April 8th : Larry Racioppo - NY Photographer

Gritty Photographer of Urban Landscape to Exhibit
at ART + CAYCE

From April 8th - May 8th, New York photographer and Guggenheim Fellow Larry Racioppo will exhibit his panoramic photographs at the ART + CAYCE gallery, located at 1329 State St., Cayce. "A Photographer in the City" opens on April 8th with a public lecture at 4 pm in room 214 of the McMaster building, USC (1615 Senate St.). A reception will follow from 6-8 pm at the ART + CAYCE gallery. Racioppo’s career as the architectural photographer for the City of New York will be the subject of a brief gallery talk at 7 pm by UNC Charlotte Architecture Professor Thomas Forget.

Racioppo explores the history of buildings and their absent inhabitants. His large-scale photographs express the loss associated with urban decay, evoking lives spent in schools, churches, and theaters that are now blighted. Images of Ellis Island suggest how the dreams of immigrants lay at the end of a vanishingly long corridor, while a soaring bank lobby recalls the grandeur of the Middle Class dream. Racioppo’s images make us remember our own temporary, and sometimes accidental, gatherings. New York Times critic Ken Johnson describes Racioppo’s photographs as "sympathetic, neither satirizing nor proselytizing. You don’t have to be devout yourself to be touched by the human yearning for supernatural meaning that his photographs evoke."

 

Racioppo began capturing New York urban culture in 1970, when he shot Italian-American neighborhoods, kids playing street football, religious rituals, and apartment interiors. This early work culminated in a book called Halloween. Since that time, Racioppo’s photographs have been exhibited widely, including one-person shows at the Museum of the City of New York, The National Building Museum, Ellis Island, The Municipal Art Society (New York,) Safe-T-Gallery, and The Museum of Biblical Art (New York). Racioppo has received prestigious support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Puffin Foundation, as well as honors from the Golden Light Awards and the Queens Council on the Arts.

As a visiting artist at USC, Racioppo will also conduct Master Classes in Photography with a photo shoot at the CMC Steel and Metal Recycling facility in Cayce.

February 18 - March 18 : josh drews!

ART+CAYCE proudly presents josh drews!, a printmaker who specializes in monotypes. His work engages rendered subjects with expressive backgrounds. Drews also teaches visual arts at Spring Valley High School in northeast Columbia.

The gallery opening is Thursday, Feb. 18 from 6-8 pm.

Gallery talk by Josh Drews at 7 p.m., on process and production.

The show will run from Feb. 18th to Mar. 18th

Show sponsored by Compass 5 Partners & Undefined Magazine

josh drews!

http://joshuadrews.com/home.html  

Josh Drews says, “Creating monotypes provides a sense of freedom that I have yet to find in any other medium.” The experience allows him to be very expressive with mark-making and color. After printing the initial product, he refines the marks, adding details and other special features, allowing the piece to emerge into the final product. Drews says, “I love creating an interaction between rendered subjects and expressive backgrounds.”

As a child, Drews would spend hours sketching characters, creating his own comics, and filling notebooks with assorted drawings of dinosaurs, robots, and superheroes. Creating art has always been a driving force in his life. In 2001, after graduating from Winthrop University with a BFA in General Studio Art, Drews was offered the opportunity to teach visual arts at Spring Valley High School in northeast Columbia.

Drews admits that teaching art has been an overwhelming, yet rewarding experience. With around thirty teenagers rotating through his classroom every forty-five minutes, six times a day, Drews claims that it makes you grow up fast. Not only has he grown as a young adult but he has also grown tremendously as an artist. Drews' passion for art has grown stronger by teaching his students and learning from these young artists.

Currently, Drews continues to spend time on his own artwork - primarily monotypes.

December 3, 2009 : presenting 9x3

9x3 is made up of three works by nine artists from the Southeast -featuring established artists to emerging artists...

Gallery talk by Tom Nakashima at 7pm, The William S. Morris Eminent Scholar in Art at Augusta State University. The show will run from Dec. 3 to Jan. 14. This show features work by established and new artists in the Southeast. The exhibit includes prints, ceramic sculpture, photography and paintings.

