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November Issue 2007
Sumter County Gallery of Art in Sumter, SC, Features Works by Ronald Gonzalez and David Voros
The Sumter County Gallery of Art in Sumter, SC, will present the exhibits: Ronald Gonzalez: Objects as Figures, Figures as Objects and David Voros: The Myth in the Mirror, both on view from Nov. 9 through Dec. 28, 2007.
Ronald Gonzalez
Over the past thirty years, Ronald Gonzalez has produced thousands of figures, both singular and in multiple groupings that range in size from very tiny to monumental in scale. His site-specific, large-scale indoor and outdoor sculptural installations feature groups of human-like figures made from organic materials and found objects.
The Sumter exhibition is comprised of Gonzalez's recent small-scale figurative works constructed of "skeletal" steel armatures from which he assembles found objects and organic materials into conceptual representations of the body. In these emotionally powerful works, a bone, a change purse, a birdhouse or a child's shoe, becomes the head of individual personalities that express themes of loss, memory and death.
Gonzalez's work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions including Human/Nature, Art and Landscape in Charleston and the Low Country, Spoleto USA, Charleston, SC (1997), Fated Objects and Strange Progeny, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2006), and Cones, DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA (2007). He has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including two Pollack-Krasner Foundation artists' grants, an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant, several New York Foundation for the Arts grants, and residencies at the Corporation of Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY, and at the John Michael Kohler Arts & Industry Program, Sheboygan, WI.
Gonzalez is a Professor of Sculpture at Binghamton University.
David Voros
David Voros' large-scale metaphorical pieces have an old world feel to them; darkness and shadow, figures lit by candlelight, and mythic creatures, half human, half animal. The Sumter exhibition includes a rare installation of his monumental, ten-panel Dance of Death along with more recent work based on Greek mythology, such as the story of Icarus.
Voros' work has been in many solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Italy including Thresholds, Expressions of Art and Spirituality, Charleston, SC, 2003, a large multi-state traveling exhibition, Visualizing Dante The International School of Art, Montecastello di Vibio, Umbria, Italy, 2004, and David Voros: Scenes from My Life, Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, MI, 2006. He has been the recipient of many awards and honors including two Sustainable Universities Initiative Grants; University of South Carolina, School of the Environment (2002, 2001), a Research and Productive Scholarship Grant; University of South Carolina (2004), and a Visiting Member, American Academy of Classical Studies, Athens; Athens Greece (2007).
Voros received his MFA from the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, Indiana University in Bloomington in 1994, and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Chicago, IL, in 1985. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC.
Voros states, "My work addresses personal history and experience in the context of western mythology, the history of painting and contemporary culture. Despite the autobiographical focus, the primary goal in my work is to connect my own experience to shared universal themes. The vehicle for this pursuit is large-scale mimetic painting. Through the scale and tangibility of the image I hope to amplify both the experience of empathy and a sense of participation on the part of the viewer. In this sense I also see the work as a sort of theatre in which the viewer is continually reconfiguring the event with his or her own experience."
For further info check our SC Institutional
Gallery listings, call the gallery at 803/775-0543 or visit (www.sumtergallery.org).
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