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July Issue 2007
Wilkes Art Gallery in North Wilkesboro, NC, Offers Works by Mary-Ann Prack
The Wilkes Art Gallery in North Wilkesboro, NC, will present the exhibit, Figures and Faces - In the Abstract, featuring drawings, paintings and sculpture by Mary-Ann Prack. The exhibit will be on view from July 13 through Aug. 18, 2007.
Mary-Ann Prack is the essence of a complete artist. Her background in the arts really began over a century ago with the creation of an architectural design firm in Pittsburgh, PA, by her grandfather. Prack & Prack, A & E, became the quiet start of an iconic architectural, engineering, interiors, and fine art family tradition that has spanned three generations, two countries, includes several different Prack families and lives on today in the art work of Prack and her siblings.
Prack's early life in Ontario, Canada, was
dominated by art and design. She chose to study, first painting
and drawing, and later sculpture as she grew up. Prack started
exhibiting her sculpture while studying at Florida Atlantic University.
She also worked with her husband, Bill Maler, on many design commissions
for major corporate projects in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
During the 1980s, Prack concentrated totally on developing hand-built ceramics as a sculpture medium; exhibiting her work in a broad range of indoor and outdoor venues. Though she uses ceramics as a material, she does not follow the potter's vessel concept but blazes her own path with clay as a pure sculpture medium; hand-building each piece using stoneware clay slabs, carved line work/textures, and glazes, colors, or stains with a painter's approach to surface treatments.
In 1994, Prack and her family moved to Jefferson, NC. She has fully matured her artistic style into an instantly recognizable abstract expressionist form that continues to gather awards and commendations from critics.
About the body of work exhibited at the Wilkes Art Gallery, Prack writes, "My background includes three generations of family artist tradition encompassing sculpture, painting, and architecture. From this foundation I have developed artwork that transforms my personal vocabulary of form, color, line and texture into what are for me spirited, serious and elegant abstractions of the human form. I treat the figure, and especially the face as a multi-dimensional "tabula rasa", to be filled with hidden gestures, emotions and subconscious thoughts made more visible by my personal interpretations, but still far from transparent and in need of subjective interpretation by the viewer. Thus, my work stems from an intuitive source rather than a response to social trends and movements, moral causes or political statements. My subjects are vehicles which connect my inner spirit to a tangible artwork that has its own individual presence, spirit, timelessness and mystery."
For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the gallery at 336/667-2841 or visit (www.wilkesartgallery.org).
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