Fearsome Beauty, The Art of Lauren Boilini, by Robert Sparrow Jones, Michigan Quarterly Review, August, 2014

Whenever I travel, especially to someplace new, the first thing I do is go on a run. For me running is the necessary immersion I need it in order to establish a sense of place, which in turn informs my work as a painter. At times it is also very useful to get me out of the work, a mental distraction to float outside the subject matter. There is a sweetness in the balance. This is why I found myself this past July as an artist in Residence for The Studios of Key West (TSKW), running along the southernmost coast in the Conch Republic with 95 degree weather and 80% humidity, thinking, looking, simmering.

Lauren Boilini, swims ocean side, due west, during The Swim Around Key West, 2014, a 12.5 mile endurance racePhoto Credit: Artistic Director, Erin Stover-Sickmen, The Studios of Key West who volunteered to kayak for Lauren during the race.

Within twenty-four hours of arriving at TSKW from Baltimore, MD, another resident artist, Lauren Boilini stepped into the 90 degree waters of the Atlantic for The Swim Around Key West, a 12.5 endurance swim following the shores of the island. From her unusual vantage, Boilini has a very different perspective of the island.

“I decided it would be a great way to understand the geography and life of the island, and it would be my first major warm water swim, as well as the longest distance I had covered,” she said. She added that she used her time training for the event contemplating work that she hoped to accomplish while in-residence. “Residencies are all about time and space to make work, so I thought an 8-hour swim would be a great way to start that time off.”

Though she is an avid swimmer, the ocean is sublime, is able to swallow her up in a moment. She explains it as a terrifying, but awesomely powerful experience. Partway through her grueling 12.5 mile Key West swim, she had spotted an ominous shape directly below her in the shallow water. It was surrounded, as Lauren described it, by what looked like a “sporadic fish orgy.” When she looked more intently she understood the shape to be a six-foot tiger shark. She kept on swimming.

Lauren BoilinSticky Fingers, (View #1), 2014
latex paint and chalk on wall, 12′ x 12′ x 12′
School 33 Art Center, Baltimore, MD

Lauren Boilini is a fearsome beauty with an obsessive drive, a good humor, and a superman tattoo to boot. Her work, in essence, is about the sublime. Her relation to water as a long distance swimmer is a pure physical experience. In previous races Boilini has swam with the jellyfish of Ocean City (she has been stung numerous times), completed a 10K in the Hudson River, the 4.4 mile, Chesapeake Bay Swim between the spans of the Bay Bridge, a 7.5 mile crossing of the Potomac river from the Virginia side to Maryland and a submersion into the crystal clear water off the coast of Cinque Terra, Italy. This direct experience manifests itself in her work in almost every way. She typically paints large-scale. A prevalent physicality is consistently contained in the expression of materials, primarily in oils. Recently she has been working directly on the wall, working under a specific time constraint like an endurance race, exploring painting in the expanded form. This is exemplified in her installation work, “Sticky Fingers,” presented at School 33 in Baltimore. Because the painting takes up four 12ft walls, the viewer actually enters the piece and is enveloped in it. “Sticky Fingers” engages the floor as well as the ceiling. Her abstracted figures team and swirl, controlled by solid blocks of organic background shapes of dark intense hunter green, cadmium red, and black. This not only frames the work, but also gives the larger wave-like forms a foreboding unease. Her use of softer organic background shapes in yellow, pink and peach then act to sink into the space and places the viewer inside the action of a heaving and plundering ocean of figures.

Lauren BoilinSticky Fingers, (View #2), 2014
latex paint and chalk on wall, 12′ x 12′ x 12′
School 33 Art Center, Baltimore, MD

“I like working large—larger than the scale of my body, and I love the potential for it to overwhelm the viewer. If I think about it, I enjoy the overwhelming scale of open-water swimming. I grew up in Indiana, which does not have many bodies of water other than a few small lakes, so I was always afraid of water so deep I could not touch the bottom and I was deathly afraid of fish. The first open water swim I attended terrified me, but I did not like that something scared me so much, so I signed up for my first race.”

