First Thursday November: Trigos, Idlet, Hudson, Sims

Join us First Thursday November 3rd from 5-8pm at the Fayetteville Underground for another exciting month of all new exhibitions!
 

Luciano Trigo's paintings will be featured in the Revolver. In the Vault, Dana Idlet will present her latest work since her experience on Flores Island in the Azores. The work of Chad Sims will be on display in the Hive gallery. The E Street Gallery will feature functional stoneware by Gailen Hudson. 

 

Luciano Trigos 

Progressive Hemofiction

Revolver Gallery

 The eye stops in front of the Hemofiction painting. Observes shapes, colors, and structure, it self mesmerized. Desires to comprehend, looking back from a previous time, worn out. Attempts to enter lateral invented reality through a known door, but uses the incorrect key. Attentive eye, but conditioned. Curious eye. Was it going to speak proudly of its knowledge? What do I see? – asks the eye in continuous excitement. Hemofictive shapes that escape like smarmy fishes. Luciano Trigos's pictorial sense refuses to respond positively to custom. I am eye, should be able to see- the observer says with a certain rancorous air in his usual gaze.

The eye that claims or wishes to admire the unwanted requires tutelage. The disciple eye submits itself to surprising design and, does it look again? No, in reality it touches, it creates visual hands that reach out to caress the canvas and wooden frames. The eye, reeducated, gropes hemofictive forms. Colors and perspectives come to it in an open manner, vibrating. Wanting to retrocede, the eye wishes to perceive the pictorial dimension in an instant, but the painting's reality divides, it sets diversity of centers at the sight, it seems the painting does not desire to be a painting, and in contact with the touching eye it becomes restless, aggressive, as if it were being watched through a microscope. What I see transforms to pure beauty. The eye insists, inserts, accomplishes at last to detach an apparent totality, but discovers itself walking in an aesthetic surface right away, it is a wayfarer that steps, barefoot, in fragments of another reality attached to the first. Then, annoyed, decides to focus again.
 

Luciano Trigos does not recreate images, he produces Dynamic Abstract Chromatics. The artist sets off in observing, where personal creativity is the center. He sets the eye in first place and completes what could be spaces full of aesthetic cells that reproduce in unusual senses.

  

The eye roams with its own unrefined resources: shape, movement, color. The cosmos is by no means, the way Luciano Trigos paints it, it is worse- the artist's aesthetics tries to make up for God's faults or in some way, adhere to nature's constant birth giving. Luciano Trigos's paintings are product of lateral, germane vision. Plastic cells are born, they grow and reproduce inside original, abstract form and at the same time, follow a kind of autonomous development. These spurious Hemofictous beings are displayed towards objectivization, they wish to be touched, they desire to enter as fact to the three dimensional world and offer concrete possibilities to the receptor.

 

Dana Idlet 

Gravity

Vault Gallery

This work comes from the growth and experiences I had on Flores island in the Azores. After coming across a photograph of a place I had never seen, I followed my intuition and spent the last six months in the middle of the Atlantic. I shared a tiny village with 200 other people between waterfall striped mountains and a rugged coastline shaped by lava flow, always aware of the sea and its shifting horizon. The people I spent my time with there are now my brothers and sisters.

There is a simplicity to the pieces I have produced, but they come from a very deep and honest place. The island's gentle pace, lack of material clutter and some indefinable quality of lightness gave birth to these images. On the island I had an overwhelming feeling of heaviness and being grounded. I had lived with my head in the clouds, floating around, fighting to touch down. In this otherworldly place rich with contradictions I found my gravity.

 

Gailen Hudson
Tea Time

The art of pottery has been the transformation of the raw clay into the vessel form serving the daily utilitarian needs of the people. It has always been a three dimensional surface of expression and decoration in the living space. The tea pot is the refinement of the vessel as a server of refreshment noted as a time of relaxation and reflection - a rest from the day's labors - either as a private moment or as a social gathering. The tea pot should be pleasing to observe, to hold in the hands, and to use. It is an enclosed space for containment, it creates a defined volume within the living space of the home, and it must have the attributes to efficiently serve its contents as desired. As I return to making functional pottery in stoneware, I am again searching the perimeters of design of the pleasing and functional vessel.

Chad Sims

Chad Sims graduated with a degree in Art from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where he majored in Graphic Design. He also studied at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. His works have been displayed in various galleries including the Jules Gallery in Fayetteville, AR; DDP Gallery in Fayetteville, AR; Gallery 26 in Little Rock, AR; and have been shown publicly in conjunction with Art Amiss, a Fayetteville-based collective for emerging artists.

This collection of works ranges from earlier, more detailed, meticulous and deliberate watercolor and pencil pictures, to more recent work in red and white earthenware clay. Due in part to the nature of the medium, the clay tiles took on a more urgent and basic quality (the lines for example being drawn more gesturally, and the compositions made simpler). Clay provided an opportunity to explore and stylize more elemental forms and figures, which I hope might one day populate paintings like the earlier more elaborately composed ones. Working with glazes and underglazes, which can't as readily be mixed and blended with one another the way watercolors can, forced me to look at color in a new way; to compose in flat blocks of color and to rely less on blending and shading and modeling of forms.

Fayetteville Underground : 4 Art Galleries : Working Artist Studios
One East Center Street : Fayetteville, AR
Fayetteville Underground Gallery Hours: W-F 12-7pm and Saturday 10-5
www.fayettevilleunderground.com
www.fayttevilleunderground.blogspot.com

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.