Feature Articles
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December Issue 2006

Nina Liu and Friends in Charleston, SC, Features Works by Jocelyn Chateauvert and Nina Liu

Nina Liu and Friends gallery in Charleston, SC, concludes its twentieth anniversary year and welcomes the holidays with a two person exhibition featuring the work of Jocelyn Chateauvert and gallery owner Nina Liu. Entitled From the Ground Up, the exhibition opens on Dec. 1, and will be on view through Jan. 31, 2007.

Both artists use familiar materials to create objects that are visually powerful and technically accomplished. Liu has said that the exhibition will allow the two artists to play with elemental themes that one associates with their preferred media: paper and clay. "Our materials are different, but our works have an affinity for one another."

Chateauvert uses paper to create lamps, lanterns, sculpture, and jewelry in organic shapes. She makes the paper from abaca fibers by pounding the material for varying lengths of time to develop different colors and thicknesses of paper. Once she has fabricated her basic material, Chateauvert works with it to develop objects that are deceptively simple in appearance. Her lamps and lanterns glow as if they are phosphorescent, living things. Her sculptures and jewelry quietly echo the forms of plants and animals. (The Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery will exhibit Chateauvert's work in the spring of 2007.)

Chateauvert's creations are a perfect foil for Liu's ceramics. With contrasting textures, patterns that are elegant in their simplicity, and combinations of intense colors, Liu's ceramics resemble artifacts from an ancient past. She often challenges herself by working with more than one clay body in a given piece, sometimes weaving strips of both porcelain and stoneware to create patterns that she then elaborates with glazes or broken glass that melts in controlled "accidents".

The exhibition will feature Chateauvert's work in large-scale and smaller formats. Many of the pieces that Liu will exhibit in From the Ground Up will be older works that she made before coming to Charleston. Other works in the exhibition will be assemblages that Liu has created from multiple units of similar shape and color.

For more information check our SC Commercial Gallery listings or call the gallery at 843/722-2724.

 

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