Lauren BoilinLovin’s for Fools, 2013
oil on canvas, 87.5″ x 155.5″

I imagine that like running, a swimmer has to accept what is not under control. There are so many variables: weather, temperature, terrain but there are other factors such as salinity, flotsam and jetsam, and, to say the least, various impending creatures. As an athlete Boilini finds inspiration in physical action that indulges pleasure and pain and searches for the limit. I can really respond to this. As a long distance runner, I feel endurance in her paintings. It manifests in the use of operatic choreography. She engages a provocative vocabulary of bodies to populate her canvases in crushing and seemingly reckless dances. Her compositions utilize movement as vicious as the pushes and pulls of a riptide. Her painting, “Lovin’s for Fools”, is a terrific example of her choreographed theater, a large canvas of 87.5in x 155.5in, that appears to be a fistfight or a wrestling orgy. She is particularly committed virtuoso and yet her figures are rather showpieces of form and style and less about being convincingly portrayed. “Lovin’s for Fools” uses stacked figures as the make up of a lucid wrecking body of water. It splashes of bodies. We are not reading these activities as much as we are immersed in them. We experience their ebb and flow. Emotionally they advance and recede in fleshy warm tones and a pastel pallet designed to subvert their impulsive violence. This strategy renders painting like “Lovin’s for Fools”, sensual and tender and at the same time pungent. This works for other paintings such as, “Hurt So Good” where a stampede of stallions acting as a a crushing tidal wave soften in pallet and abstraction to subvert allusions of sexual desire and violence.

Lauren BoilinHurt So Good, 2013
oil on canvas, 84″ x 134″

“I love wrestling, and it is very choreographed. I love the practiced violence of it, as well as the real violence. Many of the works are meant to simulate the power of a crowd of figures. A mob is a terrifying and powerful beast, but it can be a sublime space for me. I also look at flash mobs- organized, choreographed chaos. The imagery I work with comes from wrestling, MMA fights, cultural and military gatherings, and other forms of conflict and competition. I am fascinated by the things that men do to each other, for sport or war.”

This all makes sense to me. Lauren began her athletic career immersed in teams sports, soccer and then rugby until she injured her back. Swimming for her was the only physical activity she was able to do. Her creative ambition mirrors this relationship. She longed for the contact of running, the impact of tackling, and the camaraderie of the group.

“I thought I was touching God the first time I tackled someone in a rugby practice. When I played rugby I loved being crushed into a scrum, pushed into the inside of a maul, piled into a ruck. I loved being a part of bodies on top of bodies, on top of bodies, and I think that has reflected in my work over the years. Open water swimming is all about vast, open space that surrounds you, and over time that has become a necessary contrast to the compression of space that I usually look for.”

Lauren Boilini, “In the CuOil, acrylic, aluminum and LED lights, 8’ x 76’, 2014
Maryland Department of Public Health”

Her most recent piece is her most ambitious. Her public commission for the Maryland Department of Public Health has just opened this past weekend. “In the Cut” is a large site-specific installation for their new laboratory in East Baltimore. For that project Boilini needed to work with a fabricator and lighting designer in the creation of am impressive 8ft x 76ft, larger than life painted light box. The composition for the work is taken from an abstracted panoramic landscape of Baltimore, mixed with imagery from the lab. Baltimore is like a large ominous body of water and a place where she swims regularly. It is a city in constant flux.

“I think what draws me to Baltimore is the rawness of it. For every beautifully built building, there are 10 dilapidated and derelict ones. Walking down the street you see an enormous amount of diversity: equal parts despair and destruction, equal parts joy and possibility. Nothing is easy there, but it makes you realize how much worse it could be. That is an interesting place to be a creative person.”

Lauren Boilini at the grand unveiling of her public work, “In the Cut”, commissioned by the Maryland Department of Public Health in East Baltimore.

