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July Issue 2003
Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC, Offers Exhibition Featuring Works by 16 Artists of the Carolinas
Artists from South Carolina and North Carolina are brought together at the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC, for a unique exhibition that provides the audience a glimpse of the artist's journey to capture the moment when art yields purpose and meaning. On view July 11 through Sept. 14, 2003, The Felt Moment was initially organized as an exhibition to include many of the significant artists currently living in our two state region.
This exhibition is guest curated by Tom Stanley, director of Winthrop University Galleries and includes 82 pieces by 16 artists. Stanley says, "With the exhibition The Felt Moment, the Columbia Museum of Art has assembled some of the finest artists in the Carolinas. The project affords the artists an excellent exhibition opportunity, while it also offers audiences a chance to witness contemporary art in a new light." Stanley will give a talk about the exhibit when it opens on July 11 at 7pm and on July 12 at 2pm. The event is free and open to the public.
While there is no overriding theme to this exhibition, it does explore the artists' passage in finding their own voice and imprint. The artists included in this collaboration represent a diverse group of talent at varying stages of their careers who approach their art from a variety of personal perspectives. Many have achieved national attention while others are still looking for broader audiences.
"Viewing these works, I am reminded of a poem by Wallace Stevens, A Postcard From the Volcano. In this little poem Stevens talks about what people might think about our civilization from what they found of us," says Interim Director Bob Shirley. "I challenge each of you to come and see if there is not a strong sign of what these artists felt! At what (they) saw."
The Felt Moment includes a variety of works ranging from paintings and photography to installation art. Susan Brenner, Shaun Cassidy, Clara Couch, Amy Fichter, Maud Gatewood, Deanna Leamon, Juan Logan, Thomas Meyer, John Monteith, Philip Morsberger, Susan Page, Quashie, Hollis Brown Thornton, Michelle Van Parys, Joe Walters, and Jonathan Williams make up the artists who are participating in this collaboration.
Susan Brenner is an associate professor in drawing and painting at UNC-Charlotte. She was awarded her MFA from the University of Southern California and her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited her work nationally as well as locally in venues including Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the University of Colorado, the University of Maryland, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, SECCA, the Mint Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and Hodges Taylor Gallery. She was a 1992 recipient of the Southern Arts Federation/N.E.A. Regional fellowship Award in Painting and Works on Paper and a 1994 NC Artist's Fellowship.
Statement
Tending the Corporeal Garden, the installation work included in The Felt Moment
exhibition, builds a fragmented narrative around images of
the idealized body, drawn from figurative sculpture. Tending
the Corporeal Garden grew out of questions about syntax and
the relationship between word and image, between reading and viewing.
Its narrative, a tale of romance with a focus on taking tender
pleasure in the body, is told like something glimpsed out of the
corner of one's eye. It is intended to feel familiar and intimate
without ever becoming anything truly knowable. Images, text, and
sound intermingle to play with the vagaries of meaning.
Shaun Cassidy, a native of London, currently resides in Rock Hill, SC, where he is an associate professor of art and design at Winthrop University. He holds a MVA from the University of Alberta. His recent work has been exhibited in the region at the McColl Center for Visual Arts, Joie Lassiter Gallery and the Weatherspoon Art Museum. His sculptural works have been exhibited nationally and he has received numerous residencies both in the University and the United Kingdom.
Statement
The large-scale drawings focus on process and image as a means
to examine issues of time, the history of activity and nostalgia.
They rely on the removal of material, and evidence or traces of
that removal to provide an image. The works are created by building
up layers of color and then sanding through the layers of paint
and through the paper itself. Templates and shapes are laid under
the paper to provide edges and relief for the sander to pick up.
The resulting images and eroded surfaces define these shapes and
any irregularities in the paint surface.
