Medieval Book Arts: A Private Collection

Opening Reception Dec 2nd 6-9p

In the Middle Ages books were handmade objects of luxury, meticulously written by professional scribes, then delicately painted in bright colors and “illuminated” with gold that often shines as bright as the day it was applied. “Medieval Book Arts: A Private Collection” presents such lavish medieval books and pages from a private collection in Columbia. Among the rarities on display are a vast mass-book from southern France datable to 1300, a Psalter with gold letters from around 1425, a prayer book with filigree initials painted in liquid gold, and a staggering, bloody Crucifixion scene from medieval Germany. ART+CAYCE will also unveil pages from the St. Albans Abbey Bible, which was made in Paris around 1330; from the Llangattock Breviary, a work commissioned by Leonello d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, in the 1440’s; from a sumptuous Book of Hours once in the possession of François-César le Tellier, the Marquis de Courtanvaux; and from a unique list of holy relics in the church of St. Thiébault, Alsace. Details in these illuminated manuscripts will surprise you: Judas’s bulging purse in a painting of the Last Supper, the fangs of lean-ribbed wolves in a depiction of the Apostles, life-like owls and strawberries in panels from a Book of Hours. “Medieval Book Arts” will captivate anyone interested in medieval art, religion, music, or history.

"Everlast" Collaborative work of Virginia Scotchie & Bri Kinard Opening at ART+CAYCE

Titled EVERLAST, the absorbing and spirited exhibition sponsored by ART+ CAYCE features ceramic sculptures by Virginia Scotchie and Bri Kinard. Having completed a BFA under Scotchie, Carolina Distinguished Professor of Art at USC, Kinard is now completing an MFA at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The Scotchie-Kinard collaboration manifests a passion for experimental forms, especially of tools. Scotchie is internationally praised for her inventive manipulation of tool shapes—as well as their internal/inverse forms: cones, bisected angles, squared off cylinders, and tubular excrescences. Kinard has found her own voice, sculpting bone-line archeological “artifacts.” Scotchie has mastered glazing, and Kinard has adapted this expert training to her own body of work. Together in EVERLAST, they have slip-coated and glazed industrial mopheads. Once the thick fibers are burned out, the technique yields the most astonishing ropes of intense color. The powerful surfaces flow in more than one sense. They are sinuous, gravid roots with an iridescent oily patina. The green figures resemble dense Martian wisteria vines. Experiencing these sculptures is like scuba-diving in the Great Barrier Reef and  encountering fabulous drifts of textured ossified spines. The fluid, mesmerizing forms suggest eternal duration or eternity, and the title EVERLAST derives from this implicit agelessness. Although one can perceive elements of both artists’ work, together they have created a fresh genre that departs in surprising ways from the exceptional art they have already produced. EVERLAST opens on Friday 11 November at Compass 5 Partners LLC, 1329 State St, Cayce (across from Brookland-Cayce High School), with a catered reception from 6-9pm.

"An Art Show with Legs"........ what Jasper said

Below is a link to the Jasper Magazine review of the Lindsay Radford Wiggins opening..... check it out!    

             

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jaspercolumbia.net%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D610&h=kAQBrycCDAQChBXZOWPXA8D4Q8DJyN-_F1I1qz29sSHIm4w