On my first run in Key West I turned up the White Street Pier. I ran close to the edge so that I could look into the shallow, aqua green water, searching for stingrays and manatees. Two large brown pelicans pulled in sidelong to me and hovered eye-level. Their yellowish heads were pulled back at rest, seemed to be addressing me when suddenly they plunged head-first into the Atlantic. When a canvas plot of Boilini’s is stewing they are precisely and credibly described as notions lodged in her dancers psyches. Her most fascinating relationships swim around and funnel down into a target. Zeroed in here, a secret waits to astonish us, and I can envision Lauren in the swim, the ocean’s pull surrounding her.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2014/08/fearsome-beauty-the-art-of-lauren-boilini/

Tim Powers: Below the Surface, by Robert Sparrow Jones: Michigan Quarterly Review, July, 2014

Michigan Artist, Tim Powers is an unabashed materialist whose work revels in minimalism, but he is not at all resistant to one metaphorical symbol, the pillow. In effect, “Tim Powers: Below the Surface” at the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, is a quiet meditation on the mundane and intimate space of sleep. His source of investigation is the philosophical and existential oppositions that manifest themselves in the industrial materials he uses. The theme of the unconscious is carried through in the ethereal hues inherent to polystyrene and latex that collectively invite the viewer into a meditative space. But what stirs this exhibit are the oppositions Powers designates in the details. They are full of physically engaging contradictions that lure you inside the work. And while dreams themselves remain nameless; a sustaining eternal question about what makes our own landscape lingers.















Powers grew up on the west side of Detroit until he was seven. He is the youngest of four. His father, Daniel Anthony Powers, a graduate of the University of Detroit was a mechanical engineer who designed and manufactured hardware. Along with acquiring several patents, Daniel became president of the thriving Precision Hardware, which manufactured panic and fire exit hardware for over half a century. Precision Hardware was situated along Fort Street near Del Ray, an area cut off from the rest of Detroit by a deeply industrial landscape: the River Rouge and Zug Island. Physically, the company was an amalgam of repurposed buildings they had purchased one after the other in a perfect row, including what was once the local meat market. Each building was referred to by its original owner’s name—Shimmle’s, Dewy’s—and each served a dedicated function of the company: a foundry, inventory, shipping warehouse, a churning machine shop. Tim would spend summers working in front of a drill press and a large bin of parts, manually clamping down and rote drilling. He ate his lunches on the asphalt as the air mixed with the toxins emitted from the Ford Rouge Complex and Wayne Soap—an industrial plant that rendered animal parts.

This geography is evident in “Below the Surface.” The menace of a deeply personal and historical landscape is sometimes right on the surface. There is nothing warm or billowy about these pillow forms. They are made from the cold, hard, and rubbery industrial materials that Powers experiments with. His pillow forms are molded from polystyrene, a material used for uniformity and mass production, into an illusion of softness by manipulating their shapes. Sometimes other materials are used, such as the polished concrete in, Untitled, 2011, concrete and the mix of latex in, Untitled, 2010, polystyrene, latex rubber. A few of pieces, with their insides emerging, are even more evocative.

Untitled, 2011, polystyrene, enameled wire, a white pillow form, is comprised of a bottom shell and top layer. The two forms have a silia-like membrane made up of enameled copper wire that peeks out around the seams between the two surfaces. Texture here suggests movement, magnified and slithering. One can imagine, just as sleep takes us, that the unconscious opens up to release memories. The invading detritus of the mundane becomes horrific. In another work, Untitled 2010, polystyrene, jacketed wire is a pillow form where the seams have opened on one side to reveal a gill-like texture. Because this hinted interior is made of white-coated enamel wire, the texture resembles sinew and offers a subtle, otherworldly breathing. It is inviting, sensual, and frightening.

Especially dramatic are the materials and effects of the pillow form, Untitled 2010, polystyrene, silicone caulk. Here the transparent plastic top layer reveals a spiny rolling landscape of white latex silicon spikes. Powers overtly seduces the viewer with the slickness and the association with the manufactured newness of the object. His contradictions are playful: hard and soft, light and dark. He then repels us with the reminder that here is a pillow. This is where we sleep when our childhood night terrors come back to us as dreams of water, submersion, and sci-fi horror.

