by geometry, repetition, and material exploration. It often starts with finding multiples (sometimes hundreds) of the same item and researching the origin of their manufacturing. The history of how something was made and the individual residual components that remain are the core focus of her work. Through assembling these items in nontraditional ways, she aims to create new objects that honor an industrious past and question the current and future means of supplying goods to society.

Website

Nic Langner

Artist in Residence @ Standard Projects
artisan, mechanic, philosopher

Nicholas Langner is a visual and structural artist, as well as a community activist and inventor. He has spent time educating and learning at The Art Institute of Minneapolis, Columbia College in Chicago, and the Fox-Valley area in Wisconsin. There, his work was primarily based in photography.

Currently, his studies are focused on the ethereal dynamics of self-empowerment, self-sustainability, and community building through the gritty and rich ethic of DIY culture. He repurposes and refurbishes materials to create simple solutions and functional art. His future goals are to re-embrace his roots and start an organic farm; slowly building a self-sustainable community and makers' space in the country.

Website

Shannon Slane

Artist in Residence @ Standard Projects
designer, decorator, fabricator

Shannon Slane is an installation artist. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture with a minor in Industrial Design from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her work combines the themes of organic and industry, place and purpose. Her work is a narrative with a focus on form and material. Use of natural materials such as paper, leather, and wood, along with cutting edge production processes lends Shannon’s work a sense of history and modernity, and is intended to reflect culture's simultaneous fetishizing of the handmade and the technologically innovative. Fusing the organic with the industrious, she creates emotionally resonant environments that lead the viewer to at once be who they are in the world today, and connect to a traditional practice of making and storytelling.

Originally from Southern California, Shannon has been traveling the United States and abroad, including Australia, New Zealand and Europe, for the last 10 years. Her love of travel has recently progressed from being a factor that informs her work into the work itself. Shannon’s current project is the remodeling of a 1967 Airstream Ambassador to serve as her nomadic home and mobile art studio. Once finished, she intends to roam coast-to-coast collecting stories and perspectives from other travelers to inspire a new series of installations. This work will explore the connections and tensions between the ideas of home and travel.

Website

Robert Fraher

Artist in Residence @ Standard Projects
thinker, maker, nerd

Robert Fraher is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Stout. He has a Master of Fine Art degree in graphic design with an emphasis on interactivity from the University of Minnesota. His research considers how interactive design and digital media can facilitate individual expression and community involvement. He has exhibited, published, and presented research in the fields of graphic design, art, instructional design, interaction design, and creativity.

As an artist and designer, Robert is interested in creating compelling experiences for people through interactive computer-mediated communication. His work explores the context of the computer interface as an environment for emotional and cognitive engagement. The purpose of this exploration is to help people experience the exhilaration that can result from creative participation.

Website

To the extent those patterns are alive,
they let our inner forces loose,
and set us free.

The more living patterns there are in a place–
the more it comes to life as an entity,
the more it glows...

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The more it has that self-maintaining fire,
which is the quality without a name.

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Its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety
created in the presence of the fact that all things pass.

This is the quality itself.

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To you, mind of no mind, in whom the timeless way was born.

Christopher Alexander

Q

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