December Issue 1999
Goodall Gallery Features Upstate Artists at Columbia College
Upstate to Midstate is an exhibition of work by six South Carolina artists which is currently on view through Dec. 15 in the Goodall Gallery at Columbia College in Columbia, SC.
The exhibit features work in a range of media from ceramic vessels to constructed paintings. The artists whose work is being exhibited include: Michael Brodeur, Jim Campbell, Sharon Campbell, Bob Chance, Glenda Guion and Jo Carol Mitchell.
Michael Brodeur, the Chair of the Visual Arts division of the SC Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, SC, presents paintings and drawings that use still life elements to comment on the fragile and poetic nature of life. Through the use of central placement of the still life elements, muted and limited color, and a precisionist's approach to balance, he lifts mundane commonplace objects to the level of transcendent metaphor.
Jim Campbell teaches at the Fine Arts Center in Greenville. In the small scale paintings he has included in this show he moves away from the traditional rectangular painting format to three dimensional constructed paintings. These pieces are small jewels, paintings that have been fragmented and put back together in ways that pull the viewer in to piece them back together. His themes in these works are time, memory and aging; difficult subjects that are handled eloquently.
Sharon Campbell, a freelance curator and artist from Greenville, works primarily in clay. Her five sculptures included in the exhibit explore abstracted landscape elements suggestive of cliffs, mesas and canyons. The forms are accentuated by her use of a monochromatic palette. The spaces between the masses are very controlled, creating a carefully balanced tension.
Bob Chance, the Chair of the Art Department at Furman University in Greenville, is well known for his beautifully crafted raku vessels. He continues to explore pure ceramic form using shapes influenced by ancient Minoan, Greek and Etruscan pottery as well as 17th century Kyoto ware. His painted surfaces are covered with abstract shapes and colors as well as more recognizable images like the raven and the koi.
Glenda Guion teaches ceramics at the Fine Arts Center in Greenville. Her painted wall pieces are full of abstracted yet still recognizable images of people caught within maze like structures. The surfaces of her works are painted in jazzy patterns of muted blues and earth tones that belie the seriousness of her subjects. Drawing from both Native American and European mythology, she uses clay, the "prima materia" to explore the nature of being and becoming.
Jo Carol Mitchell, the Chair of the Art Department at Anderson College, in Anderson, SC, includes small intensely colored gouache paintings of female figures. Caught in bright lights on a stage like platform, the figures move through a dance that we can catch portions of, not the whole.
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