Content is played the same way, pulling the seams open of cultural layers to infuse the medium with the realities of where we come from—through the lens of Powers’ own narrative:

“I have an awareness of the complex cooperative dynamics of a place. The factors that make up the unique characteristics of a particular place: the people, the climate, the industry, the culture and heritage, and the natural environment. These are in play in any “place” and are what becomes its personality. The more time there, the greater the awareness, if you are looking. Keen observation forms a connection that sits outside sentimentality. These observational details become the foundation of the emotional connection, the smell of a soap company or lacquer plant, the neon of a neighborhood bar, a draw bridge tower, the ever present litter that collects along a curb in a viaduct, cast iron street lamps, refinery tanks and two story clapboard homes separated by a potholed street.”

Is this personal landscape available to the viewer? I think so. Powers’ personal experience and relationship with his surrounding environment can not only be observed through the visible layers but also through his control and reconstructing of environment. Following the 1967 riots and the stabbing of a neighbor, the Powers family moved to rural Monore. Powers continued to be influenced by Detroit–his father commuted in daily to run Precision Hardware, and Tim worked there during summers and on Saturdays and later, as a part-time employee while he earned his undergraduate degree at the College of Creative Studies–but his work is shaped by the intersections between the rural Monroe and Detroit.

“In a way, the monumentality of Detroit taught me to look ‘up,’ and agrarian Monroe taught me to look ‘down.’ Both environments had a different, but equally wild nature. Each was full of texture, smells, subtle and dynamic colors and awesome vistas.”

“Below the Surface,” speaks to that experience of the diversity of place. I see a connection between identity and the industrial landscape. Powers evidences an unsentimental love for where he comes from rather than rebellion against it. This is where Powers is especially acute. By his devotion to a material and the development of a symbolic figure, he creates an atmosphere where a descent into the unconscious is a collective experience.

Untitled, 2013, polystyrene, provides a perfect example. A large grid of more than 400 somewhat organic white pillow forms takes up an entire wall and a corner of the exhibit. From a distance, the work appears minimal. They are stark white against the softer white of the actual wall. They resemble multiples, which would not be entirely off the mark. Every pillow form began when pulled from a wooden mold that Powers crafted. Then, however, he methodically made each one unique using a heat gun to create the curls, folds and wrinkles that stir the imagination. I like the contrast between appropriating a material used for uniformity and mass production–polystyrene is usually pulled around a mold tens of thousands of units over to create identical forms–and then tailoring the resulting forms.

Because Powers renders each pillow form distinctive, the near-repetition of the installation pieces does not create an impression of uniformity. Rather, it ignites a curiosity about each pillow’s personal identity. The illusion from a distance of movement encourages close examination, which results in deep struggle. You have to resist the temptation to run your fingers across the silky and satin surface of the folds. I imagine the downy insides, and the restlessness of each form takes us to an intimate, interior space: sleep, dreams and then excitement, passion, sleeplessness.

Albrecht Durer’s, pen and brown ink drawing, Six Studies of Pillows, 1493, comes to mind. Durer masterfully depicted folds and wrinkles to evidence the body, and he created adroit likenesses that keenly described life. Powers, however, purposely and less sharply, takes a three-dimensional form and creates a very different effect. Untitled, 2013, polystyrene evidences passive revelation of the act of sleep, lovemaking, violence, despair, and sleeplessness. Instead of rendering material into a representation of direct observation, Powers gives us something interior. The language of wrinkles is somewhat unclear. They are subtle in their shifts. As a symbol, they signify the interior, private experience. This telling mark points to the artist’s interest in materials. The movement and expression, unpredictable and somewhat orchestrated, awakens us to our collective folds of the unconscious.



A final note: before the entrance to the exhibit a molten metal artifact is displayed. It evokes a certain intimacy, resembling something animal, the residue of life lived. Powers notes that he wanted to include this piece because although he didn’t make it himself, it provides context for the items he did make. It is one of many artifacts collected from the floor of Precision Hardware by his late father.

“It broadens the definition of what is art and what constitutes a body of work. It is an item I had no control of its creation, yet supplements the discussion of those that I did. I think the interpretive nature of its form provides an access point for the viewer on a basic level, and also supports my relationship to the specific process I experienced with my new work. It went through a similarly transformative process the polystyrene went through, going from rigid, to pliable, to rigid again and changing form in each step. Like many materials it holds limitless potential forms that lie latent in its current form. It is a state that is only momentarily static. That moment ranging from minutes to eons, but it will change again. It was originally not my thought to realty this to the landscape, but it is certainly an obvious parallel.”