Clara Couch has studied at Sacred Heart College and Alfred's School of Ceramic Art. She currently lives and works in Burnsville, NC. She has had solo exhibitions at Christa Faut Gallery, the Penland School Gallery, Hodges Taylor Gallery, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and Headlands Center for the Arts. Couch was included in the exhibition Nine from North Carolina at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her sculptural clay vessels are included in the collections of the Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Knight Publishing and First Union Bank. She is a recipient of a Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest International Award.
Statement
My work is about my relationship to the natural world of form
and its mysterious content. I am drawn to archetypal images that
have surfaced over man's historical connection to the universe.
Mostly the works are symbolic containers that seek to replicate
the spiral movement of the earth.
Amy Fichter holds a MFA in drawing from the University of South Carolina. She has exhibited throughout the country with solo exhibitions of her large-scale figurative drawings at Texas A & M University, Coker College, the University of Central Arkansas and Converse College. Fichter currently lives in Randolph, Iowa.
Statement
I think in lines that wrap around forms. A line wraps around the
body. The body's energy travels each wire. These marks are marks
of love, time, and looking. Sight and touch in the same breath.
My drawings are images of desire. Eros demands more than pleasure.
Eros, in its truest sense, weighs us down. Many of the images
reveal incessant conflict with one's own physicality, when one
wants perfection in flesh and spirit, but fails. The portraits
are tributes to those who persevere.
Maud Gatewood is a native of North Carolina and currently lives in Chapel Hill. She received her BA at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and her MA at Ohio State University. She has studied art history and painting under a Fulbright Grant at the University of Vienna, Akademie fur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna and the International Academy for Painting in Salzberg. Though Gatewood's reputation extends to the national scene, she is often considered the most important realist painter to have emerged in North Carolina. Her awards include a North Carolina Artist Fellowship, a Governor's Award in Fine Arts, a Southeastern Seven Fellowship and the Painting Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Weatherspoon Art Museum mounted a major retrospective of her work in 1994 titled Maud Gatewood: Re-Visions.
Statement
What I am trying to paint is relationships, formal relationships:
light and color and forms. There might be messages, but I think
a lot of times painters know less about what their painting says
than anybody else.
Deanna Leamon resides in Columbia, SC, where she is an associate professor of art at the University of South Carolina. She has exhibited widely included solo exhibitions at George Mason University, Camden Fine Arts Center, McKissick Museum and Artemisia Gallery in Chicago. She has received numerous grants to assist in the research for her own art work including her study of anatomical drawing and the Hamlet, NC, chicken processing plant disaster. Leamon also serves as an adjunct associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine where she teaches artistic anatomy.
Statement
"In order to invent heaven and hell, a person would need
to know nothing except the human body. "(José Saramago,
Blindness).
The body presents a kind of paradox. Saramago points us in one
direction. The body is the seat of the soul. We are embodied and
our experiences of the world and our actions in the world all
proceed in and through our bodies. Our body is that junction where
all that is good or evil, lovely or ugly can be focused, felt
and acted on. And where is that "vital human spirit",
that thing that makes us human? These drawings explore our humanity
in our decaying biology.
Juan Logan lives in Chapel Hill, NC, where he is an associate professor of studio art at the University of North Carolina. He received an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Solo exhibitions have been mounted by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Print Center in Philadelphia, Hodges Taylor Gallery, Texas Tech University, St. John's Museum and the Mint Museum of Art. Logan is in numerous public and private collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of African Art, the Mint Museum of Art, Greenville County Museum of Art and the Asheville Art Museum.
Statement
My history has been determined by being a Southerner. Being from
the South, all of my relationships, my views on racism, my interest
in storytelling, my efforts to preserve my past, and my observations
of the use and misuse of power are all shaped by my southern heritage
and my family. Trying Not To Forget references that heritage
and many of the people made my history richer. Elegy for Lost
Souls references a repository for all of the souls. A gathering
place for souls, lost because of their action/inaction, their
beliefs, their misdeeds, or maybe, simply because they were lost.
