August Issue 2002
Burroughs-Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach, SC, Features Works by John Acorn and Winston Wingo
The works of two noted South Carolina sculptors - one a lauded Clemson University visual arts professor and the other his very successful student - will be featured at the Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum Aug. 10 - Sept. 15. Both artists will speak about their work at 7pm on Aug. 10.
John Acorn
John Acorn: Prints, Plates, Fishheads and Figurines further explores the Camouflage Man series he began in the mid 1990's. During that period he was inspired by a small advertisement for a camouflage hunting suit from his local newspaper. Enlarging the tiny suit on a copy machine, he noted "the bigger it got, the better it got." He went on to create a series of eight-foot tall freestanding sculptures, each covered with their own provocative materials, ranging from spikes to flies to flowers. One day a few years ago, while loading some of these very large and very heavy sculptures onto a truck, a helpful friend suggested he should make smaller sculptures. It was at that point Acorn began to create Camouflage Man as a Figurine, 24-inch tongue-in-cheek references to collectable figurines. Thirty of these figurines will be on display at the Art Museum, along with 13 original prints also using the Camouflage Man imagery.
The exhibition will also include five plates from his printmaking process assembled into works of art in themselves. The show will be rounded out with fishheads, another subject Acorn has explored two dimensionally, waiting for the opportunity to try them in three dimensions. He found the invitation to exhibit in Myrtle Beach to be "the right place at the right time to begin making fishheads."
Acorn is retired from Clemson University where he served as Head of the Department of Visual Arts and History for more than 20 years. He has exhibited widely throughout the Southeast, and his works are in the permanent collections of museums in Greenville, SC, Asheville and Charlotte, NC. He has created public sculpture installations for a number of buildings throughout the region, including the Charleston International Airport. In 1998 he was a recipient of the Elizabeth O'Neill Verner Individual Award, the South Carolina Arts Commission's most prestigious honor bestowed in recognition of an artist's commitment to furthering arts in the State.
Winston Wingo
Winston Wingo's association with John Acorn goes back to his days as a graduate student at Clemson University where he received his MFA degree in 1980. Wingo came under Acorn's tutelage as a sculpture student. His Technocratic Man exhibit features 12 cast bronze sculptures and seven oil paintings, all exploring themes of dehumanization, the bronzes by technology and the paintings by the urban ghetto environment. His bronzes are cast in the Italian tradition, using the lost wax process, which he has perfected to the extent he can make ultra thin sculptures with slick, highly reflective surfaces. His casting is done in Pietrasanta, Italy, where he pursued postgraduate studies. His very large canvases, most about seven feet by five feet, are lushly painted to create patterns of shimmering light, just as light plays on the surfaces of his sculptures. His subjects are victims, "targeted" for extinction and doomed by their circumstances. The actual target painted onto each surface provides a geometric counterpoint to the organic brushwork of the rest of the canvas.
In the past 25 years, Wingo has exhibited extensively throughout the Southeast, particularly in the Carolinas. His sculptures have been installed in numerous public areas, including a Martin Luther King bust and a Stop the Violence sculpture of melted guns for Spartanburg and a bronze mural on Asheville, NC's Urban Trail, which depicts the culture and heritage of the city.
For more information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings or call the museum at 843/238-2510.
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