This show includes:
Frieda Dean, Priscilla Hollingsworth, Chris Johnson, Bri Kinard, Tom Nakashima, Ashley Padgett, Virginia Scotchie, Laura VanCamp, and Yen Yu Lu

FriedaDean http://www.annexgalleries.com/artists/Frieda_Dean.html   Frieda Dean’s work encompasses over 30 years of seasoned study and education. She is trained in various mediums – painting, sculpture, watercolor, oil painting, sculptural masks, performance art, printmaking and lithography. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, include “Art and Narrative” (September 1996, Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, Chicago), “New Abstract Prints in Chicago” (April 1999, Fine Arts Center, Chicago), and “Providence Art Club Juried Prints and Drawings Exhibition” (March 2002, Providence, Rhode Island). Her Later work shows the influence of her study of American Abstract Expressionist painting and prints. She is currently teaching painting and printmaking at the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta. Her recent prints include large-scale abstract lithographs and intimate color engravings.

 

Priscilla Hollingsworth

http://www.aug.edu/~artpxh/

Priscilla Hollingsworth is a ceramic artist whose work includes sculpture, installations, and vessels. She has shown her work in numerous individual and group exhibitions across the United States from 1985 to the present. Photographs of her work have been published in several books, such as Surface Decoration for Low-Fire Ceramics by Lynn Peters (Lark Books/Random House, 1999), The Ceramic Design Book: A Gallery of Contemporary Work (Lark Books/Random House, 1998), and The Best of Pottery (Rockport Publishers, 1996). Her work is represented by the RileyHawk Gallery in Seattle and the Eclectic Design Gallery in Augusta, GA. She has received residency awarded from the Kohler Company’s Arts/Industry Program; the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada; the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine; Artpark in Lewiston, New York; and the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. She received a M.F.A. from Indiana University in Bloomington, and an A.B. degree from Princeton University, where she studied with Toshiko Takaezu. Currently, Hollingsworth is a Professor of Art and the Art Coordinator at Augusta State University in Augusta, Georgia.

 

Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson is originally from Macon, Ga. In 2008 he received a B.F.A. from Clemson University with a combined focus of printmaking and ceramics. Currently, Johnson is a second year of the M.F.A. program at the University of South Carolina, majoring in printmaking with a minor in drawing. He works primarily in woodcut printing and etching. Johnson’s work has a strong narrative quality that invites the viewer to participate in creating and finding its meaning.

Bri Kinard

Bri Kinard is a senior at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. She is an undergraduate student in the art studio program with a focus in ceramics. Her work is organic using the method of soda firing.

 Tom Nakashima
http://www.tomnakashima.com/

Born in Seattle, Washington, Nakashima is The William S. Morris Eminent Scholar in Art at Augusta State University. He is a painter/printmaker who is exhibited internationally. In addition to his work, he is a highly solicited lecturer and has written and reviewed hundreds of publications internationally. His work is in the permanent collections of over 50 public collections. Included are The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Long Beach Museum of Art, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum (Rutgers), The Jersey City Museum of Art, The Morris Museum of Art, Augusta Georgia, The Ogden Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA, MOCA/GA, Atlanta, GA, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA and The Georgia Museum of Art, Athens , GA.

Ashley Padgett

Ashley Padgett, a native to Lexington, SC, is expected to graduate from the University of South Carolina in the spring of 2010 with a B.F.A. in Fine Arts – concentrating in ceramics. She has studied under Virginia Scotchie since 2006 and has shown work in the McMaster Student Gallery and Gallery 80808 in Columbia, SC. Padgett’s work is mainly concerned with figurative abstractions and deals with issues of touch.





Virginia Scotchie
http://virginiascotchie.com/  

Virginia is a ceramic artist who exhibits her work extensively throughout the United States and abroad, and has received numerous awards including the Sydney Meyer Fund International Ceramics Premiere Awarded from Shepparton Museum in Victoria, Australia. She has lectured internationally on her work and has been an Artist-in-Residence in Taiwan, Italy, Australia, and the Netherlands. Her clay forms reside in public and private collections including the Yingee Ceramic Museum in Taiwan and the FLICAM Museum in China. Reviews about her work appear in numerous ceramic publications.