Lindsay Radford Wiggins Opening October 14th

"Dreams and Memories” is the name of Lindsay Wiggins’ new show at ART+Cayce, which will open with reception on 14 October from 6-9p at 1329 State St. in Cayce. Inspired by Surrealism, the works evoke emotional landscapes that dreams warp, elide, and distort. At home with graphite, oil on canvas, and mixed media, Wiggins creates images with deeply expressive consciousness--a mother and child, two women (friends or sisters?), lovers—all inhabiting warm, eerie spaces. When visible, the austere faces simply stare out with absent gazes against meaningful, if mysterious, tableaux: a rocky outcrop looking like a cracked molar, a ranch house whose lights shine on a man hunched over in a wheelchair, a watering hole in some exotic African veldt. Sometimes individuals remain alone, isolated, and wrapped in the complex symbology of memory. The darkly magical stages, for example, are often populated with animal and vegetable life, zebras with ropey legs, trees with elongated branches and roots, clouds with slender appendages. The effect is disorienting, strange, and inviting. We have entered the graphic dreamspace familiar to all of us. Wiggins herself acknowledges, “our memories and dreams communicate how we perceive things. Each one of us has our own unique perspective, while at the same time there are some universal symbols with which we all can relate.” Speaking about the puzzle of interpretation, Wiggins has developed “universal symbols” that include color, spatial orientations, and nests of thin line suggesting dendrites. Sometimes the warm gray tonality of Wiggins’ graphite pencil implies absence. Sometimes a dark field implies ambiguity. The nudes are always vulnerable, hiding, contemplative. Clearly, this code communicates subliminal thought in ways that harmonize conscious and unconscious experience and interpretation, conveying “various psychological dimensions” that Wiggins comes back to time and again in her art. She remarks that language cannot describe dreams, so she has invented a different mode of expression for this unexplored region of inspiration.

Wiggins is an emerging woman artist of refined talent, known locally for her participation in the painted violins project. She received her BA in Studio Art from Columbia College in 2011. Since 2005, she has exhibited her work in group shows all over Columbia, both as a painter and award-winning photographer. This admirable versatility and rigorous preparation have served her well in the “Dreams and Memories” exhibition.

Eliot Dudik Opens September 9th 2011

Fine Art photographer Eliot Dudik works in a large-format style that documents the inhabited landscapes of an almost bygone South, the country that lies along US Route 17. Many of us drive this road between Charleston and Savannah. We know it for its sweet grass baskets, the scent of ocean, the expanse of towering pines. But as Dudik laments, “like many semi-isolated, rural spaces, this area has a deeply rooted culture in danger of obscurity and demise ... The surest levee to protect such cultures and preserve heritage and history is awareness ... These images are but a single, essential sandbag.” Dudik discovers the soul of Route 17 in its people and landscapes, and his dramatically eloquent photographs interpret the spirit of this vanishing community.

On 9 September at 6 pm ART+CAYCE will open an exhibition of Dudik’s bucolic images in a show called “Road Ends in Water.” The title comes from a road sign, yellow with black letters, planted in front of a spectacular Dixie wilderness extending to the horizon. Travel on this route is guided by Dudik’s eye for the uncanny. In a piece called “Carew Rice Painting” a rotting drive-in screen has been re-painted with silhouettes of deer—a buck, doe, and fawn under a tree. They drink at a pond of startled ducks. The image perfectly depicts what was (people at a show) and what will be (wilderness, unpeopled). “Snuffy’s House” also highlights Dudik’s fascination with the residents and their natural environment. Snuffy’s mounts line the paneled walls of his man-cave: deer and a Canada goose in flight. There’s a wreath of pinecones—big ones—and hunting rifles, but in the adjacent room stands a baby grand piano. Could there be a better image of our southern culture, that genius for combining the pleasures of nature and art? In “The Word” Dudik finds “spiritual intimacy” in one small mission devoted to local faith. The sanctuary may be lonely now, but the Sunday tide will pull in its parishioners and they will be washed in the Word. The face of Christ covers the fans lying on a table. There’s no A/C in these places! Finally, “First Snow in Twenty Years” shows some tire tracks in a vacant field lightly dusted in snow. Someone has been spinning out the pickup, making what can only be described as crop circles in the snowfield. Down here snow makes an appreciated if ephemeral canvas.

Dudik’s 2010 monograph, also called Road Ends in Water, has received acclaim through national exhibition and in online publications, such as Fraction Magazine, Magenta Magazine, and One, One Thousand: A Publication of Southern Photography. Dudik received a BS in Anthropology and a BA in Art History from the College of Charleston in 2007. He earned his MFA in Photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2010. Dudik has just relocated to Columbia, where he was recently appointed adjunct professor of Photography at USC.