With “Below the Surface,” Tim Powers’ expert capabilities as a maker result in a deeply industrial landscape. Inherent to his materials are the playful subversions possible because of our associations with closeness and escape. We all harbor deep internal landscapes. They are expressed as an amalgam of memories, sweet and dark as entanglements of fossilized metal.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2014/07/tim-powers-below-the-surface/

Six artists get chance to create in studios at the Deering Estate in Palmetto Bay (Miami Herald)

For about seven years, Mia Leonin had the idea to write a collection of poems about a little girl named Micaela growing up in a Spanish-speaking seaside town who uses her imagination to cope with a trauma.

But all this time her idea added up to miscellaneous thoughts on paper.

“It was just this raw kind of mess of language and images. I didn’t have a story,” said Leonin, a creative writing professor at the University of Miami and who writes freelance theater reviews for the Miami Herald. “I never even thought it would add up to anything.”

 

About a year ago Leonin earned a residency at the Deering Estate at Cutler in Palmetto Bay, part of the environmental, archeological and historical preserve’s Artist in Residence program.

What once was a “mess of language and images” became a manuscript of about 61 poems titled, The Fable of the Paddle Sack Child.

“Literally, sitting at this desk, little by little it turned into something,” said Leonin, 46, on a recent visit to her Deering Estate studio. She lives in Kendall.

The Artist in Residence at the Deering Estate is a program that gives literary artists, as well as visual and performing artists, an opportunity to use the 444-acre site to nurture their creativity. Deering created the program in 2006 as an extension of the art patronage of Charles Deering, who built the estate on Biscayne Bay at the beginning of the last century. By 1922 the Maine native had amassed an art collection appraised at $60 million and included works by El Greco and Rembrandt.

The unpaid residencies give artists a year to draw inspiration from the pastoral setting.

Artist Natalya Laskis plans to work on several 24-by 24-inch paintings for a body of work titled, Better Homes. Through the acrylic and oil paintings, Laskis will explore her idea of gender role reversal. 

“Instead of men, women are (financially) carrying the household and men are staying at home, taking care of the kids,” said Kendall resident Laskis, 34. “My work revolves around social and economic issues – on what’s happening right now.”

A short walk away from her studio, housed at the estate’s Carriage House, Robert Sparrow Jones is working on paintings inspired by growing up in rural Pennsylvania.

 

“When I started to walk around the Estate, I started feeling nostalgia and I thought I couldn’t be myself unless I went back to my childhood and put myself into that landscape,” said the 43-year old Wilton Manors resident.

A self-portrait in his studio depicts Jones holding deer antlers. “I don’t see any deer out here, but where I am from, they are pervasive,” he said.

Nearby, propped on an easel, is another canvas. It depicts two blond girls. One, clad in a bathing suit, is sitting on a wood folding chair and is holding a flowerpot. The other, with a skirt and a short top, is standing next to her. The colors in the piece are slightly more vibrant than in the selfportrait.

“In Florida, it is just always blooming and vibrant colors," Jones said. “In the Northeast, we sit and wait for the landscape to change and then it’s a wow factor.”

A few doors down from Jones’ studio, Lucinda Linderman’s fingers are coated with rust and oil. She is working on a mountain landscape created from old bike chains she collected from South Miami’s Mack Cycle and from dress hangers thrown away after weddings at the Estate.

“I work with reclaimed materials,” said Linderman, an environmental artist from South Miami. “I do a lot of dumpster diving so I was really happy when I realized I could professionally dumpster dive.” 

Environmental art involves reusing tossed-out materials to create a sculpture or wearable art, such as a dress Linderman made from a dark-green parachute. Linderman, 37, is part of the new Eco and Environmental Art Residency Program, which was funded by a National Endowment for the Arts matching grant the Estate received this year. During the one- to three-month residencies, up to six artists will explore environmental art under Linderman’s guidance.

“It allows artists to come in and explore in ways they may have not,” said Yantis, the exhibit specialist.

