More from Paul Stephen Benjamin!

Here are some photos from Paul's fantastic exhibition last week.

If you missed the show, don't worry, you can check out Paul's work at the Hudgens Center For The Arts, on view through March 9, 2013.
For more information please visit:
http://thehudgens.org/?page_id=2853

For more information on Paul Stephen Benjamin:
http://paulstephenbenjamin.tumblr.com/
http://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/49866-paul-stephen-benjamin
http://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/33609-paul-s-benjamin

-Photos courtesy of Paul Stephen Benjamin.

Alumna In Kyoung Chun has Solo Exhibition at {Poem 88}

In her first solo exhibition, Chun considers materiality and its dissolution and their connection within the never-ending continuum of energy. Beginning with an installation of disparate objects and surfaces, Chun creates large and small paintings in watercolor and oil that move between representation and abstraction. Bubbles and open spaces occur and reoccur as a device for portraying that push and pull, embracing the visible and the invisible, the mundane and the sublime. Dollhouses and clocks intermingle with rooftops and rice cakes to indicate the exchange between American and Korean cultural signs. Chun’s adept use of color is especially pleasing.

Chun is an MFA graduate of the Georgia State University Welch School of Art and is currently a Walthall Fellow. She is also the 2013-2014 recipient of the Emerging Artist Award from the City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs. Please click here for her artist statement.

{Poem88}
Westside Provisions District
1100 Howell Mill Road Suite A04
Atlanta, Georgia 30318
www.poem88.net

gallery hours: Wed - Sat, noon to 6pm and by appointment, tel 404.735.1000
Free Parking in the parking deck.

artist talk: Sat, March 9, 2 pm

-Text from {Poem88}

Stephanie Liles-Ray Solo Exhibition

This week's installation of graduating MFA exhibitions features Stephanie Liles-Ray's show Amerian(n).  It's been a pleasure having her in my department for the last two years and her show promises to be fantastic.  Check it out this week in the Earnest G Welch Gallery!

Tonight - Paul S. Benjamin and Julia Hines Opening in the Earnest G Welch Galleries

Tonight we will be celebrating the first set of Graduating MFA exhibitions for the year, beginning with Julia Gray Hines and Paul S. Benjamin.  Tomorrow is the last day to see their shows so please come on down!

Randall Moody - Aqua Miami

 

Randall Moody
Area of Research: Ceramics


Ceramicist Randall Moody examines ideas of memory and humanity’s passage through the continuum of time. He creates both wheel-thrown functional works and hand-built sculptures. His utilitarian works embrace earthy, neutral colors and textures reminiscent of the dirt and water of his grandfather’s farm in Northwest Florida. In his recent porcelain sculptures, Moody explores the passage from life to death in the form of boat imagery. The artist believes that death is not an end; rather, it is simply the transition from one state to another, a transition that every human experiences. Because many cultures associate water and boat imagery with this transition, Moody combines elements of boats from various historical and cultural sources to create archetypal forms. The black and white coloration the artist employs in turn refers to mourning rituals and the traditional practice of scrimshaw, in which sailors once made carvings on whalebones and then inked the etched lines. Drenched with texture and pattern, Moody’s bone-like porcelain boats serve as both metaphors for passage into the afterlife and symbols of cultural commonalities.

-SL

Untitled, 2012, porcelain, 14 x 6 x 9”

Katia Caetano Lord - Aqua Miami

 

Katia Caetano Lord
Area of Research: Graphic Design
Undergraduate Institution: Kennesaw State University
Place of Birth: Sao Paulo - Brazil

Motivated by a strong conviction that primary and secondary public school curricula need to adapt to the break-neck speed of technological advancement, graphic designer Katia Lord has created a three-part series that calls for a resolve in educational programming. The design process that Lord uses for her own work is the same process that she believes can be used to teach K-12 students to develop creative, problem-solving skills. Lord witnessed the freedom and inspiration her eleven-year-old son experienced when he was given the option of choosing his own medium and method of presentation for a school project. She hopes this same type of independence, of moving beyond pure memorization for the sake of standardized testing, is what will help students in the future to find inventive solutions to their own problems and to function as successful adults. The second in Lord’s series, Change is What Is Missing cleverly presents its “missing” text through a sleek, minimalistic design. The raised hands, while clearly referencing students who are eager to engage in the list of presented actions, also serve as an understated reference to hands lifted in a united appeal for educational restructuring. Interfacing and sharing, as Lord explains, are two activities that are particularly unique to today’s youth as a direct result of the development of the internet and social media.

