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September Issue 2005
Davidson County Community College in Lexington, NC, Features Group Exhibition
Davidson County Community College's Fall 2005 art exhibit, New Traditions, will be on view through Dec. 16, 2005, in the Mendenhall Building on the Davidson Campus in Lexington, NC. Nine artists from six states, including California, Kansas, and New York, as well as the Carolinas and Virginia, will exhibit work in various media. They are Lee Breur, Nancy Cook, Jay Hahn, Julie Johnson, Rob McDonald, Scott Murkin, Daniel Petrov, Jennifer Calais Smith, and John A. Sundstrom. Each artist uses a traditional media - painting, quilt making, photography, mixed media, and sculpture - in a new way with their own unique vision.
Lee Breuer and Daniel Petrov are both painters. Breuer's colorful, stylized acrylic works, filled with movement, are achieved by painting in layers and using wavy strokes. The Columbia, SC, artist paints both landscapes and the figure. New York City artist, Petrov's oil and acrylic figurative paintings are created with emotional, vigorous brushwork. He often paints self-portraits, examining various psychological nuances, and often exaggerating the pose.
Woodlake, CA, artist John A. Sundstrom will be exhibiting abstract acrylic paintings and alabaster sculpture, as well as intricate mixed media pieces. Often working in a series, in the mixed media series "Puzzles" he creates an image in one of four basic shapes, and then he cuts it into sections and rearranges them, thereby creating something totally unique.
Nancy Cook from Charlotte, NC, and Scott Murkin
from Asheboro, NC, show two different approaches to fiber art.
Cook's colorful surfaces are richly adorned and embellished. She
seeks to reconnect our urban lives with the world of nature through
her work. Cook helps the viewer to recognize contemporary quilting
as an art form as well as a rich tradition of "woman's work".
Murkin's fiber art is a reminder that the quilt has come a long
way from these origins. He layers color, light, and pattern as
well as meaning and materials.
The remaining four artists are all photographers. Jay Hahn from
Swannanoa, NC, takes digital photography into the realm of printmaking
as he manipulates his images with the computer, using it as a
tool to change elements such as color and texture. Hahn is inspired
by what he calls "an unwavering love of wild places and their
inhabitants", but his resulting works are often creative
departures from the original landscape sources. Jennifer Calais
Smith of New York City, a native of Lexington, also chooses to
recognize what is already there but presents it in a new way using
a natural and intuitive approach. Though she enjoys photographing
people, she prefers to find "traces" of people - the
spaces where people have created something - which lends an air
of mystery to her works.
Julie Johnson of Leawood, KS, and Rob McDonald
from Lexington, VA, both use traditional darkroom techniques.
Johnson's photography is primarily a study of line and color.
She explores facets of nature and the emotions they can evoke.
Flowers, trees and water are frequent subjects, but she uses absolutely
no digital manipulation to create her surreal colors. Traditional
darkroom techniques rather than digital ones are employed to achieve
very contemporary results.
Rob McDonald also prefers the "old and unconventional"
camera equipment, developing, printing, and toning his medium
format sepia toned photographs by hand. In his photographs, he
reveals the beauty, dilapidation, ironies and atrocities of the
rural South.
Davidson County Community College - a comprehensive community college established in 1958 - provides quality educational programs and services to prepare people in Davidson and Davie counties for enhanced employment and educational opportunities. During the 2002-2003 academic year, the College provided more than 15,000 individuals with instruction. The College is committed to enhancing the ability of individuals and organizations to live, earn, cope, change, survive, succeed, and prosper through perpetual, lifelong learning experiences. These learning experiences create choices and enhance opportunities for education and employment, thereby providing viable means to improve the quality of life in the community.
For further information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings or call Teenie Bingham at 336/249-8186, ext.
239.
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Copyright© 2005 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston
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