 

The Artist in Residence program also allows the public to see the working artists.

“This is not a private, hide-in-your-studio type of program,” said Kim Yantis, a exhibit specialist at the Estate. “They are encouraged to rather than just leave a piece of art work at the Estate, to create an activity or an action that really involves the public.”

Laskis is planning an outdoor watercolor workshop, while Jones is creating functional wood batroost sculptures. The roosts invite bats, whose numbers have recently declined due to a fungus, to feed on insects, many of which eat crops.

Linderman will continue an Eco-Art Outreach Program, in which high school students conceptualize, create and exhibit art made with reclaimed materials. In addition, she will teach workshops for Miami-Dade County teachers on how they can incorporate reclaimed materials in the classroom as well as host environmental art talks to the public.

Meanwhile, Leonin is continuing her residency for another year in hopes of finishing the two manuscripts she has been working on – and to start writing a third, which will incorporate the Estate’s environment into her poems.

“I’ve wanted to bring the Florida landscape into my work for a couple of years. Here, the naturalists will walk around with you and show you things,” said Leonin. “One of the nice things about the residency is that it allows you to be who you are. I just needed the solitude to finish these manuscripts.”

Lidia Dinkova, Miami Herald, Aug 2013

Please Help Fund My Project!!

Vermont Studio Center, Proposal on Kickstarter!!

I have just been awarded an Artist Residency at The Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont for one month this coming July, 2012. The Vermont Studio Center is the largest international artists' and writers' Residency Program in the United States, hosting 50 visual artists and writers each month from across the country and around the world. This amazing opportunity at the VSC will be a lasting experience for me because they offer the time to live and create with the sole responsibility of focus, research, and the production of new works.

The Vermont Studio Center, which initially costs $4000.00, has awarded me partial funding for my project through their Artist’s Grant in the amount of $800.00 and a work exchange program for $600.00. There is a remaining amount of $3000.00, which for me is very difficult to come up with at this time.

With your help I plan to concentrate on the creation of a new body of work for an exhibition in Athens, Georgia and possibly in Southern Florida. This new body of work will be comprised of a group of paintings dealing with our currant relationship to our fragile natural environment. With your support this opportunity at the Vermont Studio Center will offer me the physical and mental space to concentrate on developing this new work—allowing for freedom of creativity, space of reflection, and experimentation into new ways of working with this subject matter. All of which would be impossible without this rare opportunity.

If you are unfamiliar with Kickstarter, this is a terrific organization however it is an all-or-nothing style of fundraising. If I do not raise at least $1000, my project will be pulled and your account will not be charged. Once the $1000 is raised, the project will be successful. My ultimate goal is raise $3000 to cover the remaining costs and perhaps some supplies.

Every level of donation comes with a different reward!! There are many rewards such as: original hand-pulled, signed and editioned prints, small watercolors, and small to medium oil paintings; as a thank you for your support. They are listed here at a sizable discount from their original retail price. You may also donate without choosing to receive anything in return (this option appears once you select a reward level).

Be a part of this project!!

Here's the Link:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1063252734/the-vermont-studio-center-artist-residency-program

See a better quality video at Kickstarter!!

The Gathering: A solo exhibition of oil paintings by Robert Sparrow Jones

January 18 – February 11, 2012
Opening reception and artist talk Friday, January 27 at 4:30 PM

The Carlos Gallery in the Nabit Art Building at University of the South is pleased to present The Gathering, an exhibition of oil paintings by Georgia based artist Robert Sparrow Jones. In this new series, Jones explores a “Thoreauvian” attempt to coexist with nature. This fascination with the natural world, both delicate and enduring, forlornly strange and intimately known, is Jones’s response to, and escape from, the hyper-civilized, technology-saturated, globalized world.

Inspired by his upbringing in a small, valley town, and a passion for narrative, Jones’s paintings depict safe havens, such as tree houses and boats, amongst landscapes and waterscapes, reminding us that even in Mother Nature’s peril, meditative places exist and survive. In these timeless paintings, the new and old world overlap in a mixture of bucolic and cosmopolitan elements. Heightened color brings merges imagination with reality, and engages a perfect tension of psychology and emotional indifference. Ultimately, Jones wants his viewers to never forget the communal wild that we share with nature.

