Glass Sea, 2022 | Abbey Stace | Plaster, acrylic, oil
On View April 27 – May 31, 2024
Opening Reception | Saturday, April 27 | 6:00p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Coffee Break: Artist Talks | Saturday, May 4 | 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Coffee Break: Artist Talks | Saturday, May 11 | 10:00 a.m. – 12:00p.m.
Featured Artists: Chau Nguyen, Duwenavue Sante Johnson, Grue Shackelford & Abbey Stace
DIGITAL CATALOG
ARTISTS
Chau Nguyen, Interdisciplinary Art
Community Arts Gallery
“My ethnographic approach goes against the grain of the Western art historical canon to embrace these fragments of archives.”
– Chau Nguyen
Chau Nguyen is a first-generation Vietnamese interdisciplinary artist, whose work draws from concepts of translation, memory, symbols, affect theory, materiality, and research on Vietnamese histories. They work to convey this notable friction at the intersection of cultural identity, colonial fragments, and transnationalism through their art and their study. Chau’s artistic practice allows for and relies on experimentation and material transformation as a way to combine their research into postcolonial transnationalism and their personal perspective as a Vietnamese immigrant. With an emphasis on material and its history, their work offers an open-ended and complex look into these concepts.
Nguyen’s Of Color is being exhibited in our Community Arts gallery.
Duwenavue Sante Johnson, Mixed Media
Tile Gallery
“Creation comes from an intense emotional state involving uncomfortable, non-cooperative responses to perceptions and resilience, while searching for joy and beauty.”
– Sante Johnson
Duwenavue Sante Johnson is a BIPOC embroiderer and contemporary artist, influenced by world travels, environmental patterns and textures, and colorscapes. Not limiting herself to any one medium, Johnson blends practices of painting, printmaking, textile, and craft to create dynamic works of art that encapsulate the human experience. Art acts as a tool for Johnson, helping her process and understand the complexities of humanity, its divides and cultural histories, and engage with these pathways to create something positive that unites.
Johnson’s Seasonal Resilience is on display in our Tile gallery
Grue Shackelford, Fiber Art
Kellner Gallery
“Each piece is a fragment of a memory, a place recalled through a haze of blazing sunset and screaming fury.”
– Grue Shackelford
Grue Shackelford is a contemporary fiber artist based in Philadelphia, whose work explores the relationships between memory, intergenerational trauma, and the Appalachian identity. A West Virginia native, Shackelford is familiar with Appalachian Fatalism, a “pervasive, inborn spirit that is found in everyone and thing that dwells in those hills”. This mentality juxtaposed with the never-ending cycle of trauma that befalls the Appalachian people is something that intrigues them. Through tufts and tangles of multicolored yarn and felt, each of Shackelford’s intricate wall hangings tells a story.
Shackelford’s Montani Semper Liberi is on display in our Kellner gallery.
Abbey Stace, Painting
Book Room Gallery
“There is only becoming; a permanent state can never be reached.”
– Abbey Stace
Abbey Stace is a contemporary abstract artist, whose material abstractions have developed over a lifetime of studying science, philosophy and art. Change and chance are fundamental to Stace’s artistic practice, creating work that is experimental and process-driven rather than literal and narrative-driven. She starts with a simple composition and then allows the materials to interact with each other to create naturally-forming textures, colors and shapes. This approach directly parallels the constant change that is life, noting “this mirrors the serendipitous and unpredictable process that is life…The layers of matter built up and worn away…mirror the accumulation and loss of experiences and memories in the human psyche.” Favoring ambiguity, Stace invites the viewer to derive their own associations and connections from her work.
Stace’s Salt & Stone is on view in our Book Room gallery.