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June Issue 2009

Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, NC, Presents Summer Exhibitions

The Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, NC, is presenting Colors, including several exhibitions: New Work, featuring sculpture, paintings, and drawings by Doug McAbee and Barbara Schreiber; New Work, featuring paintings by Marge Loudon Moody and Whitney Peckman; New Work, by Sharif Bey; and the 2009 Dare to Imagine Award Winner Exhibit, featuring works by Hannah Thompson. All four exhibitions will be on view from June 5 through Aug. 22, 2009. Also on view through Aug. 2010, Winston-Salem, NC, sculptor Don Green's metal artworks will be on display in Waterworks' Stanback and Cook Sensory Gardens.

One of the most versatile and popular artistic elements, color can be used in a variety of ways to communicate a wide range of ideas in different styles. Waterworks Visual Arts Center's 2009 Summer Exhibitions explore how six different two-and three-dimensional North and South Carolina artists use color within their work. In addition, the Center features its 2009 Dare to Imagine scholarship winner's exhibition; this annual award honors a graduating Rowan County high school senior with an art scholarship and exhibition opportunity.

In Shared Delusions, Spartanburg sculptor Doug McAbee and Charlotte artist Barbara Schreiber team up to create a bright world of childlike shapes and colors that appear innocent at first glance. However, closer inspection reveals ideas and themes that are strange, unfamiliar, sinister, and even disturbing.


Doug McAbee

McAbee's abstract sculptures combine bright, cartoon-like colors with whimsical and unusual imagery. The pretty, candy-like colors might make a cheerful first impression, but a closer look at the strange, almost-humanoid forms his sculptures take may engender a more ominous or confusing effect. Titles underscore this odd duality between pleasant rainbow hues and alien forms; his works often have ordinary men and women's names (e.g. Laura Jean, Marvin, Clara, and Lucille), yet the sculptures do not suggest typical figurative forms. In Laura Jean, a five foot tall pale yellow work, a rounded cylinder forms a sort of a head that perches atop four long, spindly appendages; rather than the human woman's shape proposed by the title, this sculpture suggests an alien, spider-like creature. Marvin, a 42 inch tall lavender piece, reveals another instance of distorted leg forms. This time, the legs are extremely short instead of unnaturally elongated. A mustache-like form on the front of the sculpture establishes the round form sitting on the short legs as a sort of a head, and the combination suggests a short, fat male thing that crawls across the ground rather than walking upright. Its shortness gives it a strange, subversive, sneaky quality. Another peculiar feature is the tall flag growing from Marvin's head. One wonders about the flag's purpose. Is this creature exploring new territory? Will it skitter beneath our feet and plant its flag into our own turf, claiming it as its own?

The possibilities of meanings for this and all of McAbee's sculptures are endless, and that is exactly how the artist intended it to be. While each work holds a personal meaning to the artist, the same work will generate new interpretations depending on who is looking at it. McAbee believes the varied interpretations that different viewers come up with are as important as his own ideas about his sculptures' meanings.

McAbee earned a BA in art and an MFA in sculpture with a minor in drawing from Winthrop University, Rock Hill, South Carolina. Since 2000, the artist has held over thirty shows throughout the Carolinas. The artist currently teaches at Winthrop University and resides in Spartanburg, SC, with his wife Georgie.

Barbara Schreiber

Barbara Schreiber explores dystopias through small works on paper executed in a style similar to that of children's book illustrations. At first glance, her drawings and paintings seem colorful and cute; however, a closer look at her work reveals startling themes of political controversy, violence, and corrupted innocence. Her work often takes the form of a series of images featuring the same character or point of view; whether that character is a child, an adult, or a small animal, these images consistently expose the social ills embedded into our society.

In a Dark Room, a series of five inch square acrylic paintings from 2008, shows six images of a young blond haired girl in a pink dress. In each painting, the girl is seated next to a television on a blood-red carpet engaged in a different activity related to political violence, murder, and religious controversy. Bon Voyage depicts the girl packing a suitcase while a flaming army vehicle rides by on the adjacent television. A Little Bomb shows the girl and her teddy bear sitting next to a pack of dynamite while the screen displays a peaceful Suburban neighborhood. In Meds, the girl empties an unmarked bottle of pills (possibly birth control, possibly illegal drugs) onto the floor while an angry nun brandishes a Bible on the television. In one of her "Kitten Series", the artist illustrates the mechanism of punitive justice via evil baby cats. In Kitten Schemes, two tiny feline silhouettes study an explosives diagram. The follow-up image Kitten Cries shows that one of the two conspirators has been arrested; the hapless kitten stands in front of a mug shot backdrop and cries a single tear.

