RECEPTION MARCH5TH 6-8P.M.
W/ CURATOR'S TALK @ 6:30
PULP Works On Paper brings artists from diverse disciplines together.
Their individual perspectives of the world around them create a
myriad of great dialogue and aesthetic views for the observer's consideration.
Among these are nostalgia - memory - humor - realistic manipulations of surfaces - space fragments - observations of community & place - and pure abstraction.
My talented exhibition partners are my former professors, some fellow art students
now out of the classroom, and a number of local area artists with whom I have an aesthetic connection.
Of all those I have met on my still ongoing journey as an artist, David Row
has made the most profound and meaningful imprint on my connection
to the art of abstraction.
The visual success of this exhibition is evidence of the outcome
of artists showing their work together to create an ambiance
of honesty and dedication to the art-making process.
—Matthew Hilyard
For the past eleven years, I have been director of the Erman B. White Gallery on the campus of Butler Community College. It has been my mission to assemble exhibits that exemplify professional craftsmanship and diversity for the 7000 students, faculty, fellow artists, and community members who visit the gallery each year. Throughout the years, the gallery has hosted exhibits ranging from traditional representational painting and drawings to interactive digital media installations. Exhibits have included work by historically significant artists, Butler CC faculty and students, local and regional ceramicists, sculptors, painters, and others. Since the gallery is located at an institution of higher learning, I seek out artwork that demonstrates artistic intellect and aesthetic integrity. Many of the people who cross though our doors have never viewed original works of art. I want the experience to awaken them; to inspire their own creative impulse and challenge their traditional definition of “art.”
The exhibit Pulp: Works on Paper is yet another example of diverse expression and exemplary art-making processes. Twenty-seven artists have agreed to merge their individual artworks into one cohesive, aesthetic experience for the viewer. All works come from the most basic of art materials: pulp. Each artist has manipulated the paper to create personal visions that reflect the complexities of human experience, observations from the world that surrounds them, and inventions of color and form from within.
It is an honor for me to host this exhibit and I am humbled to be included in the list of 27 exhibiting artists. Please enjoy the show!
Valerie Haring,
Lead Art Instructor, Butler CC
Director, E. B. White Gallery
LYNDA BECK bramo series # 75 acrylic/gouache on paper surface
5 3/4" X 24" unframed
There was a time when my painting was all over the map, so to speak. I discovered when freed via a limited palette, merging it with my love of surface a voice beyond assigned commission that was my own.
I used to be troubled when asked how many of these ‘Bramo’ paintings was I going to paint? I never had a good answer and wondered if there was an unwritten artist code I wasn’t aware of and should stop. I began to wonder if anyone ever asked Monet how many of those haystack paintings he was going to paint? Hence I am no longer troubled, and believe that variation on a theme is not only something reputable, but tried and true in art making.
For PULP, WORKS ON PAPER I’ve fashioned my surface from cut, torn, sanded, and other forms of abuse to BFK Rives paper adhered to a hard surface. I love the paper! It is like fine bed sheets! I’ve been enjoying manipulating paint with the varied rate of absorbency as related to the distress of the paper.
JOHN BOYD " self portrait with long nose " digital print 30" x 10" framed
I develop art images along a given theme. Some recent pieces have a portrait theme. These works invovle a combination of photos and drawn imagery. Most of the time, I use images of family members and close friends. I like to develop "naive" looking content in the works.
I vacillate between creating single images and making multiple images. I use compartmentalization to create a more complex narrative. These images follow a pattern of flattened space,distorted images,textural decoration, and lack of standard perpsective. I hope that this current digital print is interesting and also expresses a bit of humor. This is a self portrait.
ROBERT BUBP "Dilemmas from the margins: Burj Dubai (tallest structure in the world) in hues of the U.A.E. national flag, January 2009"
2' 10" by 8 feet
My family identified itself as German-Irish northeasterners despite moving to the South when I was seven. Subsequently shuttling back and forth between two distinct geographic regions during summers and holidays, I experienced two different regional American cultures as both insider and outsider, each with their own speech patterns, cultures, social mores, cuisines, physical geography, architecture.
Now living the midwest, I have another, and hope to keep "collecting" regionalisms.Colloquialisms are fascinating in themselves, yet I am even more interested in how we define and build places and how perceptions and traditions (and how to deal with them) inform the continuum of place. Particular to marginalized locales is a contradictory desire to both defend and erase parochial tendencies. There is a fixation with outsiders' perceptions, and a conundrum: how to no longer be a stygmatized place while retaining locational identity? How do we create a process for this?
The works in this show include observations of contested large-scale civic projects in varied communities The drawings employ a diligent and detailed process as a metaphor for the step-by-step difficulty of building anything on a large scale, while the video includes only things I have been asked or told about places. As a local and/or global witness to the civic projects represented here, I am compelled by community collaboration, redefinition, possibilities, and micro-narratives of local change as a quixotic, fragmented, playful process that mirrors and creative activity...and life itself.
