Santa Fe For Art's Sake: (the book) - Paperback

Housed in the back of a custom retrofitted 1970 aluminum stepvan, Axle Contemporary is an art gallery on wheels. We exhibit installation art, performance, works on paper, including photography, drawing, and painting, and occasionally sculpture. Our mobility allows us to visit both typical art venues and unusual ones, such as schools, empty lots, restaurants, grocery stores, and city streets. Our 6' x 10' exhibition space features high wood ceilings, exposed beams, track lighting and a magnetically based system for displaying unframed works on paper. Axle Contemporary was founded in 2010 by artists Matthew Chase-Daniel and Jerry Wellman, as a collaborative work of art, and an innovative vehicle for arts distribution. It has since grown beyond the confines of the mobile exhibition space, and also includes book publishing, and alternative methods of creation and dissemination of contemporary arts in the public sphere. Matthew Chase-Daniel (né Chase) was born in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1965 and lived in New York City in the1960s. He later raised tadpoles, minnows, and a raccoon, learned to fall off a horse, and hunt morels, wild violets, and rainbow trout in the Berkshire Mountains. In the mid and late 1980s, Chase-Daniel spent three years at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York (B.A.), and three years in Paris, France, where he studied cultural anthropology, photography, and ethnographic film production (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes & Sorbonne). Since 1989, he has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, renovating old houses, growing green chard, and making family and art. His photography and sculpture have been exhibited across the U.S. and in Europe. He is represented in Santa Monica, California by Craig Krull Gallery. He is the co-founder, co-owner, and co-curator of Axle Contemporary. Jerry Wellman's first job, besides delivering newspapers, was working as a Carny for Grover Bostwick in northern Wisconsin. Since then He has published several illustrated books, exhibited paintings, drawings, and installations, created performance pieces, produced video art nationally and internationally. Most recently he co-founded an alternative arts venue, Axle Contemporary Gallery. His interest in poetics and an expanded definition of art is evident in all his work. Exploring and sharing that interest is central to his production as an artist.