Feature Articles

June Issue 1999

 

Shadows and Substance Photography Exhibit in High Point

 

 

Theatre Art Galleries, Inc. (TAG) in High Point, NC, is presenting an exhibition of recent works of photographic art by several North Carolina artists, as well as two former North Carolina residents, now working in New York City. The exhibit will be on view through Aug. 8, 1999. The participating artists are Mark Austin (High Point, NC), Susan Mullally Clark (Greensboro, NC), W. Cameron Dennis (Winston-Salem, NC), Gil Leebrick (Greenville, NC), Jacquelyn Leebrick (Greenville, NC), Matt Myers (New York, NY), and Mandy Schoch (New York, NY).

This exhibition of outstanding photographers offers a variety of techniques and subject matter. Because of the expanse of this exhibit, the photographs are displayed throughout the upper floor of the High Point Theatre, including Gallery B, the Hallway Gallery which normally displays our permanent collection and Gallery C.

Mark Austin is a native of High Point. He is a self-taught commercial photographer. As a young man, he worked for four years as a staff photographer for the High Point Enterprise. For the next fourteen years, he worked and lived along side the commercial fishermen of New Bedford, MA, Hampton, VA, and Alaska. In his photographs from this time, he recorded the day to day life of these fishermen and developed a gritty personal style. For the past two years, he has traveled around the country and photographed blues musicians, including Muddy Waters and Taj Mahal. Some of these photographs have appeared in publications such as Rolling Stone, Esquire, Bikini Magazine, and Living Blues. The blues musician photographs are done in conjunction with Music Maker Relief Foundation, which is a non-profit advocacy group in Pinnacle, NC. This organization assists in rejuvenating the careers of blues musicians and aids in improving the quality of life for aging and/or ailing blues musicians. A portion of any sales of these photographs goes to this foundation.

Susan Mullally Clark is a photography professor at Guilford College in Greensboro. She received her BA in Fine Arts from the University of California at Berkeley and did further studies with Benedict J. Fernandez at the Parson's School of Design in New York and with T. Neal Rantoul at the New England School of Photography in Boston. Her work has been widely exhibited. Some of the collections of her work include, the Hope and Dignity Series at Guilford College which was initially funded and organized by The National Endowment for the Humanities and traveled throughout NC and was exhibited at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.

For The Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, Clark photographed some of the leading artists of our time: Romare Bearden, Chuck Close, Jacob Lawrence, Philip Pearlstein, Gregory Gillespie and Alan Shields. For this exhibition, Clark is showing some of her pinhole (an early form of the camera) photography of organic materials. These images are subtle and luminous. And for the first time she is exhibiting her series entitled, Flying Boys, which she took with a waterproof camera standing in a swimming pool. As Clark captures in these images, the boys certainly do fly through the air with "the greatest of ease" and with a burst of pure joy.

W. Cameron Dennis resides in Winston-Salem and is a free-lance designer and photographer. He has taught at UNC at Greensboro, Sawtooth Center for Visual Arts and Clemson University, SC. He studied at the Parson's School of Design in New York and then earned his BS in Commercial Design at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. He received his MFA in Photography from Clemson University. Dennis' photographs have been published in Pinhole Journal, The Photo Review and The Sun. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship and a North Carolina Arts Council Project Grant for his work in photography. Dennis is exhibiting some of his black and white landscape photographs. His works investigates the North Carolina countryside and in sometimes subtle and sometimes abrupt ways illustrates how humankind has literally touched and changed the land.

Gil Leebrick is the Director of the Wellington B. Gray Gallery in the Department of Art at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. He was Associate Professor of Art at Clemson University and lectured at the University of Missouri and Kent State University. He was Director of the Appalachian Environmental Arts Center from 1984-1991. His photographic images primarily concern the land. His landscapes express the quiet, yet magnificent, wonders of nature. In 1992 and 1995, he and his wife, Jacquelyn, received a North Carolina Artist's Project Grant to photograph Pre-Columbian Native American ceremonial sites. These panoramic images from New Mexico, Utah and Colorado are exhibited in this show.

Jacquelyn Leebrick is the Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Art at East Carolina University. She is also an instructor in digital imaging, computer graphics, art appreciation and design. She earned a BS in Art Education and a MA in Art from Florida State University at Tallahassee and a MFA in Art from Clemson University. Her photographic process involves electronic manipulation and results in computer digitized "collages". These photographs are a minimum of three images combined and colored on the computer. The images refer to childhood experience, anecdotes from family history and personal memories, which mesh into a collective memory through the resulting photographs.

Matt Myers resides in New York where his most recent group exhibitions include, Body Traces, Nude/Naked and Tatoo. The subject matter he works with is the female nude. He is exhibiting some of his black and white photographs of figures, and is also showing some of his altered photographs that he calls Fragments. These are a combination of painting and fragments of his photographs. These are beautiful images but also reflect on the body's inevitable connection to sexuality and decay. Myers received his BFA with honors from Guilford College in Greensboro, and he earned his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. When he lived in NC, he exhibited at Guilford College, UNC at Greensboro and Wake Forest University.

Mandy Schoch was born and raised in High Point. She attended UNC at Chapel Hill where she earned a BA in Photojournalism and Mass Communication. She moved to New York where she studied at Parson's School of Design and the New School. Currently, she is a still-life and fashion photographer. Her clients include fashion designers such as Nicole Miller and Anne Klein, and Conde Naste publications such as Brides Magazine and other European fashion magazines, Spiegel, and Garnet Hill. Her work has also been published on fine art cards, and she made a personal appearance on HGTV (Home and Garden Television) which was highlighting flower images. Her most recent exhibition was in Munich, Germany. For this exhibition, she is showing color and black and white images of her flowers. These photographs are lovely and graceful, yet they are also quietly dramatic.

Also on exhibit, through Aug. 8, at Theatre Art Galleries' Main Gallery is the exhibit, High Point Fine Art Guild's Summer Juried Show, which is co sponsored this year by Theatre Art Galleries and will feature works by area member-artists of the Guild.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call the gallery at 336/887-2137.

 

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