Book Launch: Nominal or Natural by Isabel K. Gwara

Studio Works: Selections from the Ceramic Art Studio at USC - Apr. 22 - May 13

Studio Works: Selections from the Ceramic Art Studio at the University of South Carolina

Join us for the Opening on Friday, April 22nd 5-8pm

Virginia Scotchie, Studio Professor
Jon McMillan, Adjunct Faculty
Liu Chia-yun, Exchange Student from the Department of Art Exchange
Allison Brown, BFA Student
Stetson Rowles, BFA Student
Robin Jones, Post-Bac Student
Dana Childs, MFA Student
Danny Crocco, MFA Student
Frieda Dean, MFA Student
Hayley Douglas, MFA Student
Katherine Radomsky, MFA Student
Laura VanCamp, MFA Student
Bri Kinnard, BFA Alumni
Jelene Morris, BFA Alumni
Ken Baskin, MFA Alumni
Rocky Lewicky, MFA Alumni

Allan Wendt, "Black Drawings", Feb 11 - Mar 11

PRESS RELEASE: Graphite Genius Allan Wendt Exhibits Magical New Work at ART+CAYCE

From 5-8 pm on Friday, February 11, ART+CAYCE at 1329 State St. in Cayce will host a reception for the opening of Charleston artist Allan Wendt's remarkable exhibition, "Black Drawings." Two dozen pieces on exhibit until March 11 reveal Wendt's fascination with "nothingness," the creation of meaning from absence. With graphite pencil alone Wendt manages to capture an eerie luminescence, a subtle range of shimmering tones that emerge from line and shadow. Alfred Willis, PhD, explains Wendt's expressive abstract drawings: "In art, the minimal and the monochromatic are often mistaken for something that means nothing, just because they look like nothing; or rather, next to nothing." By exploring the infinite possibilities of a basic drafting technique, however, Wendt has opened up startling, and completely unexpected, artistic vistas: glistening concentric volumes that look like collapsing stars or planes of iridescent foil resembling the richest brocade. It's a visual feast, and a conjuring trick, as magical as magic itself. In fact, Willis calls Wendt a "manual artist who creates with his mind and commands with his hand but produces with his wand." Sometimes the illusionist reveals his secrets. Wendt describes his own sorcery: "all of my drawings evolve with the ever-changing light. They can be legitimately taken as things conjured up by layering of short rapid pencil strokes until the receiving medium is completely obscured by overlapping strata of graphite." Art students beginning with graphite or charcoal could hardly imagine the rabbits that Wendt pulls out of his hat. But can Harry Potter see himself as Albus Dumbledore?

 

Wendt is an architect by training, and his work has a serious architectural philosophy: space—a kind of nothingness—can be achieved by enclosure. The positive elements of four walls and a roof create an experience of solid emptiness, the oxymoron achieved in Wendt's deeply introspective drawings. But the artist is philosophical in others ways, too. He is influenced by a number of western philosophers, including Martin Heidegger. "In principle," Heidegger remarks, "nothingness remains inaccessible to science." That position agrees with a statement made by Thomas Crow: "the icon does not passively submit to the analytical dissection of the humanist interpreter." Wendt appreciates the role of the artist as the creator and interpreter of feeling—of cool passion.

Wendt has been drawing and sculpting all his life. Born in Columbia, he graduated from Clemson with a degree in architecture and a minor in sculpture studio art. His work evolved through a disciplined study of the human figure at full scale, and after decades of effort his body of work conveys an epic narrative. Drawings from this series have been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the region, including the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Charleston City Gallery at Waterfront Park. The new body of work "Black Drawings" has recently appeared in the 20th Anniversary Juried Exhibition at the Lipscomb Art Gallery of the South Carolina State Museum, and was recently accepted at the New York City Drawing Center. Wendt currently works at the Charleston Studio of Art and Architecture, which he established in 1992.