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September Issue 2003
City Art Gallery in Columbia, SC, Features Works by Mary Robinson
City
Art Gallery in Columbia, SC, is pleased to open its 2003-2004
season with a solo exhibit by USC Visiting Professor Mary Robinson
titled nature/passing/time. The exhibition will be on view
from Sept. 4 through Oct. 18, 2003.
The title refers to the artist's exploration of perceptions of time in her encounter with nature. In much of her art, Robinson expresses a feeling of passing through the physical landscape, as if on an emotional as well as physical journey. This sense of movement and change contrasts with a more fixed or static observation of a vista, the conventional viewpoint of most landscape painting. Although primarily a printmaker, Robinson will show several new paintings in the exhibit, in addition to new monotypes, an etching, and woodcuts.
The themes of time and nature have been an important element in Robinson's work. Growing up, she spent many hours exploring the forest around her home in Tennessee. As an adult artist, she continues her explorations, with a keen awareness of the process of change: "I watch in awe as plants, animals, insects and human beings sprout, grow, transform, decay, die. But not only is the world outside me changing. I watch my own mind change and see that my perceptions sometimes become clearer, sometimes more clouded or blocked. We human beings - along with everything around us - are in a continuous state of flux."
In her work on display at City Art, she responds in part to the dense and web-like thickets prevalent in places such as the Congaree Swamp and areas of the Lowcountry. Her new paintings build upon collages of varying vantage points encountered in her nature walks, in "these spaces you can escape to." Robinson says that in viewing her work she would like others "to have some kind of power they recognize in their experience in nature - to look at the light and how it changes, to see how forms tangle and overlap one another."
Robinson is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of South Carolina where she teaches printmaking. She received her BFA in 1990 in Studio Arts at the University of Colorado, and a MA in 1994 in Art History from the University of Wisconsin. She completed her MFA in 2001 at Indiana University where she specialized in printmaking. Her work has been exhibited in several national juried competitions. Robinson's installation art has been shown in Sumter, SC's Accessibility project and in Columbia's Artista Vista celebration. Her drawing Tangled Branches was exhibited in this year's USC Faculty Exhibition at the McKissick Museum in Columbia.
For more info check
our SC Commercial Gallery listings, contact Teri Tynes at 803/252-3613
or e-mail at (gallerydirector@cityartonline.com).
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