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October Issue 2004
City Art in Columbia, SC, Offers New Work by Represented Artists
City Art in Columbia, SC, will present an exhibit
of new work by gallery artists from Oct. 9 through Nov. 13, 2004.
The show will include works by Alex Powers, Tarleton Blackwell,
John Monteith and Rebecca Rhees.
Alex Powers
(detail of Studies of America)
Alex Powers will show multi panel pieces, New
York Art and Studies of America for the first time in Columbia,
SC. Powers has been a self-employed painter and teacher for 28
years. He exhibits in galleries in five states and among his many
national juried exhibition awards is the Gold Medal winner in
the 1997 American Watercolor Society Exhibition. Powers travels
and teaches workshops in this country and abroad. He is the author
of Painting People in Watercolor, A Design Approach, published
by Watson-Guptill, now in paperback.
Powers' painting style has evolved into personal, content-dominated
imagery. Using gouache, charcoal, pastel and sometimes collage
on illustration board, his loose realism combines an emphasis
on drawing with an awareness of the art of our time. Often the
illustration boards are connected for work up to 15 feet in length.
Powers explains, "I attempt to deal with issues such as human
origins, religion, philosophy, racism, economic, inequality, etc.
These overwhelming issues are difficult to deal with, but they
are what interest me. And, since I believe in the singularity
of life and art, these issues are the content of my current work."
Powers' work will be included in the South Carolina Art Education
Association show at the Columbia Museum of Art this month.
Tarleton Blackwell will be showing a large-scale
oil painting. The original sketch of the painting will also be
on display.
Blackwell has established himself as one of the leading visual
interpreters of the rural South. In his celebrated Hog Series,
begun nearly twenty years ago and now consisting of over two hundred
and fifty works, Blackwell explores the rich iconography of the
region, incorporating elements of art history, children's tales,
persistent stereotypes and even commercial imagery.
The native of Manning, SC, populates his visual world with hogs,
opossums, wolves, pit bulls and cats but also with images inspired
by his experience as an arts teacher and as a devoted fan of the
seventeenth century Spanish School of painting. Much of the allure
of Blackwell's work rests in his complex, dense, and often-ambiguous
imagery, one that is part allegory, part fairytale, and part social
commentary. He creates a complex topography of the rural South,
grounded in his experience but overlaid with historical and literary
musings.
The hogs which appear in his works emerged out of Blackwell's
experiences raising them, but over time they began to mean something
more. He articulates our shared cultural and social perceptions
about the animal, whether derived from the Three Little Pigs,
Porky the Pig, Piggly Wiggly and so forth. The same holds true
for the wolf, often seen in Blackwell's world as an authority
figure, or the opossum, depicted in one of the works on display
in the guise of a marshal.
Issues of power, authority, and wealth complicate Blackwell's
visual imagery. Uncle Sam, George Washington, and the US dollar
exist side-by-side in more innocent images. In a new painting,
the head of George Washington emerges out of a hand-painted teapot.
Behind him looms a stern portrait of Uncle Sam. A cat, dressed
in a white costume with a ruffle neckline and sporting Uncle Sam's
stove pipe hat, sits next to Washington. These figures share the
canvas with a white mouse, and, not surprisingly, a herd of hogs.
In another work, Blackwell makes as the centerpiece of his canvas
a black and white pit bull, an animal that lends itself well to
Blackwell's double-edged iconography. The dog shares her space
with teddy bears but also with a picture of African-American soldiers
and a cross on fire, an allusion to the burned churches of Clarendon
County, SC, where he grew up.
Blackwell graduated from Benedict College in Columbia in 1978.
He received both the Master of Arts and the Master of Fine Arts
degrees from the University of South Carolina. The recipient of
the Martha Beach Endowed Chair in Painting, Blackwell is currently
Visiting Professor and Artist-in-Residence at the University of
North Carolina Pembroke.
Blackwell was recently recognized in Washington,
DC, as a participant of the Art in Embassies program. Blackwell's
work also will be included in the South Carolina Art Education
Association show at the Columbia Museum of Art this month.
John Monteith will show his oil portraits.
Monteith, a Columbia resident for thirteen years, made his mark on the international art scene in 1997 with his appearance in the Biennale de Lyon d'Art Contemporaine, Maison de Lyon, France. Last year Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC, hosted a solo show of his internet chat room profile paintings - a/s/l-SC, and another series of paintings was featured in the exhibit The Felt Moment at The Columbia Museum of Art. Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York selected his collage-based photomontages for solo exhibits in 1997 and 2001. In 2000 Monteith's work was shown in the Edward M. Smith Gallery at Davidson College in North Carolina.
Monteith's artwork has also been featured
in Harper's (Sept. 2001), Blind Spot, Issue Fourteen,
Winter 2000, (Re)Presenting the South: New Studies in Photography,
Southern Quarterly (Summer 1998), The Art of the X-Files,
by Chris Carter and William Gibson (HarperCollins: 1998), and
Graphis Fine Art Photography 2.
The tintypes of Rebecca Rhees will also be on display in this
exhibition.
Rhees recently graduated with her Masters of Fine Arts degree
in photography at the University of South Carolina, with her MFA
exhibition featured in McMaster Gallery last April. During her
graduate study, she received the John Benz Graduate Studio Art
Award from the University's Department of Art, recognizing her
for the excellence of her graduate work. Previously, Rhees earned
her Bachelors of Fine Arts degree from Brigham Young University,
in Utah, where she is originally from. There she earned the prestigious
Dean's Award for the College of Fine Art and Communications.
Rhees is currently interested in the expressive capabilities of
historic photographic processes, and their relevance to contemporary
experience. Her recent body of work features the tintype, which
she uses for the inherently unique characteristics to portray
her view of the subject of home.
For info check our SC Commercial Gallery listings, contact Marissa Dancer, Executive Assistant, at 803/252-3613, or at (www.cityartonline.com).
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