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March Issue 2004
City Art Gallery in Columbia, SC, Offers Group Exhibit Where Artists Respond to a Sense of Place & Region
On Location: Place & Region in a Digital Age is being presented in the Main Gallery at City Art Gallery in Columbia, SC, through Mar 31, 2004.
What does a sense of place, region or location mean in our global digital age? In a time that is characterized by a loss of regional identity and increasing globalization, an individual's notion of place can be displaced or even confusing, especially as familiar and unique locales give way to globalization and homogenization. Curated by City Art Gallery Director Teri Tynes, On Location: Place & Region in a Digital Age is designed to serve as a visual arts complement to the USC Orphan Film Symposium, On Location: Place and Region in Forgotten Films, to be held in Columbia Mar. 24-27, 2004. See (www.sc.edu/filmsymposium/) for registration information and related events.
The City Art exhibit features seven critically acclaimed artists working in various media: Tarleton Blackwell, Reed Elliott, David Hooker, John Monteith, Scotty Peek, Alex Powers, and Rebecca Rhees, each with a singular response to a sense of place. The exhibit will include visual explorations of the rural southern countryside, phantom portraits of lost mill villages, home and family remembrances through photographs and clay, chat room self-portraits on the Internet, the conflict between tribalism and globalization, and the curiosities of discovered eccentric spaces.
Tarleton Blackwell
Tarleton Blackwell is one of the state's most celebrated artists. Known for his Hog Series, a body of over 250 works inventing a rich mythology of the rural South, Blackwell continues to ground his artwork in an imaginative retelling of the region. Reed Elliott recently returned to his native New Orleans after completing college at Winthrop University. Featured in City Art's inaugural School's Out exhibit in May of 2003, Elliott explores memory and place through imaginary portraiture. Much of his work commemorates the lives of those who worked in the south's quickly disappearing mill villages.
David Hooker
Sculptor David Hooker, new to City Art, works within traditional regional pottery traditions, such as the face jug, to create humorous and thoughtful self-portraits in clay. Also new to City Art, artist John Monteith has exhibited nationally and internationally. A new body of vibrant and colorful paintings depicts the individuals engaged in online chat discussion groups. Based on the images the chatters make of themselves with often low resolution web cams, Monteith brings to these works a sense of the multi-faceted beauty and pathos of this type of portraiture.
Scotty Peek continues with images from his her/my family series that debuted with his solo show at City Art in Mar. of 2003. He bases these generalized figures, depicted with charcoal and gesso on canvas, on family photographs saved by his wife's family, a large and tightly knit group from Sumter, SC. Alex Powers, one of the region's most established artists and celebrated mixed media draughtsman, approaches the concept of region from a much more global perspective. In a series of new work, the Myrtle Beach-based artist uses his stance as an engaged citizen of the world to comment on topics such as the tensions between tribalism and globalism, the volatility of the Middle East, and closer to home, the varying perspective on the South's legacies.
Rebecca Rhees
Finally, photographer Rebecca Rhees, who like Elliott made her City Art debut with the School's Out exhibit, discovers a mannequin repair shop in Oregon. Her Mannequin Misfit series of small hand-crafted Van Dyke prints documents the peculiarities of several realistic but plastic body parts not quite in sync.
For the final week of the exhibit, City Art will also serve as the site for visiting artist Ron Hagell (University of London) and his piece, Cupboard Frames, a digital video installation using Edison Kinetoscope films.
For further information check our SC Commercial Gallery listings, call the gallery at 803/252-3613, or visit the website at (www.cityartonline.com).
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