September 2013

Artspace in Raleigh, NC, Offers Several New Exhibitions

Artspace in Raleigh, NC, is offering several new exhibits including: The Places in Between, featuring works by Anthony Ulinski, on view in the Upfront Gallery, from Sept. 6 - 28, 2013, with a reception on Sept. 6, from 6-10pm; It All Goes Back To Childhood, featuring works by Kiki Farish, on view in the Lobby Gallery, from Sept. 6 - 28, 2013, with a reception held on Sept. 6, from 6-19pm; Dear Nature, featuring works by Natalie Abrams, Cynthia Camlin, and Mi-Sook Hur, on view in Gallery 2, from Sept. 6 through Oct. 4, 2013, with receptions being held on Sept. 6 and Oct. 4, from 6-10pm; and Thought Maps & Ladders, featuring works by Ray Duffey and Becky Joye, on view in Gallery 1, from Sept. 14 through Nov. 9, will receptions on Oct. 4 and Nov. 1, from 6-10.

Warehouses, farms, towns, and cities that Ulinski passed on drives from Raleigh to the beach inspired this body of work. Through a series of long Sunday drives, Ulinski gathered the subject matter for his paintings. The works depict scenes spanning winter through summer.

Ulinski elaborates, “I was looking at the way the light bounced off the farm buildings, the abandoned warehouses and the empty streets…As spring turned to summer the last traces of gray disappeared replaced by verdant greens and clear blue skies. The trees, a linear compositional aid in the winter, became massive and looming and the dominate feature in the landscape. Late afternoon thunderstorms became a regular feature of July and August. [There were] huge banks of clouds that would catch and bounce the light down illuminating the scene with an eerie green light and deep blue shadows.”

Ulinski creates his works using a palette knife, applying oil paints with wax and/or a heavy impasto medium. Layer is built upon semi-opaque layer, capturing subtle shifts in light and color in the scenes depicted.

Ulinski was born in Bandung, Indonesia, the son of a US Foreign Service officer. He spent his childhood shuffling between Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States before settling in Raleigh in 1976. He opened Dovetail Woodworks, a studio furniture shop, that fall. Ulinski continues to design and build commissioned furniture and sculptural pieces for gallery exhibitions.

In 1993, Ulinski began the formal study of oil painting, working with Elizabeth Lentz for four years and subsequently with Jacob Cooley, Margie Stewart and Beverly McIver. Ulinski has taught woodworking and painting with various organizations, most recently at the Penland School of Crafts, NC, Arrowmont School for Arts and Crafts, TN, as well as at Artspace. He has exhibited widely at various museums and galleries, including the John Elder Gallery, NY, NY; Funeria, San Francisco, CA; the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; GreenHill, Greensboro, NC; and Blue Spiral Gallery, Asheville, NC. Ulinski’s work has been included in the Smithsonian Craft Show and the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show. He was an artist-in-residence at Artspace in 2000, and is currently an Artspace Artists Association member. Fellowships include those from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

In the exhibit, It All Goes Back To Childhood, Kiki Farish’s drawings focuses on dichotomies. She explains, “In this series of drawings, I begin with text that reflects conflict regarding my own family’s words of comfort: ‘Kiki, you’re not fat, you’re chubby.’” Blending abstraction and realism, Farish uses mark-making to both express and suppress emotions in her works. Fragments of realism that are present in Farish’s works, give, as she states “a sense of how we experience memory.”

Born in Jacksonville, FL, Farish has been a visual artist since she left the Sales and Marketing Division of SAS Institute, Inc. in 1993. She graduated with a MFA in painting and drawing from East Carolina University, May 2006. Farish is an Artspace Artists Association member, and in 2011 she opened a studio at Artspace. She exhibits nationally and her work is in many corporate, government and private collections, including Fidelity Investments and the City of Raleigh.

In the past three years, Farish was selected to participate in both the NC Museum of Art’s benefit, Art of the Auction, and the Raleigh Fine Art Society’s NC Artists Exhibition (Absent Annabelle received Best in Show in the 2011 exhibition). Farish’s recent exhibitions also include Surfacing Connections, at TAG in High Point, NC; Nothing’s Black and White with Julie Brooks, Artspace; Friends, Caldwell Arts Council, Lenoir, NC; Plans, Subplans and Overlays, Visual Arts Exchange, Raleigh, NC; Marked, Artspace; Earthly Musings, Block Gallery, Raleigh, NC; Paul Hartley Legacy, Lee Hansley Gallery, Raleigh, NC; A Woman’s Place, Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville, NC; and Drawing Revisited, GreenHill, Greensboro, NC.

It all goes Back to Childhood will also be on exhibit at the Community Council for the Arts in Kinston, NC, in November 2013.

Farish has taught Color Theory, Design, and (Figure) Drawing at various NC degree granting institutions since 2005. Recently, she was selected to present at the 2013 NC Outreach Project of GreenHill, Greensboro, NC.

Exploring the core of Dear Nature, featuring works by Natalie Abrams, Cynthia Camlin, and Mi-Sook Hur, art critic Dave Delcambre observes: “A constant dialogue with nature (positive or not), seems in fact deeply rooted in our modus operandi, perpetually engaging us on multiple levels. Not only is the ever-changing tableau of the natural world (and perhaps most importantly our interactions with it) a constantly roving target, but the particular challenges of capturing and representing such variety is an especially daunting one given nature’s familiarity and the simple fact that we think we know the natural world better than we actually do.”

“Interesting to note in this exhibition, aptly entitled Dear Nature, is how one certain trio of artists - Mi-Sook Hur, Cynthia Camlin and Natalie Abrams - unflinchingly grapple with these issues head on. Within their work, time and process are inextricably interwoven so much so that it is often difficult to tell where each begins / ends and / or begets the other.”

