New exhibits highlighting 17 artists set to debut at Gadsden Museum of Art
The Gadsden Museum of Art will welcome new exhibitions featuring 17 artists on June 2, First Friday.
"Embodied: Contemporary Takes on the Dress" is a collaborative exhibition of 14 artists: Merrilee Challiss, Leanna Leithauser Lesley, Alvina Zendejas, Montes Hill, Tara Stallworth Lee, Michelle Reynolds, Tracie Noles-Ross, Cynthia Wagner, Erin London, Katie D'Arienzo, Chiharu Roach, Amanda Banks, Kimberly Hart and Sarah Jane Shaw.
Each dress is a visual narrative stemming from observation and experience, according to a news release from the museum, creating an immersive study into individuality, semiotics, joy, sorrow, and humanity.
Kentucky artist Brandon Smith will be showing “Convulsive Motion” on the museum’s second floor.
Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein” describes a “convulsive motion” in the monster’s limbs when he stirs to life. In Smith’s charcoal and pastels take on the scene, the creature’s limbs hang and dangle. Lines describe what is there and what is not there. The carved dark shapes, the backs of hands and elbows are solidly described against a field of smoky neutral pale light.
The lines arc toward the lurching bodies to lift or impede the weight, according to the release. Figures are composed of mismatched proportions, hewn at the joints with fragile red lines. Identity is obscured in thickets of opaque dark masses.
In the vague expressive dust of soot and pigment rest forms uneasy in their shape, ungainly and uncomfortable. The blue washes over them or suspends them in time. They sit, they yell in puddles of pink, wade through streams of viscous red, and troweled on blacks and brown.
Trapped in vague spaces of strokes and marks they reach, wobble and try to stand, according to the release. They are dark and emotional, sentimental even and sometimes wretched in their form. They pay homage to the truth but only fleetingly and uneven. In the spaces between truth and visual chaos, they are both beautiful and grotesque.
In the Leo Reynolds Gallery, painter Wanda Sullivan of Mobile presents her collection of kaleidoscopic floral paintings entitled “Natural Selections.” According to the release, she uses measured symmetry, and deconstructed layers of computer-assisted designs with painterly, atmospheric layers of paint. Her work is described as relishing in color, undulating form and alluring textures.
“My flowers are beautiful, but they are monsters, contemporary, biomorphic Frankensteins,” she said, designed to seduce the viewer and lure them in, just like the widespread dependency on fossil fuels, phones, tablets and computers.
Jacksonville State University ceramics professor John Oles’ work can be seen in the Courtyard Galleries. According to the release, Oles in his vessels and functional forms honors the tradition and familiarity of the domestic object, with its ability to enrich our lives through daily use, as a vehicle for communicating content.
He approaches the making of each pot as an individual sculptural object, often with reference to landscape or the human figure. The walls of these vessels are like that of a membrane: inflated, stretching thin, just barely able to contain the space within it.
On that skin is a mark — a finger swipe, pinch, pushout or gesture — that instantly records history, intent and expression onto the surface, while at the same time building a tension with the interior volume.
This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: Gadsden Museum of Art to spotlight 17 artists