-JG

Change is what is missing, 2012, Computer Arts (Illustrator) 24 x 36”

Stefanie Liles-Ray - Aqua Miami

 

Stefanie Liles-Ray
Area of Research: Drawing, Painting and Printmaking
Undergraduate Institution: University of Montevallo, Alabama
Place of Birth: Birmingham, Alabama

Stefanie Liles-Ray has spent a significant portion of her career examining the
often banal and normative aspects of the suburban, middle-class “American Dream.” Unconfined to a specific medium, she has experimented with Astroturf, wood, found objects, paint, ink, and paper, all specifically to put the dream under a microscope. Everything from home ownership to marriage, career and family are subject to Liles-Ray’ deconstruction. In the monotypes that form the Dog Series, the artist playfully alludes to the popularity of dog portraiture in suburban America. Using a reductive printing technique, ink is removed from the matrix then printed to create bright and crispy defined portraits of her own pets. Set against indeterminate black backgrounds, the luminous dogs also act as placeholders for other types of family portraiture, and for the generic dreams of conformity, happiness and success that they represent.

-CL

Suburban Landscape, 2012, Astroturf, Gesso, Wood, 4’ x 8’

Nicole Klein - Aqua Miami

 

Nicole Klein
Area of Research: Photography
Undergraduate Institution: Brenau University
Place of Birth: Ridgewood, New Jersey

“I am having a quarter-life crisis. Not sure who I am…” Nicole Klein, preferably known as Nikki, is immediately honest about her inner struggles. Through photography and mixed media installations, she seeks to define herself personally and culturally. Klein is of Cuban-American decent. Her grandmother and mother, now residents of the United States, spent much of their early lives in Cuba. Klein’s mixed media pieces provide an intimate look into this time, and specifically when they were each twenty-four years old, the age the artist is now. Through a combination of both personal and found domestic objects and audio recordings, Klein reflects on their past as well as her own heritage and identity. The artist continues this investigation of personal self through her photographs, which evoke the artist’s search for a sense of place and belonging. Using distorted lenses and a “peephole” format that produces a voyeuristic distance, Klein insinuates that she is in a period of exploration and has fully yet to embrace her Cuban heritage.

-CC

Table (Mother) 2012, Mixed media, sound on side table

Jesua Holt - Aqua Miami

 

Jesua Holt
Area of Research: Sculpture
Undergraduate Institution: Kennesaw State University
Place of Birth: Jacksonville, NC

Jeshua Holt is interested in memory. More specifically, how we access it and how it subsequently shapes our lives. Preferring not to restrict himself to any one type of art, he uses both two- and three-dimensional mediums to explore the small and seemingly unrelated details that we often come to associate with major past events. In a series of finely crafted shipping pallets, Holt uses photographic images imprinted into a layer of porcelain to invoke these types of memories. Presented in rearrangeable stacks, the pallets also allude to the idea of how memory is stored and accessed. Through this installation, the artist wants to evoke a feeling of discovery of all those brief moments that have affected our lives and our growth. In his video, in contrast, Holt looks at the shared memories of two people living together. Here, memory is a weight or rope that binds the two individuals even as they struggle against it.

-PM

Blue Pallet #2, 2012, Walnut, Porcelain, Iron Oxide Transfer. 24’’-18’’

Julia Gray Hines - Aqua Miami

 

Julia Gray Hines
Area of Research: Interior Design
Undergraduate Institution:
Place of Birth:

As an interior designer, Julia Gray Hines is interested in what she calls the “push pull” between natural and manmade creative forces. She approaches nature with the wonder of a child and the respect of an adult, tempered by her understanding of the threat that the building industry poses towards it. In that vein, Hines’ has created a work that will be part of a larger series of interactive light fixtures that deals with these conflicts. Specifically, the designer is inspired by the beautiful and fragile form of the insect chrysalis, which despite its seemingly vulnerable and passive nature has many defense mechanisms that allow it to respond to external threats. Using motion-sensor technology, Hines’s light fixture will generate a similar type of response when viewers approach it. The artist hopes that this moment of surprise not only rewards the viewer’s inquisitiveness, but also emphasizes the threat that humanity often represents to nature. Hines’ chrysalis embodies not only man’s creative powers but the fragility of nature and man’s affect upon it.

