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Student, Guest Exhibits To Begin Semester Creatively
Aug. 26, 2014
SHSU Media Contact: Jennifer Gauntt
The SHSU art department will open the fall semester with two exhibits—one putting on display its student talent and the other showcasing the projects of working artists—beginning this week.
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| A work by Casey Morgan, which will be among those on display Aug. 27 through Sept. 10 in the Satellite Gallery as part of "Independents: V." —Submitted image |
“Independents: V” will present the work of five art majors who completed independent study courses in the “Workshop in Art Studio and History” program during the spring semester. The exhibit will be on display from Aug. 27 through Sept. 10 in the Satellite Gallery.
Those students, who serve as WASH mentors, include Keyton Berry, Brittney Butler, Katelyn Newman, Casey Morgan, and Macy Pennington, whose semester-long independent creative research projects resulted in works of video, installation and mixed media on wood.
The WASH mentor program was created out of a need to enable advanced art students to participate and contribute to the WASH foundations program as student leaders.
Nominated by an SHSU art faculty member, WASH mentors commit to assisting with a portion of the WASH studio experience by taking on leadership responsibilities—such as participating in group critiques and class discussions, as well as overall studio management—and to developing a new body of work completed in an independent study course.
“This exhibition will highlight the wide range of projects by these student leaders, many of whom have taken creative risks to work in materials outside of their comfort zone and area of concentration,” said exhibit curators Valerie Powell, assistant art professor, and Ron Hollingshead, visiting assistant art professor.
A reception for the exhibit will be on Thursday (Aug. 28), from 5-7 p.m. in the Satellite Gallery, located at 1216 University Ave., in the Huntsville downtown square.
On Tuesday (Sept. 2), married artist couple Christopher and Ariel Lavery will share their takes on the human experience for their exhibition “Anything That Has a Front” in the Gaddis Geeslin Gallery.
“The Laverys’ work intersects with regard to their mutual interests in the human experience as it relates to both consumerism and irony that leads to an overall sense of entrapment,” said Annie Strader, assistant art professor and Gaddis Geeslin Gallery committee chair. “Their works are extraordinary sculptural investigations sharing the spirit of appropriation.
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| Works by Arial Lavery (above) and Christopher Lavery (below), which detail their perspectives on the human experience, will be on display in the Gaddis Geeslin Gallery Sept. 2 through Oct. 9. —Submitted photos |
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“In this exhibition, their mutual interests diverge with regard to the method of fabrication of each body of work—Ariel reimagines objects from the domestic realm in awkward and surreal gestures that suggest obstinacy against ‘good consumerism,’ while Christopher’s work poetically explores the duality of wonderment and horror with regard to our planet on the verge of destruction by the hands of its occupants.
“Together their work encompasses some mammoth and fraught concerns about our human footprint,” Strader said.
Ariel will present an artist talk on Tuesday (Sept. 2), beginning at 5 p.m. in Art Building E Room 108, followed by the exhibit’s opening reception, at 6 p.m. in the 3G, located in Art Building F Room 101, at 1028 21st St.
Christopher will give an artist talk on Oct. 9, the day the exhibit closes, also at 5 p.m. in Art Building E Room 108.
Ariel, who earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2007 and her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2013, borrows from American domestic vernacular to create mutated versions of our home living spaces in reflection on a concept of “Middle America,” as it is defined in domestic goods.
Ariel has presented her work across the country, including recent solo exhibitions “Project 1” at Zephyr Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky, and “Detritus In Situ” at the Herter Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
She is also a recent recipient of the Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women.
Christopher has exhibited his work nationally and internationally and in 2008 was awarded the Emerging Public Artist Project Grant from the Colorado Percent for the Arts at Denver International Airport for his project entitled “Cloudscape,” a “monumental-scale” project that won an award in 2010 from the Americans for the Arts Public Art Network.
He also has held residency at the well-known Vermont Studio Center, where he began to develop a new body of work about the rapidly developing global warming crisis and the melting of the polar icecaps.
His work puts into practice “visual art as a philosophical way of living,” stating that an “art practice in the postmodern era is questionable and undeniably dysfunctional due to the nature of equal sensibilities developed towards undefined or lost humanitarianism.”
All art events are free and open to the public.
For more information, contact Annie Strader, 3G committee chair and assistant professor of art, at 936.294.1322, or "Like" the art gallery page on Facebook.
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