CHERI LEE CHARLTON Trigger Happy
Graphite, Marker, Ink, Watercolor on Paper Framed 20 ½ x 20 ½ inches
WWW.CHERICHARLTON.COM
The surface of a painting has the capacity to seduce. I seek to make art that
addresses that very human desire to be seduced; art that provokes the viewer
to acknowledge that sensual place between desires and fulfillment. My work
alludes to the not-quite-hidden physicality and messy longings of the body,
intimating the sexuality, physical detritus, and interior tangles that truly
characterize us as organisms.
For my most recent work I have referenced children's books, greeting
cards, images from my own memories of childhood, as well as depictions
of sex and sexuality in the media and on film. Because of this I include the
classic imagery of the "little boy" or "little girl." I incorporate Victorian
needlepoint and wallpaper patterns to reference the pleasing to the eye
prudishness of the Victorian era.
JIM GROSS “ DIVINUM MYSTERIUM “
Collage 18” x 22” framed 2009
ANNETTE GASPERS A Perspective on the Moving Point
(installation details)
Handmade sheets of kozo fiber, wire, magnets 2010
A desire to understand a place begins with learning to navigate without a map.
I am interested in landscapes, in particular how individual people decipher a way to understand and develop connections to the spaces they occupy, either for a brief moment or a lifetime. Often the work concentrates on one specific form, texture, mark, or light from the places I have connected to, however, the simplification of these spaces into basic elements allows the viewer to bring their own experiences to the piece. A Perspective on the Moving Point asks the viewer to move with the piece, to physically change their bodies viewing position, to stop for a moment to reconsider the subtle transitions that lie within their surroundings.
VALERIE HARING "Regimen 12-09
Digital Monoprint 8 1/2" x 21" 2009
SARA KEPHART “ BOYPILE “
Graphite on Paper 22” x 30” 2009
Drawing has provided me with a way to humorously investigate and slightly exaggerate the memories of my childhood. By examining the way gender roles constructed the earliest stages of my development, I have been able to reconstruct my past to make light of all the injustices I endured as a “girl.” The childlike renderings embody an honest immaturity and a profound curiosity about the differences of not only male and female bodies, but the expectations and demands placed on both sexes by social and cultural influences.
I grew up with three brothers, making my position as the only girl in this group one of an outcast, a black sheep if you will. Boys had it made! They could get away with damn near murder! They could rough house, get dirty, play pranks on people and, this one always got to me, they never had to wear a t-shirt when they played outside. While they were chasing around balls and tackling one another, I would find myself restricted to the porch, or a side yard where I was fully clothed, (even though my body practically mirrored those of my brothers) entertaining my lonesome, envious self. I resented the fact that I was born a girl! There was no justice in the world! I had believed that God found this shit humorous and that he was laughing at me, or simply hated me, one of the two? I was constantly given a different set of rules that were strict demands, because I was a “girl.” I would eventually discover that these demands weren’t something I wasn’t going to grow out of any time soon. On a lighter note, one of my greatest memories as a young girl was getting my first bikini swimsuit! It was green and white checkered with white, ruffled trim. That swimsuit helped me shape my identity separate from my brothers in my own way, not my mother’s way. It was beautiful and it set me apart from their grubbiness and made me sparkle in the water from sprinkler that provided much relief from the hot, summer days in Kansas. Need-less-to-say, I wore that damn thing constantly and to this day, I wish I still had it!
BoyPile and Always Playing with Myself are results of my playful endeavor down memory lane.
JENNIFER LARSEN HOMELAND
MIXED MEDIA 11” X 17” 2009
Nostalgia, ephemera as well identity have a strong presence in my work. I create narratives with texts, an assortment of domestic objects and vintage imagery that have been given a new life as a work of art. Lately I have rediscovered my love for craft and activities that are known as domestic and feminine in nature such as sewing as well as using recycled materials which touches on previous ideas of impermanence and temporality that I have often explored before in my work. I alter objects to transform them and give them a new life as a work of art. I embellish my work with the pieces of material that usually get left unnoticed.
I am engaged by the stories of others and use my own narratives as a place to build imagery. I often reflect on the construct of the family in my work as well as locational identity. Being in between two places has placed an emphasis on my need to compartmentalize objects in my sculptural pieces. The state of in between had led me towards ideas of nostalgia and ephemera which I explore through a feminist perspective in my narrative.
Her there
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed seeing your stuff here guys. Atmospheric and sensitive work on the whole. I'm sitting in a cafe in London, writing my novel, set in hyperspace, which deals with real issues of abandonment, and sociopolitical issues and communities, pollution etc.
I found your site while researching a fragmented mirror image for a description of the interior of a cafe which I am writing about in the novel, if this resonates with any of you I would be glad to describe your pieces in my descriptions of the cafe.
I also really admire your poetic depictions bloody good writers too.
john x