Schreiber studied at the Atlanta College of Art in Georgia and earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute's College of Art in Baltimore. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally in well over 100 solo and group exhibitions. From 2006-07, Schreiber was selected as an affiliate artist in residency at the McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte. The artist was an Atlanta, Georgia resident from 1977 to 2004 and now lives in Charlotte.

Marge Loudon Moody

In her colorful acrylics on canvas, Marge Loudon Moody intuitively manipulates line, shape, space, and color to create images of places. Her art comes directly from her experiences of different locales in an overarching theme she refers to as 'Other Worlds.' This quest led her to paint several series, such as the 'Italy Series,' in which she explores views of the Italian city and country; 'New York Minutes,' which seeks to express the many sights of that energetic metropolis; the 'Studio Series,' which pictures her painting work space; and the 'Home Series,' a body of work depicting areas in and around her home in Rock Hill, SC. Yet, a viewer would be hard pressed to find a Tuscan sunset, skyscraper, an easel, a house or any other object within her compositions.

In these paintings, Moody relies solely on abstraction to recreate the "essential nature" of her subjects. In Moody's work, light, shade, lines, shapes, and dramatic hues replace traditional landscape elements, expressing the 'feeling' of the place rather than its mere appearance. Through broad expanses of soft pastel peaches and blues, swift strokes of black, and blocks of bright red and orange, she recreates her impression of the luminous Italian setting in Italy Series: Village I. Appropriately, a subject far away from Italy produces different imagery with a totally different feeling: Home Series: Carolina Summer uses darker and richer shades than Village I. In this work, bright blues and deep ultramarines contrast with hot red-oranges to create a vibrating sense of warmth; in an expert use of expressionist line-work, Moody's numerous thin vertical black, blue, and orange lines create a sense of downward motion, suggesting the oppressive weighty air of a humid, sticky Carolina summer.

Moody studied painting, drawing, and education in Edinburgh, Scotland. She has taught art at Winthrop University in Rock Hill since 1988. Recently, Winthrop University awarded her with the 2008 Elizabeth Patrick Gallery Endowment award, and in 2006 Moody received a Regional Artist Grant from the Charlotte/Mecklenburg Arts & Science Council. Also in 2006, Moody was a summer Affiliate Artist at Charlotte's McColl Center for Visual Art. Moody has held dozens of solo and group exhibitions since 1998, including recent local shows at UNC Charlotte's Rowe Gallery in 2007 and at Queen's University in 2008.

Whitney Peckman

"Art is a conversation between the artist and the viewer. It is a conversation which speaks both about and to creative energy, ideas, the integrity of original work and the thoughtful deliberation of the viewer." This quote by Salisbury artist Whitney Peckman sums up her view of art, a view that places great focus on broad ideas of creativity and the importance of a dialogue between the artist and viewer. Instead of representing the feeling of a place, she celebrates the process of creativity within the artist's mind. To Peckman, art-making requires a spiritual release, an opening of the creative self, in order to unleash the spontaneity of raw imagination necessary for making truly original art.

To coax forth this creative spark, Peckman begins a painting with a single layer of basic color and mass. She adds layer after layer of colors and textures until she feels herself respond creatively to the route the painting was meant to take. This intuitive working method allows her to open her creative mind to art's possibilities. One can observe this meaningful working process by the carefully constructed layers of color and shape within Peckman's work. For example, her painting Wildflowers I demonstrates this expert touch. The numerous patches of clear sunny yellow overlap with thin washes of blue and brown within this landscape's sky, while rusty oranges, dusky purples, and bright greens make up a lush undergrowth of flora in one of many rich works sure to inspire much conversation between viewer, artist, and many others.

A self-taught artist, Peckman spent thirty years weaving tapestries before taking up painting. She has exhibited her painting and sculpture in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Raleigh, NC, as well as Arizona, Illinois, and Colorado. Peckman is a founding member of East Square Artworks in downtown Salisbury.

Sharif Bey

Winston-Salem artist Sharif Bey creates wearable ceramic sculptures. His powerful, ritualistic, and distinctive works of art reference African-American cultural identity as well as the idea of function as an artistic concept.