Robert Sparrow Jones is an artist whose work investigates the relationship between people and the natural world. Working in drawing, painting and print media, his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Some exhibitions include: The Paintings of Robert Sparrow Jones, Pratt Art Institute, Seattle, WA; Oscillating the Landscape, School 33, Baltimore, MD; The Birds of Robert Jones, Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA; Athens Institute of Contemporary Art, Athens, GA; Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, WA, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, Mason Murer Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Cann Serrat, El Bruc Spain and The University of Hong Kong. He is also included in the Drawing Center Viewing Program.

Jones is an Assistant Professor of Painting at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia. He has previously taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Towson University in Baltimore, MD, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA and the Museum of Glass, International Center for Contemporary Art in Tacoma, WA. He currently resides in Athens, Georgia.

Carlos Gallery
Nabit Art Building
105 Kennerly Road
University of the South
Sewanee, Tennessee
gallery hours:

Monday - Friday 8:00AM - 5:00PM,

Saturday and Sunday 1:00 - 5:00PM

The ATHICA Mystery Triennial, Saturday, August 20th, 2011 - Sunday, September 18th, 2011

This Saturday, August 20th ATHICA (Athens Institute for Contemporary Art) presents their Mystery Triennial. This is a small works invitational, a "Who Dunnit" including the works of 120 extrordinary artists the likes of...

REM (Yes, the band!), Lauren Gallaspy, Robert Sparrow Jones (That's me!), Hope Hilton, Brian Hitselberger, Jon Swindler, David Hale, Didi Dunphy, Will Eskridge, Melissa Harshman, Nash Hogan, Grammy winner Art Rosenbaum and Charles Westfall just to mention a few! There are so many great people involved in this show and gives you a cross section of the eclectic and outstanding community in Athens Georgia.

Also to note; there is a music event by a terrific friend of mine, super-talented singer songwriter Kate Morrissey!

Opening Reception: Saturday, Aug. 20th 7:00-8:00 p.m.: First Dibs

w/ $10 Donation 8:00-9:30 p.m.: Free Entry

Music Event:
Sunday, Aug. 28th
7:30 p.m.
AMT Benefit Concert Series:
Kate Morrissey & Marty Winkler
$10.00 Suggested Donation

Mystery Triennial

It has been almost a decade since ATHICA (Athens Institute for Contemporary Art) opened in the Chase Street warehouses on Tracy Street. Since then, we have come to rely on the nonprofit art space to provide provocative exhibitions of contemporary art on social topics by artists from around the world and our own backyard. ATHICA’s director, Lizzie Zucker Saltz, founded the non-commercial gallery in 2002 after moving here with her husband when he joined the theater department at UGA. Rather than become, as she puts it, a victim of “university spouse migratory syndrome,” Lizzie created her own niche by bringing to Athens some of the excitement she experienced visiting contemporary art institutes in big cities like New York, L.A. and Chicago.

“ICAs were where you saw the most intriguing work—art that made you feel alive! I wanted to recreate that experience: where you see something that awakens you to a new way of thinking about your world,” Saltz says.

This passion became embodied in ATHICA as she found volunteers from the community to join her in creating this new contemporary art space. An army of volunteers (including the director herself) and a sense of community spirit are the secret to ATHICA’s longevity. Art lovers, artists, musicians, performers, students, professors and local business owners are a part of each and every event. ATHICA has put on 40 exhibitions since it began, highlighting challenging work by national, international and local artists and providing a forum for their ideas in Athens. Lizzie describes this approach as one that “lifts all boats” by showing emerging artists alongside those who are more established. Exhibitions are accompanied by a full roster of events that includes music, films, lectures, dance and performance art book-ended, as anyone who has attended an opening or closing knows, by convivial parties with excellent catering donated by local restaurants.

Running on volunteer power, ATHICA has also been the recipient of grants from the mayor’s office, the Warhol Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. These grants help pay the bills: rent, utilities, printing and shipping are still part of the expenses needed to keep the operation afloat but cover only a portion of what is needed. This year, ATHICA is in a gap period before it can reapply for new grants. To show that the gallery has the community support to be sustainable, it is reaching out with an exciting fundraising endeavor: the first “ATHICA Mystery Triennial.”

