First Thursday: October

Join us First Thursday October 6th from 5-8pm at the Fayetteville Underground for another exciting month of all new exhibitions!

The clay works of Kelley Hatfield Wilks will be featured in the Revolver. Sabine Schmidt will present her latest collection of photography in the Vault.The paintings of Becki Lamascus will be on display in the Hive along with Flannery Grace Horan's ornate, hand fabricated jewelry.The E Street Gallery will feature jewelry pieces and wall hangings created by Teresa Hall.

Metal Transitions

Teresa Hall

As an evolving mixed metal artist, I have finally found artistic satisfaction that combines my passion for painting landscapes and torching, bending, and soldering metals.  The results are rich patinas that I use to create a rustic style of art to include jewelry as well as wall pieces.  I have always been a fan of form and function with regards to art, and as a self-taught jewelry designer and trained painter, I now consider myself to be a mixed metal artist with a focus on the rustic and organic forms.   My fascination began with an accidental walk around a junkyard some fifteen years ago where I discovered an array of metals and the intriguing patinas that were a result of weather, age, etc.  I began experimenting with the manipulation of metals by hammering, torching and soldering forms to achieve desirable colors and shapes that I incorporated into large format wall hangings, as well as smaller investigations which continue to explore in the form of jewelry.   I consider the art of jewelry design to be closely related to sculpture as my pieces involve building and balance to achieve a comfortable and aesthetically pleasing piece of jewelry that can be worn on a daily basis.  In addition, there is a lot of satisfaction in transforming salvage into what I consider a rustic style of functional art.       

It is my hope to transcend through the building process the spirit of nature as my art has always been inspired by the landscape.  I live and work in Northwest Arkansas, but I spent quite a bit of time in Santa Fe, which still is the inspiration for many of my pieces because the copper patinas remind me of the peaceful, natural erosions found in the desert.  Even though my pieces appear rough to the eye, they are very comfortable and smooth to wear.  I am drawn mostly to bracelets because I believe they have an empowering feeling that I hope to share

Set My Watch Against the City Clock

Sabine Schmidt

The works in Set My Watch against the City Clock reflect the process of exploring the house as object and idea. A house provides shelter but also a sense of home. Houses appear in dreams and serve as metaphors for the human soul. Owning one is an important life goal; losing it can be catastrophic.

After photographing buildings in various states of use all over the United States and abroad for several years, Sabine Schmidt began to re-evaluate how humans create, destroy, and remember built space. As the most basic of such spaces, structures that “house” people share visual and functional elements. 

Schmidt took those familiar features out of context by making miniature houses (mostly) from paper and placing them in different exterior and interior environments. They are out of scale and out of place, creating a tension between object and location that is meant to trigger thoughts on place and belonging. Viewers are invited to let the photos remind them of real or imagined places they know.

Life's Little Cakes

Kelley Hatfield Wilks

I had years of drafting in high school and have always appreciated the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Gaudi, and Bruce Goff. Although my primary medium is clay, I have always had a camera in my hands or within reach. I’ve used it to document all the wonderful textures in the architecture of life. Bringing my passions together I’ve titled this exhibit "Life's Little Cakes - Architectural Elements". I feel that it is the design elements that we choose to live with that are part of the wonderful sweetness in life, thus the cake. I have created Keystones, Tile Murals, Chandeliers and Sconces , Vessel Sinks and more all from porcelain, stoneware and glass along with photographic images of architectural interest from my travels around the world. I've chosen works with strong geometric presence and hopefully a sense of whimsy for this show. I hope they make you smile and want to live with a little more cake...