In the 1960's and 70's, many African-Americans wore traditional beads to celebrate their cultural and racial identities. Pieces such as Bird Spirit and Sundial and Water Vial incorporate strands of red, yellow, blue and black beads that reference this African-American cultural pride. In Sharif Bey's work, this traditional, historical significance of self-adornment asserts itself over modern African-American youth culture, where platinum and diamond jewelry is symbolic of personal power and wealth. Bey's work seeks to examine the conflict between cultural pride and individual advancement that these two types of jewelry suggest. The idea of functional use as an important part of an artwork's meaning also plays a vital role in Bey's ceramics. In the past, the artist used cultural forms and designs to create finely crafted functional ceramics in an effort to merge art with life. However, the ceramics were treated as objects d'art rather than everyday practical items. Afterwards, Bey began to explore the idea of function as an artistic concept instead of simply a way to make his artwork useful, and this led to interesting stylistic developments. Bey's recent work, while displayed on the gallery walls and not on the average person's kitchen shelf, incorporates the idea of function into its very design. In creating art that can actually be worn around the neck and that also is connected to a rich history of traditional ethnic jewelry, Bey creates inventive and original ceramics that celebrate the artistic integrity of functional objects.

Originally from Pittsburgh, Bey earned a BFA in ceramics from Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a PhD in Art Education from Penn State University. A 2003 Fulbright scholarship enabled him to study post-socialist Slovak artists in Bratislava, Slovakia. In 2007, Bey was an artist in residence at Charlotte's McColl Center for Visual Art. The artist currently teaches art education courses at Winston Salem State University.

In recognition of the importance of art in the life of our community, Waterworks Visual Arts Center presents the Dare to Imagine Award in the amount of $1000 to the Rowan County graduating senior whose artwork most exemplifies the creative potential of the human spirit, heart, and hand.

This year's winner is Hannah Thompson of Jesse C. Carson High School. Thompson's highly original work uses a variety of media to express surreal, sometimes sinister, designs. She enjoys mixing media, such as colored pencil, ink, paint, and collage elements, to add material depth and interest to her work. Sprawling organic patterns, meticulous pen and ink line-work, and a predisposition towards natural forms characterize her imaginative creations. Thompson cites her high school art teacher Dr. Mark Riley as the main influence to her art. "He may be crazy," says Thompson, "but he's the best art teacher I've ever had. He's an amazing artist and as cliché as it sounds he always pushes students to do their best." Of his award-winning student, Dr. Riley comments that, "Hannah's developed her own unique style that is very visually pleasing."

Thompson is a member of the National Honor Society and the JC Carson High Art Club. She is interested in book illustration and plans to attend Appalachian State University this fall to pursue a Fine Arts degree. Selections from Thompson's portfolio, framed by Fine Frame Gallery of Salisbury, will hang in the Stanback Gallery Hall throughout the summer. The annual Dare to Imagine scholarship and exhibition are made possible through the generous support of Susan and Edward Norvell.

Through August 2010, Winston-Salem sculptor Don Green's metal artworks will be on display in Waterworks' Stanback and Cook Sensory Gardens. Green's exhibition fits well into a natural setting, considering the sculptor's philosophy of art. God's creation, nature, and cycles of death and regeneration provide creative inspiration; one can clearly see the artist's interest in death, decay, and erosion in his sculptures' rusting surfaces. When exposed to oxygen, metals containing iron will naturally form iron oxide, i.e. rust. The act of rusting, a natural form of chemical evolution, establishes an important symbol of the altering effects of time and nature. Both the natural world and the more immediate cultural landscape of our everyday lives are constantly changing. Part of Green's artistic goal is to leave his small mark within this dynamic world. Through his work, the artist hopes to leave a small legacy of his own perceptions and creativity so that others can have a glimpse into his mind.

Green has an advertising art degree from the American Academy of Art in Chicago, Illinois, a BFA from Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois, and a MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. He has been a member of Art Works Gallery Co-Op since 1994; he is represented by Gallery 9 of Blowing Rock, NC, and Art Works Gallery of Winston-Salem, NC. In addition to the Waterworks' exhibition, Green's sculpture Tecton #9 can be viewed in Magnolia Park off West Innes Street in downtown Salisbury as part of the 2009-10 Salisbury Sculpture Show.

The Waterworks Visual Arts Center is accredited by the American Association of Museums. The mission of the Waterworks Visual Arts Center is to provide diverse opportunities in the arts for all people through exhibitions, education, and outreach programs. The Waterworks is funded by individual memberships, corporations and businesses, foundations, the City of Salisbury, Rowan County, and the Rowan Arts Council. The Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, a federal grant-making agency dedicated to creating and sustaining a nation of learners by helping libraries and museums serve their communities, supports the Waterworks Visual Arts Center. This project received support from the North Carolina Arts Council, an agency of the Department of Cultural Resources and the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the center at 704/636-1882 or visit (www.waterworks.org).

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