August Issue 1999
New Exhibits on View at Waterworks Visual Arts Center
The Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, NC, is presenting two new exhibits which will be on view through Sept. 26, including the exhibitions, The Spirit and The Flesh and In the Garden.
The Spirit and The Flesh is composed of three distinctly different styles featuring works by Malena Bergmann, Cara Reische, and Kerry Smith. Each artist creates in a uniquely personal way a visual language for the quality of their own experience.
Malena Bergmann
Bergmann's new assemblages, composed of fragments of the familiar, are stark, sometimes brutal reminders of our own mortality and the fragility not only of the human body but the fragility of all life as well. Reische, known for her traditionally rendered portraits, is exhibiting a new group of layered and richly colored abstract oils on canvas and mixed media pieces which have allowed her a new freedom of expression, the spirit of personal creativity unfettered by references to anything outside itself. Smith's mixed media figurative paintings and works on paper are strong gestural compositions that balance a sense of spontaneity, a sense of the solidity of the body, and a love of the process.
Each of these artists, all three in their early thirties, are engaged in their work at a very personal level, not necessarily modeled after what is currently fashionable in the art world. Individually, they make powerful visual statements. Together, their work brings us full circle in the human experience, from the unformed to the corporal, from the spirit to the flesh.
Bergmann maintains a studio in Charlotte, NC, and is an Adjunct Professor of Art at Queens College in Charlotte, and Winthrop University, in Rock Hill, SC, and Lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Florida, Gainesville. She has exhibited nationally and was recently selected for 2000 Outstanding Artists and Designers of the 20th Century. She was also selected for Who's Who of American Women, 21st Edition.
Reische's studio is located in Spencer, NC. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990, she opened a portrait and painting studio. Her work is now in public and private collections, both here and abroad.
Smith earned an MFA degree from Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. She is presently a Life Drawing/Painting instructor at the Waterworks Visual Arts Center and is currently represented by Somerhill Gallery, Chapel Hill, NC, and Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte.
Sculpture by Frank Holder of Greensboro, NC, will be exhibited in the Taylor/Johnson Courtyard at Waterworks. Holder's large organic abstract shapes in a variety of metals have a wonderful sense of fluidity and motion, and often times, whimsy.
Holder says, "My work is an abstraction and a reflection of the organic world, whether leaf, stone, water, wind, a bird, or a man. All possess forms, patterns, and space which I try to bring to a piece while instilling a sense of motion and giving a sense of life." A self-taught visual artist, Holder received an MFA in Dance from UNC-Greensboro in 1972. His love of dance and movement is an intrinsic part of his sculpture. Holder's sculptures may be seen publically at North Carolina Botanical Gardens, Chapel Hill, NC; Elon College, Elon, NC; and the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro.
Artwork by children who participated in the Waterworks Summer Artworks Program will also be featured through Sept. 26, in the Center's Young People's Gallery.
For more information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings
or call the Center at 704/636-1882.
Mailing Address: Carolina Arts, P.O. Drawer 427, Bonneau, SC
29431
Telephone, Answering Machine and FAX: 843/825-3408
E-Mail: carolinart@aol.com
Subscriptions are available for $18 a year.
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring
Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc.
Copyright© 1999 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© 1999 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.