-PM

Studio Wall with Studies for Chrysalis, 2012

Cotter Christian - Aqua Miami

 

Cotter Christian
Area of Research: Interior Design
Undergraduate Institution: Marymount Manhattan College, New York
Place of Birth: West Palm Beach, Florida

For interior designer Cotter Christian, art-making is problem solving. When faced with a project, he works towards the most direct, simplest and sustainable design solution, hoping also to create an environment that will facilitate positive experiences for the viewer/user. In his work, Christian attempts to balance rational processes of pattern development with aesthetics. To do so, he often creates a set of working parameters for a project, only to break his own rules to see where that leads the design process. In this installation, Christian used the architectural modeling software Revit to create a pattern that activates the gallery space. By supplementing a computer-generated pattern with his own aesthetic and arbitrary choices, Christian explores the tension between rule-based systems and artistic intuition. In the end, he creates an interactive, site-specific system of linear patterns that completely changes how the viewer experiences the space.

-SL

(ir) rational, 2012, Mixed Media, 4’-6’X 12’

Andrew Boatright - Aqua Miami

Andrew Boatright
Area of Research: Drawing, Painting and Printmaking
Undergraduate Institution: University of Central Arkansas
Place of Birth: Farmington, MO

Andrew Boatright draws inspiration from diverse sources: Hieronymus Bosch’s complex paintings; Ad Reinhardt works and writings; Robert Rauschenberg’s combines; and Maurice Merleau-Ponty theories of embodied knowledge, to name a few. Many of Boatright’s works are created with common household products such as caulk, insulation foam, nails and interior latex wall paint. Allowing his working processes to guide him, the artist has no predetermined outcome in mind. Instead, any intention or significance the sculptures and paintings possess is largely due to internal narratives created after-the-fact by the viewer. Bodily associations seem inevitable but always remain unspecified in Boatright’s work, particularly through the juxtaposition of hard and soft textures and forms. Such readings play out further when multiple pieces are aggregated together to “cross-pollinate,” as the artist puts it. These groupings encourage but simultaneously elude narrative overlays.

-CL

Untitled, 2012, Mixed Media, 20”x 7 1/2” x 7”
Untitled, 2012, Mixed Media, 17 1/2” x 13” x 11 1/2”
Soft Geometry, 2012, Mixed Media, 16”x 17 1/2”x 8 1/2”

Paul Stephen Benjamin - Aqua Miami

 

Paul Stephen Benjamin
Area of Research: Sculpture
Undergraduate Institution: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Place of Birth: chicago, Illinois

Since his childhood in Chicago, Paul Stephen Benjamin has been crafting art from unconventional materials. Today, such items as tarpaper, house paint and crushed coal are some of the materials the artist utilizes in his practice. Delving into painting, collage, sculpture, soft sculpture and video, Benjamin bases his choice of medium on the concepts he wishes to express. Motivated by a passion for creating, for uniting and repurposing things, the artist is driven by his desire to explore the deeper implications of his materials. An overarching theme of his work is the repetition of the letters a-b-c-l-k, which are represented quite literally through Benjamin’s paintings on tar and brown paper, but also implicated in the images scrolling in his video installations. Hinting at the deeper implications of history and identity, Benjamin purposely abstains from revealing the “punch line” because he is interested in how viewers engage with the work. The culmination of one’s personal experiences is a continuation of the artistic process for Benjamin. Whether one simply appreciates the lushness of the materials and colors, or reaches beyond the tangible to grasp the conceptual underpinnings, it is impossible not to be captivated by Benjamin’s artistry.

-JG

Paul Stephen Benjamin
AaBbCcKkLl, 2012, Video