October Issue 1999
College Of Charleston's Halsey Gallery Hosts Six Assemblage Artists in The Right To Assemble Exhibition
The William Halsey Gallery at the College of Charleston's School of the Arts in Charleston, SC, is hosting an exhibition featuring assemblage artists- Aldwyth, Oriane Stender, Lisa Kokin, Brad Thomas, Tiffany Cole, and Mr. Imagination that will be on display Oct. 1 - 30. The exhibition is co-curated by Mark Sloan, Director of the Halsey Gallery and Dr. Marian Mazzone, Assistant Professor of Art History at the College of Charleston.
The Right to Assemble features six artists who transform the mundane into the exalted through creative juxtaposition of found objects. Aldwyth has exhibited throughout the Southeast and lives and works in Hilton Head, SC. Lisa Kokin received her MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, and works in Richmond, CA. Oriane Stender studied sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute and UC/Berkeley, and now lives and works in San Francisco. Brad Thomas is a graduate of UNC-Charlotte, and a 1998 recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship. Thomas resides in Charlotte and has work included in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Tiffany Cole received her BA in interdisciplinary Studies from Ohio University in 1991, and has exhibited in Atlanta,GA and Charleston,SC. Mr. Imagination (Gregory Warmack) is a self-taught artist based in Chicago. His work is in the collection of the Smithsonian, and he has produced commissioned works for the House of Blues and for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games.
Twentieth century art history has witnessed a number of artists who have utilized common "detritus" as raw material for their work, beginning with the pioneer Pablo Picasso, and extending through Marcel Duchamp, Jean Dubuffet and Joseph Cornell, to name a few. The metaphorical potency of working with found materials has fascinated contemporary artists since the late 1950's, including the early California assemblage artists such as Wallace Berman, and the assemblage/Happenings practitioners such as Oldenburg, Dine and Kaprow on the East Coast.
Since the landmark exhibition The Art of Assemblage, held at New York's Museum of Modem Art in 1961, which placed the word "assemblage" into the modem art vocabulary, there has been a consistent history of exhibitions on the theme. Working with the visible remains of our culture, the artists in "RTA" reorder not only objects and images, but our expectations as well. Once we have seen United States currency cut up and reassembled as a quilt (as with Oriane Stender's work), we can no longer look at money in just the same way. Or, after viewing Mr. Imagination's royal throne made from discarded bottlecaps, we now think twice about throwing anything away. Aldwyth's interactive box constructions invite us to enter into the world of assemblage as a participant, thereby dissolving the barrier between artist and viewer.
Through the works of Tiffany Cole and Brad Thomas we tread in the domain of the autobiographical and intimately personal as seen through the minds of visual poets. Lisa Kokin's sharp wit is applied to an amazing array of materials resulting in ironic (and often humorous) insights into personal and political subjects such as religion and sexuality.
Each of the artists in this exhibition approach the idea of assemblage from their unique perspective. The variety of methods and materials in this grouping of artists is diverse. The primary objective of "The Right to Assemble" exhibition is to create an occasion for a dialogue about the limitless possibilities inherent in the seemingly ordinary materials that surround us. Whether the subject is personal identity, an exploration of the world of dreams, or a formal investigation, the artists in this exhibition each create works which address the fragmentation of memory and the mercurial nature of meaning.
For further information check our SC Institutional Gallery listings or contact Mark Sloan at 843/953-5680.
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