February 2000 Issue
Three Exhibits Offered at SECCA in Winston-Salem, NC
The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC, will be offering three exhibits which will begin on Feb. 19. The Main Gallery will be showing Ann Mandelbaum: Proximities, an exhibit which explores unique perspective of the human anatomy, on view through May 28. On view through May 21 in the Potter Gallery, Life Cycles is an exhibit in which the gallery will be transformed by force of nature. Also on view through May 28 in the Overlook Gallery will be the exhibit, Return of the Sabines: An Installation by Anne Kesler Shields.
The most intimate view of the body becomes distant and unfamiliar landscapes in Ann Mandelbaum: Proximities.The strangeness and beauty of our physical character is the foundation for the work in this extensive exhibition featuring more than 60 photographs, close-up images of the human body and other organic material. Organized by the Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona and supported in part by the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the exhibition is the first comprehensive museum show of Mandelbaum's contemporary photographic work.
Isolating the surfaces and orifices of the human anatomy within the photographic frame, the artist creates strange and unfamiliar images of the thing we assume we know well, like the back of our hand. While Mandelbaum's photographs provoke and excite the senses, the viewer is compelled to explore the terrain of the bodily form without association, and from such a unique perspective, establish an unbiased, unencumbered relationship toward the image.
Ann Mandelbaum is a professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is included in major museum collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Since her first solo exhibition outside the commercial gallery at New York University's Grey Art Gallery in 1995, her work has been widely reviewed and exhibited especially in Europe. "Her view is macrographic..." says Trudy Wilner Stack, Exhibition Curator and Center of Photography Curator of Exhibitions and Collections, "but the focus is so particular through the filter of the camera's macro lens and her refined enlargements that each visible detail becomes itself a universe of information, feeling, and formal experience - - a macrocosm of human mortal material."
In the Potter Gallery Life Cycles, on view Feb. 19 through May 21, is an exhibition featuring the work of nine regional and national artists whose work suggests that all things are bound to change. Seeds and larvae mix with plaster and paint to germinate a mysterious life form; a living sculpture is created with peat moss, sand and soil; and, the Yadkin River makes an appearance in the gallery. "On a variety of levels, the work included in this exhibition represents the larger processes at work in our environment and, in turn, reflects the increasing difficulty in determining what is and is not natural in the modem landscape," comments Douglas Bohr, SECCA's exhibitions manager and curator of the exhibition.
Several of the artists will create works especially for the exhibition and two will create unique on-site installations using natural materials. Stacy Levy (Spring Mills, PA) will work with a group of community volunteers to collect water samples from the Yadkin River and will create a physical map of a section of the river and its tributaries in SECCA's Main Gallery. Samm Kunce (Brooklyn, NY) will introduce earth into the gallery's architecture by building formations out of fertile soil, peat moss and sand. Emil Lukas' (Stockertown, PA) Timeline Under Pear Tree combines organic and inorganic materials to see what will emerge from its many layers forming the forty foot long timeline. Virginia Tyler (Hillsborough, NC) creates emotionally charged casts of plants, flowers and trees, from handmade paper to emphasize the vulnerability of the forms she has chosen to cast. Along with other pre-existing works selected for the exhibition, Tyler will cast four young pine trees from SECCA's grounds. Using recycled materials to create similarly poetic structures, Paul Hitopoulos (Charleston, SC) will construct an installation composed of planted grass that grows throughout the course of the exhibition from salvaged architectural molding installed on the gallery walls.
Beyond this, Catherine Chalmers' (NY) highly provocative series of photographs methodically capture the drama of predators and prey engaged in life and death struggles for survival. Both Rob Amberg (Marshall, NC) and Frank Gohlke (Southborough, MA) have dedicated years to photographing the changes taking place in their own backyards. Amberg' s photographs bear witness to the impact of the Interstate-26 corridor through the Blue Ridge Mountains of NC while Gohlke captures the seasonal transitions of the Sudbury River flowing past his home and through eastern Massachusetts. Lastly, Dan Peterman (Chicago, IL) became fascinated with finding natural systems of efficient energy use. Peterman's "Mushroom Prints" are made from the inky remains of the auto digestive process by which the mature mushroom releases its spores in order to reproduce and sustain life of the species.
Finally, Courtney Love and Interview Magazine meet Eighteenth-Century painter Jacques Louis David and prepare for battle in Return of the Sabines: An Installation by Anne Kesler Shields. The installation features Winston-Salem based Kesler Shields creating a new, billboard sized, site-specific installation for SECCA's Overlook Gallery.
According to the artist, "We are bombarded everyday with pictures in magazines and television. I attempt to put order to what I see and alter the way others view this visual clutter." Shields has received numerous awards for her work including a National Endowment for the Arts Urban Wall Project in 1975 and a series of fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
For further information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings or call SECCA at 336/725-1904 or visit our web
site at (http://www.secca.org).
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