Thomas Meyer is a poet who resides in Highlands, NC. He received a AB from Bard College in Old and Middle English. Since 1968 he has been involved with editing, production and design of 50 publications associated with the Jargon Society, a small arts foundation whose primary purpose is the publication of poetry and photography. His awards include a N.E.A. Creative Fellowship in Poetry, the Ingram-Merrill Award for Poetry and an N.E.A. Opera and Music Theater Creative Fellowship. For The Felt Moment, Meyer's contribution is an unpublished poem titled Book II.
Statement
You cannot wash your hands in the same river twice, just as you
can never read the same sentence again. There is no Book I or
Book III, but there could be. I wanted to replace the modernist
sense of 'fragment' with 'interruption' so that images (and their
associations and feelings) could flow generously and responsively.
Therefore, as they come and go they do so with the implication
of something that, despite our inability to see it in full detail,
has an integrated existence: a momentary, wholesome well-being,
literally. Therefore this (or every) text can be read starting
at any given point, and stopping at any given point, though like
a river (or writing itself) it flows in one directions only.
John Monteith is a self-taught artist who resides in Columbia, SC. He was raised in a number of cities in the Northeast and educated at Texas Tech where he studied to be a pathologist. His work has been shown nationally and internationally including the Biennale de Lyon d'Art Contemporaine in Maison de Lyon, France, and at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York.
Statement
In the past, John Monteith has constructed photo-based works from
appropriated school yearbook pictures. His interest in images
from popular culture has led him most recently to collecting "self-portrait"
digital photographs from chat-rooms sites over the Internet. Monteith
has used the cyberspace figurative images like models. His rendering
in oils and his voyeuristic view contribute to a Degas-like realism
of private worlds made public.
Philip Morsberger studied art at Oxford, the Carnegie Institute, La Grande Chaumiere in Pans and the Maryland Institute College of Art. His teaching career included positions at the California College of Arts and Craft, Oxford University where he was the Ruskin Master of Drawing, University of California at Berkeley, Harvard and the Rochester Institute of Technology. His exhibition record is too numerous to name. Selected collections include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Morris Museum of Art and the City University of London. He currently lives in Augusta where he recently served as the William S. Moms Eminent Scholar in Art at Augusta State University.
Statement
Often considered a Bay Area Painter, Morsberger's work in The
Felt Moment reflects his "cartoon" figuration as
well as selections from a series of single, large head images
on canvas that are at once monumental and humorous. His concern
for color and the formal qualities of paint on canvas are vital
forces within this work.
Susan Page resides in Chapel Hill, NC. She is currently a visiting associate professor in photography at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and holds a Master of Music from Michigan State University. She currently has a solo exhibition at the Greenville County Museum titled The Tie That Binds.
Statement
I have chosen linen as the surface for my photographs in the installation
Almost Invisible to exemplify the strength of the Bedouin
culture struggling to exist in the fragile political environment
of Jerusalem. There is also reference to the shroud that has been
used historically to wrap a corpse before burial. I want these
images to be proof or testament to the existence of the Bedouin
people.
Quashie was born in London, England, and reared in the West Indies and the Bahamas before settling with his family in Daytona Beach, FL. He currently lives in Charleston, SC, where in between graphic design and screenwriting, he pursues the fine arts. Quashie has long been recognized as a politically active artistic voice in South Carolina.
Statement
Quashie's art faces off against hard issues of culture, politics
and race with a self-conscious awareness that often offends (or
disturbs) black, white and other; he discriminates with equality
and equanimity. Quashie is equal to the hard questions he raises,
but often the issues are camouflaged in pop-culture imagery and
a form of Warholesque flashiness which confounds as well as derides
the spectator.
Hollis Brown Thornton grew up in Aiken, SC. He received his BFA in studio painting from the University of South Carolina in 1999. He has exhibited at Verdir in Chicago, Aiken Center for the Arts, City Art Gallery and Gallery 701 in Columbia. For the past year, he has maintained a studio in Chicago. The late South Carolina art collector, Mark Coplan, introduced the curator to his work.
