We’ve been lucky enough to have spent the last few months living with some of Tim’s new pieces. One thing of note is that the paintings are as much objects as surfaces. At first glance, they may appear to be a found object, perhaps, an unobtrusive rock or a deteriorating piece of wood. But when looked at for longer, or when confronted with a change of lighting, many emerge as figurative specters.

Sharon discusses her research and creative inspiration.

One of our main goals at Take the Mantel is to look deeper into the various influences behind an artist's practice, giving a glimpse into the human behind the art.

Sharon Servilio reads a favorite passage from Ursula Le Guin's "The Lathe of Heaven." (Your daily ASMR, you're welcome)

All images of Sharon Servilio's work are courtesy of the artist. The ceramic works were photographed by Mario Gallucci.

Videos of purple jellyfish, arial ocean, and photo of cliff are courtesy of vecteezy.com

Photo of Ursula Le Guin: Image by Wes Guderian | Courtesy Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation

Speculative history, the painting to ceramics pipeline, and terrible 90s Detroit commercials!

Portland-based Sharon Servilio is one of our longtime favorite humans and artists. She has graciously agreed to be our first interviewee. At Take the Mantel, we have the lofty goal of writing one smashing, descriptive sentence to introduce viewers to each artists' work. When we begin to write about Sharon's work, however, we find our sentences lengthening and entangling. We add "ands" until the sentence becomes a paragraph becomes a page and on and on.

This failed endeavor may speak to our writing skills, but it also suggests the expansive, polymathic quality of Sharon's work. We love Sharon's acute ability to link personal histories to universal bodies of knowledge, disrupting conventional notions of time, history and painting alike. Many thanks to Sharon for the generosity of her responses and allowing us a small glimpse into the mind of one of our favorite contemporary artists.

We discovered that we share a love of Tim Robinson and the show Detroiters with Sharon. If you are not familiar, make it your next show to binge! (Spoiler, all the terrible local Detroit commercials referenced in the show are based on real-life 90’s commercials Brian grew up watching in Detroit.)

As discussed with Sharon, this is the mother of all bad 90’s Detroit commmercials referenced in the show Detroiters!