Natalie Abrams utilizes wax on wood panel to create sculptural, fluid pieces that reflect on concepts that include transition, capturing moments of time, how our systems and relationships mimic those found in the natural world, and the disregard we sometimes have towards the future while acting in the present.

Abrams has exhibited work throughout the United States at venues including Ball State University Atrium Gallery, Muncie, IN; Conrad Wilde Gallery, Tucson, AZ; The Gallery at R & F Paint, Kingston, NY; and the Denver International Airport, Denver, CO. Abrams was recently a Summer Affiliate Artist at the McColl Center for Visual Art, Charlotte, NC. She was also recently awarded a scholarship grant from the Seventh International Encaustic Conference in Provincetown, MA and, in conjunction with the conference, curated the exhibition Losing Ground, Gaining Perspective at Gallery X at Castel Hill in Provincetown. In 2014, Abrams will have a solo exhibition at City Ice Arts in Kansas City, MO.

With watercolors painted on screenprints, Cynthia Camlin focuses on, in her words, “Interpreting erosion, cracking, melting, refreezing through abstracted forms, … [asking] how it would look for a glacier to melt, if you could watch the whole process decade to decade from above.”

Camlin received a MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Texas at Austin. Among her solo and two-person exhibitions are those at Punch Gallery, Seattle, WA, and 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA. Her recent group exhibitions include the 10thAnnual Northwest Biennial, Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA, and The Gaia Factor: Sandy Gellis, Cynthia Camlin, and Deborah Springstead Ford, Semmes Gallery, University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, TX. In 2012, Camlin was a finalist for the Neddy at Cornish Award in Painting. Other awards include an Individual Artist Fellowship, West Virginia Commission on the Arts; a Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; and a Creative Fellowship Award from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.

Mi-Sook Hur uses casting to multiply and divide shapes and structures found in nature, like those of peppers and seedpods, exploring ideas of repetition, seasons, and cycles.

Hur earned a MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI. She is a three-time winner of the North Carolina Regional Artist Project Grant. Hur has won several awards for her work, including Best in Show for the 1st Fine Art Juried Exhibition, Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville, NC, and at the 24th Annual National Juried Fine Arts Exhibition, Wayne County’s Art Council, Goldsboro, NC.

Recent exhibitions include Mi-Sook Hur, Pitt County Arts Council at Emerge Gallery, Greenville, NC; Craft Forms 2012, Wayne Art Center, Wayne, PA; Two Views: Komelia Okim & Mi-Sook Hur, Quirk Gallery, Richmond, VA; Refined VII: Inspiration, Reavley Gallery, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, TX; and Preyed Upon, Art Avenue Gallery, Greenville, NC.

Ray Duffey, with works on view in Thought Maps & Ladders, is an artist who explores the relationships between wood, sculpture and furniture. He elaborates, “My current sculptural series combines refined woodworking with the rough quality of reclaimed scrap material to create a relationship between vessel-like forms and their support structures. The structures act as a metaphor for those abstract social and familial networks that allow us to do what we do and make what we make.”

Duffey has included for this exhibition a number of individual wooden sculptural forms referencing support structures, such as scaffolding and railroad trestle bridges. The structures are linear and constructed of many small boards meticulously fitted and joined together. These connections make up a network of cross bracing and triangulation that create a support for forms that may resemble sea or air-going vessels or perhaps seating of some sort.

Duffey has exhibited nationally, been a resident artist at Maine College of Art, Portland, ME, and has assisted teaching workshops at Penland School of Crafts and at Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts. He currently teaches in Foundation Studies and Furniture Design at Herron School of Art & Design, Indianapolis, IN, and also holds the position of woodshop technician. Duffey received his bachelor degree in Art & Design from NC State University’s School of Design and an MFA in Furniture Design from Herron School of Art & Design.

Becky Joye puts her experience as an architect to fanciful and at times ironic use to create her “Amusement” series, featured in Thought Maps & Ladders. Her amusement parks are set in stark, horizonless spaces that are colored with a dizzying range of rich, flat paint shades and collaged fabric and thread. Viewers may notice that there are no seats for people to sit in or tracks for the cars to glide upon. It turns out that Joye’s utopian escape has no other people in it. However, viewers are welcome to relish her return to youthful euphoria with a gondola, a series of islands, an elaborate network of chutes, a roller coaster, swings, and other delights crafted expressly for the delight of our eyes.

Joye received a Bachelor of Architecture from UNC-Charlotte in 2003. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including The Drawing Show, Pump Project, Austin, TX, and Symptoms of Structure, grayDUCK gallery, Austin, TX. Recently, Joye had a solo exhibition at Designbox, Raleigh, and was the featured artist at the Raleigh’s Woman’s Club. She was an Artspace Regional Emerging Artist-in-Residence from January-July 2013.

Joye will also be teaching Create Your Own Amusement Park with Sculpture and Collage for rising 6th-8th graders on Sept. 28, 2013, at Artspace. Students will create their own imaginative amusement rides using collage of pencil, acrylic paint, paper, fabric, thread, and magazine images. They will also venture into three dimensions with string, wood, and glue. To register, contact Artspace at 919/821-2787.

Artspace is a nonprofit visual art center dedicated to providing arts education and community outreach programs, creating an environment of more than 115 professional artists and presenting nationally acclaimed exhibitions. Located in downtown Raleigh in the historic Sanders Ford building, Artspace has been providing the community with the opportunity to interact with working artists and to participate in hands-on arts education since 1986.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call Artspace at 919/821-2787 or visit (www.artspacenc.org).

[ | September 2013 | Feature Articles | Download Carolina Arts' Current Issue | Carolina Arts Unleashed | Home | ]