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BIO

Ethan Worden was born in Austin, Texas, and received a B.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Colorado and an M.F.A. from Mills College in 2008. He was awarded Boulder Arts Commission Community Grant in 2001, two successive Graduate Research Grants from Mills College in 2006 and 2007, the 2007 Herringer Family Foundation Prize for Excellence in Art, and the 2007 Murphy & Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts. He has exhibited his work in San Francisco, Oakland, Colorado, and Lima, Peru. Ethan lives and works in Oakland.

STATEMENT

Often, the stories that we build around objects - their uses, their meanings seem to be those objects. It's a familiar scenario: our minds make associations and links that begin to seem less like coupled elements and more like an inextricable whole. Using manipulations in scale and configuration, I want to jostle those connections and loosen the ties between the stories we assign to an object and the object itself.

I make things that resist being themselves. They are things we know, simulacra that point to objects in a real world: easily identifiable and essentially pragmatic. At the same time, however commonplace they seem, these are altered objects that confound our expectations and project themselves into an illogical and lyrical space. They become confused: at once huge and tiny, allegorical and literal, functional and dysfunctional. While they directly reference the scale model and the miniature, these things refuse to inhabit a Lilliputian world; rather, they intrude brazenly into our own. In the end, these objects and their stories separate and shift, complicating the way we see and relate to them as well as to the things that surround us.

PRESS

ETHAN WORDEN, East Bay Express 1/5/2011
"Things Are Expanding"
Review by DeWitt Cheng

ETHAN WORDEN, Studio Walls 8/12/2010
"No Place But Now"
Interview by Michael Hall

ETHAN WORDEN, East Bay Express 7/9/2008
"Junction"
Review by DeWitt Cheng