Feature Articles


July Issue 1999

Works by Gretchen Lothrop and Terry Rodgers to be Featured at Burroughs-Chapin Museum

The Franklin G. Burroughs - Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach, SC, will be showing two exhibitions this summer. A Relationship With Notes: Sculpture by Gretchen Lothrop, an exhibit of standing sculptures and wall pieces by Gretchen Lothrop will be on view from July 6 through Aug. 8, and The Good Life, an exhibit of large-scale oil paintings by Terry Rodgers will also open on July 6, but continue through Aug. 15.

Gretchen Lothrop's works represent her fascination with history and are inspired by the notion that visual relationships equal a kind of musical harmony. Her sculptural forms appear to capture the very idea of movement and suddenly freeze it within an ethereal frame. Stainless steal surfaces reflect surrounding light and color, but what we sense is movement contained and projected outward from within.

In a statement about her work Lothrop said, "I often think of my work as a metaphor for music and dance. It seems to me that the aim of both those art forms and mine is the capturing and reliving of those certain intangible poetic instants which pass like sylphs through the halls of our souls. One sculpture in the collection, which might be called the centerpiece, is called Lyrical Cosmological Devise For Measuring December. One may approach the meaning of this piece by listening to the Prelude from J.S. Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 1 while contemplating Zelda Fitzgerald's remark 'Who can measure what the human heart can hold?'"

Several wall pieces included in the exhibit are comprised of fragments of human images. Painted in oil on irregularly shaped panels, these images are augmented by metal shapes that complete a narrative of hope and crystallize some indefinable instant of insight.

Terry Rodgers' work examines scenes from everyday life. His remarkably detailed presentations of daily human activity in familiar and unfamiliar environments are large scale and up-close. His scenes are at once customary and disconcerting. We become compelled in our observations, invited, yet not invited, like voyeurs, excluded, silent, watching. In his artist's statement, Rodgers addresses the experience of viewing his work as follows: "It is in the subtle interplay of silences and gestures, the careful delineation of what we think we can see as well as what we can't, that these works become unsettling meditations of isolation, loss, and in the end, meaning."

For further information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings or call the museum at 843/238-2510.

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