ART+CAYCE

2011-11-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-18T12:53:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-30T12:01:00.000-07:00

"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

2011-08-10T07:48:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-12T10:13:00.000-07:00

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

2011-02-04T07:31:00.000-08:00

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.

J O E B Y R N E : Industrial-Strength; Abstracted Realism, Nov. 12 - Jan. 31

2010-10-28T10:33:00.000-07:00

Link to a review from the Free-Times 11/15/10

http://www.free-times.com/index.php?cat=1991103094321166&act=post&pid=11861511101370922

Watch a short video of Joe's work on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKzU65jV_88

Joe Byrnes Ignites ART+CAYCE

with Industrial-Strength Art

G.I.G.O, 42" x 72"

Growing up in Brooklyn and Long Island, Cayce artist Joe Byrne lived near chaotic docklands and bleak industrial parks. His astonishing new body of work draws on an early exposure to colossal steel backhoes, intricate winches, hydraulic pistons, and other muscular machines. An exhibition of Byrne’s photographic-style paintings called “Industrial Strength: Abstracted Realism” opens at the ART+Cayce gallery, 1329 State St., on 12 November with a reception for the artist from 6-9 pm. Gallery owner Maryellyn Cannizzaro remarked, “the fact that an artist of Joe’s caliber lives, works and exhibits in Cayce shows how much we appreciate the Arts on this side of the river.” On view will be a dozen impressive canvases that explore the machismo and elegance that Byrne discovers in heavy equipment like boxcars and in mammoth structures like bridges.

The Bridge, 38" x 60"

Most of Byrne’s realistic pieces zero in on a moving part: a latch, piston or gear. As Byrne puts it, “instead of painting the whole scene, I’m much more interested in editing it down to the minimum. To me it’s the isolation of a part that speaks to a whole.” With technical precision Byrne conveys the tension of nuts and bolts on an I-beam, the force of hydraulic pistons, and the balletic motion of swing levers on a steel door. So lifelike is the image that you can practically feel the heat reflecting off the paint surface, or hear the squeal of a corroded hinge. “You could easily believe that this girder is holding up a bridge or that this truck is idling outside your window,” said Cannizzaro. While these pictures capture the physical beauty of steel, they convey the conceptual beauty of strength pure and simple.

2 Ton Capacity 37" x 60"

Some of these machines have done hard work. Their rust, holes, scrapes, and gouges prove it. Given the planar surfaces, hard shadows, and straight lines, these images of Big Metal could hardly be called “organic.” Unlike Lewis Hine’s 1920 photograph “Powerhouse Mechanic,” which showed a man tightening a nut in front of a huge turbine, Byrne’s paintings imply a human presence through ingenious engineering and English instructions: “open ... seal ... unlatch to close door.” Simply put, these machines are projections of the men who designed, built and used them. It’s hard to resist the thought Byrne’s train car is enjoying the dignity of its hard work. In fact, these positive images celebrate industrial tools as metal muscle.

Joe Byrne trained as a commercial artist and illustrator in New York before he re-located to the Columbia area in the late 1960s. In South Carolina he worked as an illustrator and designer for SCETV and the South Carolina Wildlife Magazine. As a freelance artist, he supplied illustrations for local, regional and national publications.

Copyright © 2010, ART+CAYCE, All rights reserved

October 7 - 28: Jon McMillan

2010-09-24T06:02:00.000-07:00

SEPT 16th: Urban/Organic: New works by - Amanda Ladymon

2010-09-06T06:49:00.000-07:00

Bri Kinard - Aug. 12th

2010-08-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

b r i k i n a r d - Aug. 12 - 31

Join us for the reception - Thursday, August 12th 5 - 7 pm

As a ceramic artist, Bri’s work directly references harsh industrial tools and weapons. When paired with lighter organic 'feathers', the tools combine to create a beautiful yet tense duality.

Home town:
Columbia, SC

Education:
BFA- Art Studio /focus in ceramics
Graduate School- Rochester Institute of Technology (R.I.T.)/ fall 2010

April 9th: Photo Shoot with Racioppo at CMC Steel

2010-04-27T07:13:00.000-07:00

Here are some photographs take by Larry Racioppo during the CMC Steel photo shoot. Accompanying Larry are USC photography students. We grately appreciated the hospitality of CMC Steel Mill as they allowed us guided access to this amazing site.

April 8th : Larry Racioppo - NY Photographer

2010-03-04T14:24:00.000-08:00

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!

2010-03-03T14:21:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-03T13:28:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-03T13:13:00.000-08:00

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

2010-03-03T12:36:00.000-08:00

September 10, 2009 : Robin Jones + Andrew Norton Webber

2010-03-03T12:26:00.000-08:00

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".