JURIED STUDENT EXHIBITION
Jan. 5–Jan. 19, 2019
Reception Thursday, Jan. 10 at 6:00 pm
Artist talk at 6:30 pm
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SUSAN STEPHENSON
Jan. 28–Feb. 23, 2019
Reception Thurs., Feb. 14 at 6:00 pm
Artist talk at 6:30 pm
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Artist Bio
Best known for her panoramic oil paintings developed from direct observation, Susan Stephenson uses scenery from her everyday life and transforms it through an exploration of color and light. A native of Louisiana, she received her BFA degree from Louisiana Tech University and her MFA degree from Boston University, where she studied with John Moore. After living in southern New England for over twenty years and teaching at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, Stephenson now lives in California and teaches in the Art Department of the School of the Arts at California State University, Stanislaus.
Artist Statement
Navigating a line between attraction and unease, I am torn between the lovely places that appeal to most people and locations that many might find un-paintable. Traffic lights and stop signs inspire me; instead of pretending that electric lines are nonexistent, I use them to break the sky into visual patterns, letting them catch the light against the shifting blue of the atmosphere. Every day, people often sleepwalk past opportunities to see beauty in the mundane. Rather than wait a hundred years for our culture to look back wistfully at some of the things we currently overlook, I prefer to show their beauty right now. Why wait?
Using curvilinear perspective, I can cram more of my visual experience into the rectangle, and I now see that my easy relationship with it is partly due to my having grown up in a geodesic dome. After twenty years of using the wraparound view, it permeates my work automatically now, and the spatial relationships of landscape define all of my work regardless of genre. I find it meditative to look for equilibrium between a work’s formal relationships and the visual cues from a particular location, and as a result, the balancing of abstraction and reality has become one of my primary reasons for creating. Ultimately, I look for combinations in modern life that spark that peculiar blend of kooky and beautiful I find so compelling.
MARY LAUBE
March 4–March 30, 2019
Reception Thurs., March 7 at 6:00 pm
Artist talk at 6:30 pm
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Artist Bio
Mary Laube was born in Seoul, South Korea. She received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Her paintings are exhibited nationally with recent shows at the Spring Break Art Show (NYC), Field Projects (NYC), Coop Gallery (Nashville), and Whitdel Arts (Detroit). Her work has been supported by several artist residencies including the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Stiwdeo Maelor in Wales. She is also the co-founder of the Warp Whistle Project, a collaborative duo with composer Paul Schuette. Commissioned by the Network for New Music in Philadelphia, their latest concert work, The Navigator was recently premiered at the Caplan Studio Theater in Philadelphia. Laube has served as a visiting artist at various institutions including the Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar, Kent State University, and Knox College. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.
Artist Statement
Prompted by the confusion between memory and imagination, I make work that originates from personal experiences with loss, displacement, and a search for ancestry. My recent work attempts to represent certain mysteries of my past by describing memory as a kind of surrogacy where ideology, personal mythology, and collectively built archetypes are folded together to stand in for various absences.
I typically begin by pulling information from the objects that populate my life; from the places I visit daily and those I encounter while traveling. Through instinctual decision-making, the work develops as I look to various external sources such as memorial artifacts and structures, traditional Korean adornment, dollhouses, and museum displays to name a few. Pictorially, the paintings appear flattened yet physically retain a tactile and layered surface. This interaction between image and object reflects a kind of transference between concrete and ethereal worlds, functioning as a metaphor for the porous boundary between memory, imagination, and lived experience.
RYAN RASMUSSEN
April 11–May 4, 2019
Reception Thurs., April 11 at 6:00 pm
Artist talk at 6:30 pm
Artist Bio
Ryan Rasmussen is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work spans practices in sculpture, installation, interactive objects, video, digital fabrication, teaching, and things that have mass or do not. Ryan holds his MFA in Dimensional Practice from the University of Iowa, as well as an MA in Sculpture with a minor in Printmaking also from the University of Iowa. He received his BFA from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University in Doha, Qatar and is currently Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA.
Ryan has exhibited both nationally and internationally in such venues as Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar; CICA Museum of South Korea; the Glass Curtain Gallery in Chicago, IL; the Nancy Fyfe Cardozier Gallery in Midland-Odessa, TX; and Clough Hansen in Memphis, TN. In 2018 his work will be included in the International Biennial at the Museu do Douro in Portugal.
Artist Statement
My works serve as meditations on the multifarious aspects of the built environment, primarily spotlighting the visual language of cultural artifacts and popular products. My investigations therefore take on many forms, including: sculpture, installation, kinetic and electronic works, collaboration, design, 3-D printing and digital fabrication, video and things that have mass or do not.
I glean the tools of extrapolation and mimicry from literary Science Fiction to research how, together with technology, cultural artifacts simultaneously embody and project desire through an expanding global vernacular. These forms embody a sort of cultural composite whose morphology is based on an abstract, socially agreeable, representation of value. As a result, they are exceptional in their adaptability to social change and are capable of igniting cultural mutation as well as mirroring it. My role as an artist is to interpret these forces that are not only present in our world but are major players in crafting it.
BFA/BA GRADUATING SENIORS EXHIBITION
May 9–June 15, 2019
Reception Thurs., May 9 at 6:00 pm
Artist talk at 6:30 pm
Closed May 27 for Memorial Day
FEATURED ALUMNI EXHIBITION
June 24–July 19, 2019
Reception Thurs., July 11 at 6:00 pm
Artist talk at 6:30 pm
STUDENT AWARD WINNERS
July 29–August 17, 2019
Reception Thurs., August 8 at 6:00 pm
Artist talk at 6:30 pm