ATHICA has invited artists from the community to create a small work (5.5"x 8.5") to be sold for $60 (or two for $100) at the fundraiser which opens on Saturday, Aug. 20. Over 120 artists have answered the call and will have their paintings, photographs, drawings, prints and 3-D constructions available for purchase. So, what’s the mystery part? All of the works are hung anonymously, meaning it’s up to you to guess who the artists are. Imagine owning your own Art Rosenbaum painting or collaboration by the members of R.E.M. for $60; guess correctly and it could be yours! Though some may try to figure out the big names, ATHICA board member and UGA art history student Ashley Wespheling encourages people to just buy something they like and find a new artist to love. She notes that while a lot of students want to start collecting art, it is something that is usually out of their price range. This event offers a chance for locals to support this important community resource by purchasing local art.

Artists involved in the exhibition have remarked on the impact ATHICA has had on them and the community. Painter Anthony Wislar points out that “Athens has a pretty great group of artists, and they need places that connect Athens to the national and international art community. Additionally, the community at large greatly benefits from having an art scene. It's a pretty well established fact that art communities enliven urban areas and boost local economies.”

The gallery has been a testing ground for new curators and curatorial concepts as well as artists. Didi Dunphy recounts this as being something she experienced when she curated the ATHICA exhibition “The Way Things Work”: “[This experience] provided me personally with a way to explore my creative possibilities as a curator, something much different than being an exhibiting artist, but more towards my design sensibilities.”

Photographer Jason Thrasher remembers when ATHICA first began and notes how it was integral to building the arts scene that now flourishes at the Chase Street warehouses: “ATHICA is great. I've always loved the chance to show work there. It's amazing what a huge part of our community that the Chase warehouses have become. I can't image Athens without ATHICA, Canopy and all the amazing people at that warehouse compound.”

All of the artwork in the "Mystery Triennial" will be on display from Aug. 20—Sept. 18; attend on opening night to witness this incredible display of local art and buy an original artwork (you will discover who made it at the point of purchase). If you are feeling competitive, arrive during “First Dibs Hour” from 7–8 p.m. where, with a $10 donation, you can have the first crack at owning art by Robert Sparrow Jones, Jill Carnes, Jonathan Jacquet, Judith McWillie, Melissa Harshman, Jon Swindler, Nina Barnes, Paul Thomas, Bob Clements and Claire Clements and many others. With each artist offering one to five works in the fundraiser, there will be plenty to choose from, and you’ll have the opportunity to get your pick professionally framed for only $10. Participants can win gift certificates to local businesses by guessing the identities of the mystery artists and vote on the People’s Choice Award, which will offer a solo show at ATHICA to the winning artist. The bidding will continue until all works are sold, but there’s yet another reason you may want to make sure you are there on Aug. 20: catering for the opening will be donated by Five & Ten and Ted’s Most Best Pizza. Throughout the exhibition, affiliated events include concerts and dance performances before the final closing party where the artists’ identities will be revealed and all remaining works will be offered at half-off.

This playful fundraising event has a serious reason behind it, however, and it comes at a critical time for this important local resource. Participating artist Don Byram makes this point plain: “It is important for the general population of Athens to understand that the 'Mystery Triennial,' in many ways, is one of the most important events to be held at ATHICA. It brings together the two human elements needed for an independent art space to exist in a community. At its core, ATHICA challenges artists to be free: free of censor, free to push their limits, free of stigmas—a safe place to bend rules and push boundaries. With this event, ATHICA brings in the second element, which is local financial support for the arts. It is easy to say, as a community, ‘We support the arts’ if someone else, in a far away place, pays for it. The challenge the 'Mystery Triennial' creates and says is: prove it.”

That we can “prove it” while having a great time is part of what makes ATHICA such a beloved local institution. If you are a longtime supporter or new to the scene, I hope you will consider participating in what is sure to be a landmark event in our community’s history. See ATHICA’s website for details and the full list of participating artists at www.athica.org.

Caroline Barratt