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April Issue 2006
Preservation Society of Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill, NC, Features Works by Rob McDonald and Ronan Kyle Peterson
The Preservation Society of Chapel Hill presents the exhibition, Handmade Photographs by Rob McDonald, and New Ceramics by Ronan Kyle Peterson, at the Horace Williams House in Chapel Hill. NC, from Apr. 2 - 30, 2006.
Rob McDonald is a professor of English and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Virginia Military Institute. Self-taught as a photographer, he holds a doctorate from Texas Christian University in American literature, specializing in the literature and culture of the American South. He writes, "Teaching and studying Southern literature for so long, I have developed something of an obsession with place. A majority of the images I am showing now reveal my interest in studying place, particularly aspects of the rural South - its beauty, its dilapidation, its ironies and its atrocities, its capacities for both contradiction and corroboration of the terms that have been used to define it. Photography is for me the ideal medium for this work because it's both documentary, recording what is, and expressive, evoking associations and meanings that transcend the details of the image."
Ronan Kyle Peterson
Ronan Kyle Peterson holds a BA in anthropology and folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has studied extensively at the Penland School of Crafts. He teaches adult ceramics classes at Lincoln Arts Center in Chapel Hill and Claymakers in Durham, NC, and produces functional and decorative earthenware vessels at his studio, Nine Toes Pottery. He has taught at Pullen Arts Center in Raleigh, NC, and was a visiting artist at Central Carolina Community College. Peterson has also served as a teaching assistant at the Haystack School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine and the Penland School of Crafts.
Peterson writes, "My ceramics are an amalgamation of the influences of my youth, the natural and the fantastical. My vessels provide a ceramic comic book interpretation of the natural world and its processes of growth and decay. I use thick line contours, a fullness of volume, and areas of exaggerated detail to embellish my functional ceramic vessels. I translate and abstract budding leaves and lichen encrusted bark, and assemble a collage of interpretations of the natural phenomena. I like to take bits and parts, magnifying some, diminishing others, and assemble them into a vessel worthy of use and destined for contemplation. Through my ceramic objects, I hope to relay a narrative of the natural world, focusing on the overwhelming visual and tactile information that seduces and causes me wonder."
For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call the gallery at 919/942-7818.
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