Animal Technology

Flannery Grace Horan & Becki Lamascus

Flannery:

When I was learning to talk, my mama asked me where I came from. I told her that I came from the moon. I said that as soon as I picked her to be my mama, I was in her belly, which I described as "hot, dark, and loud." Although I don't recall saying that, the image of me flying from the moon to earth has always stuck with me, and it started me thinking about time and space, and how to go beyond those things. Growing up as an only child I had plenty of time to get lost in my imagination, my photographic memory, and my dreams. I also had access to open space in the country around Quitman, Arkansas, where my grandparents had a farm. Since childhood, I have loved nature and animals, and venerated them. My family is not short on artistic ability, and somehow it filtered to me, but I never considered it as a career until 1996, when I spent a summer in Taos, New Mexico, with my uncle who is a master silversmith. Using only archaic tools and methods, he would hand make beautiful pieces of jewelry and sculpture. I was in love with the process and the result. I had found a spark that lit up my future. I became an artist. I started leaving behind me a trail of pieces that will last far beyond my own lifespan. I began dropping heirlooms whose stories will continue to evolve long after I have forgotten them. I began bending and manipulating not only metal and stones, but time and space as well. I love the idea that my work can survive millennia, that each piece has the potential to be a time machine. Since I hand fabricate every single bit of every single piece using only simple, old tools, I feel like I am in a grand relay handing the past to the future. For 15 years I have been speaking my official language, the language of my process. Soldering, grinding, sawing, filing, bending, those actions are not hindered by the limitations of words or inflections or geography. As the creator/vehicle, they speak to me on my terms, as the viewer/wearer they speak to you on your terms. I am so grateful for this timeless universal language, so happy with my animal technology.

Becki:

Evolutionary arms races and manipulation of one organism by another through many generations can cause physical and behavioral adaptations in all of the creatures involved. In Earth’s history, dinosaurs were once prevalent and mammals less diverse. When a series of cataclysmic events killed off almost all dinosaur species, mammals were able to spread widely after resources became available that had not been so before.  Each ecosystem is made up of a network of relationships, but it is made up of small, self-interested components.  The interactions are not necessarily harmonious.  

In my paintings, I have created a world where the dinosaurs did not go extinct, but did experience some population depletion through catastrophe. The surviving mammals and dinosaurs evolved together over time, but the mammals had new opportunities to diversify because of the shifts in populations and diversity.  The mammals evolved through natural selection to fill the niches vacated by the ecologically vulnerable dinosaurs. With increased intelligence, clever mammals developed technology and began to domesticate the dinosaurs.  The relationship among the species gradually shifted over generations.  An amiable dinosaur was bred and this led to an unintended consequence, the display of other behavioral traits that were linked to the genes for docility.  Increased intelligence and communicative abilities resulted from the breeding for friendliness.  Genes with complimentary “skills” prospered in the presence of each other.  Traits within a population were favored if they happened to interact harmoniously with the other components that were frequent in the population.  Mammals that adapted in cooperation with the dinosaurs’ changes had an advantage over the ones who resisted the change.  Mammal adaptations developed that favored cooperation with the newly sentient dinosaurs.  A more symbiotic relationship between the mammals and dinosaurs was the surprise result of the selective breeding and domestication.  These paintings illustrate my anthropomorphic vision of such an ecological historical revisionism. 

The concept of manifest destiny has influenced my painted world with an element of parallel historical allegory.  The mammals use guns and technological advantages to dominate and oppress the dinosaurs. The original manifest destiny concept is infused with racial entitlement and religious domination. The way I am using the concept is through a comparison of technologically advantaged mammals’ having this sense of entitlement, like past European conquerors.  In this metaphor, the dinosaurs represent native peoples of areas taken over by the expansionist mammals.  The evolution of the species’ relations over time is representative of the historical shifts in global imperialist attitudes of cultural entitlement during the last few centuries. 

In the clocks, I use my clever animals in a more humorous context. The clocks all have 12 letter phrases that begin the idea process. Once I decide what 12 letter phrases or words I will use on the clock face, I think of a visually funny interpretation for the accompanying painted image. I dis-assemble the clock, make a new cardboard face for it and paint in acrylics. Then, I print out the letters, cut them out with scissors, and glue them on. After that, I varnish the painted surface and re-assemble the clock. The concepts of time and numbers are almost antithetical to words and images. The juxtaposition of the ideas on a single surface, gives the clock a feeling not usually associated with time keeping.  Any clock I make can also be assembled into a functional and great looking photo print version clock.