 

Laura VanCamp
Laura Van Camp is a first year ceramics graduate student at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. She holds a B.F.A. from Adrian College in Michigan. She primarily focuses on the human form, using the method of sager firing.

Yen Yu Lu

Yen Yu Lu is a foreign exchange graduate student at the University of South Carolina, Columbia in the ceramics department. She is from Tainan National University of the Arts, in Taiwan. She holds her undergraduate degree from Ntua, in sculpture.

October 8, 2009 : Suzy Scarborough

Suzy Scarborough : artist statement

I am currently working on three distinct bodies of work: collage abstracts, gold leaf geometrics, and figures. Although they differ in appearance and technique, they are related in thematic content: inner reality as opposed to outer reality; the natural/organic as opposed to mathematical/abstract; material as opposed to conceptual/symbolic. The collage pieces begin with pages from old books I find at antique stores. I especially like “self educator” books from the 19th century; these intrinsically carry the theme of the changing nature of “cultural reality” and human concepts. In painting these pieces I had no final image in mind, but instead searched intuitively to determine where to place each paint stroke. My attention shifted naturally back and forth from defining form to harmonizing the many divergent colors. As the pieces took shape I noticed that they seemed to turn into landscapes, sometimes an open area surrounded by land masses, sometimes a spiraling stream of energy (air, water, fog?). The gold leaf pieces seem to be all about harmonizing and balancing color and shapes. They suggest many different concepts using the very limited means of pure line and color. The figures are psychological studies, meant to represent woman as subject rather than object. My women are actively engaged and conscious--- they are never merely an object to be viewed and admired; they must be reckoned with.

Techniques and Processes

Collage pieces I collage book pages on to wood panels, then paint over them with acrylic, crackle paste, watercolor pencils, and/or india ink. They are finished with epoxy resin.

Gold Leaf pieces I draw an organic usually plant based drawing on a wood panel. I drip epoxy over the drawing to create the three-dimensional shapes. I then apply red gesso and gold leaf. Over this I draw and paint the geometric shapes. I finish each piece with a coat of epoxy resin.

Figure pieces Usually a mixture of techniques. I paint from photographic sources using acrylic paint, charcoal, watercolor pencils, and crackle paste.

August 27, 2009 : Adrian Rhodes

September 10, 2009 : Robin Jones + Andrew Norton Webber

Robin Jones : artist statement

As a sculptor I work in several media, each of which has its own character, its own limitations and possibilities. My stone pieces are not usually preconceived; rather, I find the image in the stone itself: either choosing a stone that suggests an image, or that has proportions that appeal to my sense of form. In any case, the work becomes a dialogue between me and the stone, gradually evolving a form that seems meaningful as well as aesthetically satisfying. They are almost always abstract, yet the lines and forms imitate nature in its vitality and in the uniqueness and persona of living things.

Working in ceramic suggests more open forms with space circulating through the piece rather than just surrounding it. Most of the ceramic pieces in this show were conceived as though models for much larger structures which one could walk through. These fantasy structures allow for a certain playfulness, and I often imagine them as buildings of unknown origin and purpose, perhaps discovered on another planet. My most recent ceramics are playful in the sense that one can play with them; move and rearrange them to make one’s own composition. An interactive art.

Bronze sculptures are mechanical reproductions of originals in clay, plaster, wax, or some other material. It is a complicated process involving making molds of the originals, producing duplicates in wax which are then cast in bronze by the lost wax method. The large bronze, Arbor, is the one exception to this process; it is a unique cast from a wax original.

The dynamic of my work is based on the contrast between straight lines and curves: the limitations of an edge, the movement of a sinuous line, the swelling of a full rounded form. I find these forms and movements in nature – in minerals and trees and bodies. And I find them also in my mind. Artistic creation is very much a part of nature; for what are we if not nature? Art follows the same patterns and evolves the same forms, arising from the great unconscious. It is a mysterious process which is my pleasure to witness and to participate in.

Andrew Norton Jones : artist statement

Jones says his work, "explores infinity".