October Issue 2000
Artspace in Raleigh, NC, Features Three New Exhibitions
Artspace in Raleigh, NC, is presenting three new exhibitions at its facility including: Girlfriend, featuring photography and digital animation by Claire Holroyd in the UpFront Gallery (Oct. 6-28); Dreaming in Place, featuring an installation by Ann Marie Kennedy in Gallery 1 (Oct. 6-Nov.11); and Details of an Abandoned Landscape, featuring photography by John Gordy in the Artspace Lobby (Oct. 6-Nov. 11).
Claire Holroyd is a photographer and digital
artist. She grew up in Raleigh, NC-much photographed by her stepfather,
Casper Holroyd, himself an avid camerman. While pursuing her undergraduate
degree at Duke University, Holroyd became a social activist, studied
modern art, and discovered photography - from the other side of
the camera.
Combining these three pursuits, Holroyd began a documentary project
based upon her conversations with Ms. Jessie Highsmith Copeland,
a long-time activist and resident of a local public housing community,
Chavis Heights. Receiving the John Hope Franklin (Center for Documentary
Studies) and Anne Frior Scott Awards (Women's History) in 1993,
she was not only able to complete her project, but was encouraged
to pursue photography in earnest. In 1999, Holroyd received a
Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the School of Visual Arts
in New York.
Holroyd's photography is regularly shown in both the Triangle and New York City. She has recently assisted in the curation of Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman at New York University's Grey Gallery and Fame After Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. She currently lives and works in Raleigh where she continues her photographic work regarding intimacy in contemporary southern culture.
What variables of place determine our self? How does one merge with something, yet keep separate? How do the landscapes of memory emerge into daily life? How do we submerge ourselves into the places we have chosen or find ourselves in? These are questions that Ann Marie Kennedy will explore as she creates a site specific installation in Gallery 1 at Artspace.
The installation will be about relationships with the landscape and how we understand the places we live in or come from. Specifically, how those landscapes shape us and how we, in turn, affect them. Gardening is a key metaphor, in this installation, for a direct connection to the earth. A garden is a projection of a dream space -- containing desire and possibility at the onset, and producing both failures and surprises. One has the ability to control, yet the variables of place essentially shape the outcome.
The artist describes the piece: "Enter the gallery and you see a wall of barnboard with a door. Go through the door into a room. A bed sits in the center of the space. A quilt covers the bed and it is translucent, lit from beneath. The quilt is made of paper with seeds in each square. Above the bed is a video playing, a man is gardening at night, moving in circles, planting seeds. A wall divides the room, but not entirely. You walk around the wall and see a grid of jars. Each jar is on a metal stand, about chest height and contains a garden ( a sample from the forest floor). When you look into the jar the landscape is enlarged. Grow lights illuminate the space. You notice the wall -- on the bedroom side it was plastered, but on the garden side the material it is made of is straw and clay mixed together.
Kennedy is an installation artist and papermaker currently based in Penland, NC. In her paperworks, installations, and sculptures, she explores a personal connection to natural processes and questions our relationship with the environment. She received her MFA and MA from the University of Iowa in Intermedia and Sculpture and is currently employed at the Penland School of Crafts as the Studio Coordinator of Books, Print, Photo and Drawing.
This project received a New Works grant from the North Carolina Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of North Carolina and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Photographer John Gordy has been exploring the abandoned landscape for almost a decade. What began as a failed foray into steel sculpture has developed into a photographic pursuit of form and design in the debris of the industrial age. During 1999, Gordy photographed in Raleigh, lending his perspective of life in the capital city for the exhibition, Raleigh 2000: Interpretations of a Place. Recently he has been collecting images of abandoned spaces in Pittsburgh, Richmond, Baltimore and Camden,NJ.
Artspace invited Gordy to exhibit new work in conjunction with Ann Marie Kennedy's installation, Dreaming in Place, which is about relationships with the landscape and how we understand the places we live in or come from. His photographs are taken in natural light and are Iris Gicleé prints on watercolor paper.
Gordy grew up in Durham, NC. He graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, where he studied photography. He has exhibited his work in Boston, Cambridge,Washington, DC, and throughout North Carolina. He currently resides and works in Washington, DC.
For further information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings or call Corkey Goldsmith, Program Director at
919/821-2787.
Mailing Address: Carolina Arts, P.O. Drawer
427, Bonneau, SC 29431
Telephone, Answering Machine and FAX: 843/825-3408
E-Mail: carolinart@aol.com
Subscriptions are available for $18 a year.
Carolina Arts
is published monthly by Shoestring
Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc.
Copyright© 2000 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston
Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts
from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts
Online, Copyright© 2000 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved
by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use
without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina
Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.