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September Issue
2008
McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte,
NC, Offers a Contemporary Exhibition to Showcase a New Narrative
of the Craft Tradition
True Grit: Frames, Fixations and Flirtations brings together an engaging and thoroughly timely body of work from six artists who use their mastery of materials and technique to explore provocative conceptual ideas and narrative strategies. The exhibition, opening Sept. 12, at McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, NC, features works from Myra Mimlitsch Gray, Beth Lipman, Takashi Hinoda, Ai Kijima, Ted Noten and Arlene Shechet, on view through Nov. 1, 2008.
With the title True Grit implying work that is unrefined and rough around the edges, it is not surprising to find works of art in this exhibition that operate on many levels with viewers. Arlene Shechet's fired clay and mixed media sculptures are human forms and containers abstracted and altered into otherworldly vessels, straddling the line between beauty and ugliness. In a similar vein, jeweler Ted Noten plays with viewer's expectations with his surprising, wearable and conceptual designs. By encasing everyday objects, even cigarette butts, in resin he renders them refined.
Ai Kijima's quilted works of art subvert iconic imagery through her use of popular animated characters and cultural icons. These "safe" images of childhood are used to create a powerful commentary on marketing, globalization and mass media. Takashi Hinoda's work also draws on imagery associated with childhood with his clay figures and installations that reference anime subculture and cartoons.
A renowned metalsmith and jeweler, Myra Mimlitsch Gray creates sculptural work in cast iron and brass. Her new pieces incorporate the physicality of craft; indeed, her cast iron sculptures have almost a hand-chiseled feeling to their surfaces. Glass artist Beth Lipman's tableaus toy with ideas of references to the past underscored by her undeniable talent for blowing historical forms.
As a group, the artists included in True Grit are presenting work that visually and intellectually engages viewers. "I really responded to the visceral quality across the board with this work" says Mark Leach, who curated this exhibit and is Director of Southeastern Center Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC. "These are artists at their peak working with one foot firmly planted in a mastery of process and the other foot leaping into the realm of ideas, bringing back something new and exciting to the field of craft." They are dancing along the blurring boundary that historically has divided craft and fine art. While the objects created are not strictly utilitarian, they have taken on a new narrative usefulness.
McColl Center for Visual Art is an artists'
residency program and gallery dedicated to promoting contemporary
art and supporting artists regionally, nationally, and internationally.
The Center's goal is to present art and artists in a way that
engages and enriches the public while revealing the creative process
through open studios, outreaches, community projects, and educational
programs. McColl Center for Visual Art is supported, in part,
with a Basic Operating Grant from the Arts and Science Council
as well as the North Carolina Arts Council with funding from the
state of North Carolina and the National Endowment for the Arts,
which believes that a great nation deserves great art and the
generosity of corporate and individual donors.
For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery
listings, call the Center at 704/332-5535 or visit (www.mccollcenter.org).
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc. Copyright© 2008 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts Online, Copyright© 2008 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.