Statement
The seven books are reactions to the fifth day of creation in
Genesis. The work is the result of a basic, gut response, of instant
associations with the events of the fifth day. The focus is on
absorbing and incorporating in the art some of the grandeur and
formidable nature of the creation. This response relates the magnitude
of the event without trying to retell the story. The associative
response eliminates any concern with narrative accuracy; because
the books form a circle, there is no fixed beginning or ending
here. At the same time, the circle maintains a sequence of events
or, rather, two possible sequences, clockwise and counter-clockwise.
The intended viewing of the books follows a clockwise sequence.
Open, the pages are a series of close and intimate interpretations
of fifth-day moments. They relate the rush from land to water
to sky to yellows greens browns to water to whales to abrasions
and scratches to birds to the next book. Hands and fingers turning
the pages accentuate the movement and become part of it. Each
page is a separate moment, and then it's gone. The pages ebb and
flow. Great sea creatures and winged birds come and go. They are
over and under and on the pages. Closed, the books and the events
they contain are at rest. In this state, the books' complete stillness
is the calm before and after the experience. Their heavy covers
subdue the content, suppressing the action. The weighted pedestals
add to the stationary nature of the overall scene. The sense of
solitude contrasts with the contents of the pages when the books
are opened. The circular installation intensifies the action.
As a circle, the books define and confine their own space. They
contain the tumult in one spot, concentrating rather than diluting
the ferment.
Michelle Van Parys, a native of Arlington, VA, holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and a BFA from the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. Her mixed media works can be found in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the High Museum of Art, the Tampa Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Since 1980, she has won numerous grants and fellowships and has exhibited all over the US. She currently resides in Charleston, SC, where she serves as associate professor of fine art and photography at the College of Charleston.
Statement
The series Second Thoughts are visual narratives built
from ideas extending out of my personal experiences. The primary
content of this series explores sexuality, domesticity, and images
of women in our culture. Through the combination of appropriated
archival representations with contemporary iconic figures I seek
to engage the viewer in a dialogue that questions the nature of
our relationships to these and other subjects. By varying the
context of the objects (now images) I hope to create an occasion
for the viewer to reconsider their own process of constructing
meaning from literal and poetic sources.
Joe Walters lives in Charleston, SC, were he maintains a studio and teaches part-time at the College of Charleston. For the past 12 years, he has explored the idea of nature and its complex relationships. Walters received his MFA from East Carolina University. He has received fellowships from the Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts and the South Carolina Arts Commission. His work has been exhibited throughout the country and he has received numerous public commissions including Emory Conference Center, University of Florida, Hatsfield International Airport and the Moss Justice Center in York.
Statement
The works (High Tide) were inspired by kayaking in the
salt marshes off Folly Beach during high tide and observing isolated
stalks of grasses with an absolute reflection. The combination
of using abstract patterns while maintaining naturalistic representation
appealed to my personal interests and fit perfectly with the process
I use to make graphic images (punching holes in two pieces of
paper at the same time, staining, abrading etc., to create mirror
images).
Jonathan Williams is a photographer and poet who lives in Highlands, NC. He was educated at Princeton University, Institute of Design in Chicago and Black Mountain College. His mentors include Charles Olson, Kenneth Patchen, Robert Ducan, Paul Goodman, Stefan Wolpe and Lou Harrison to name a few. His numerous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, an N.E.A. Endowment Grant for Poetry and a North Carolina Award in Fine Arts. His poetry has been published in over 100 books, pamphlets and broadsides. His photography was recently published in A Palpable Elysium by David Godine in Boston.
Statement
Williams' photographs exhibited in The Felt Moment date
from 1955 to 1994 and include images of many of the major figures
in American arts and letters. The photographs were originally
shot with a Rolleiflex or a Hasselblad using Ektachrome 120, but
have since been digitized.
The Felt Moment was organized by the Columbia Museum of Art. Tom Stanley, Director of Winthrop University Galleries, serves as guest curator for the exhibition.
For more information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings, call the museum at 803/799-2810 or on the web at (www.columbiamuseum.org).
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