ART COLLECTOR BOXES: The Front Fundraiser
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ART COLLECTOR BOXES: The Front Fundraiser 〰️
November 11 - December 3, 2023
Opening reception on Second Saturday, November 11, 6-10pm.
Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm.
Room 1
Ulrika Matthiessen, Harbinger, colored pencil on paper, 18 x 24 inches, 2023.
Ulrika Matthiessen, Nature Morte, colored pencil on paper, 18 x 24 inches, 2023.
Ulrika Matthiessen, Exponential Dreamer, colored pencil and pastel on paper, 18 x 24 inches, 2021.
Ulrika Matthiessen, Pinus Sylvestris Fugue, oil on linen, 42 x 54 inches, 2023.
Ulrika Matthiessen, Stardust Mother, colored pencil on paper, 18 x 24 inches, 2023.
Ulrika Matthiesen, Stone Spirits, colored pencil on paper, 18 x 24 inches, 2023
Ulrika Matthiessen, Deep Down Inside, colored pencil on paper, 18 x 24 inches, 2023.
Harbinger
Ulrika Matthiessen
A harbinger is something that delivers a warning or foreshadows a future event. It often has a negative connotation, like a bad omen, giving a sense of foreboding, but it can also signal that something positive is coming. The harbinger is a messenger with the ability to foresee the future.
In this series of drawings, figures are transformed into symbolic representations of harbingers as solitary beings, some warning of dire possible futures, while others imagine futures of beauty, harmony, and symbiosis with nature.
Ulrika Matthiessen is a visual artist born in Sweden, raised in the American Deep South, and currently living and working in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her paintings, drawings, and mixed media works often center around the human figure, with all its implications, where multiple layers of imagery overlap and merge to weave a complex mixture of representation and abstraction. She discovers themes and meaning emerging throughout her working process, preferring the evocative over the literal. Matthiessen holds a MArch, a BArch, and a BFA in painting from Tulane University. She has artwork in the collections of Xavier University and the Whitney Plantation Museum.
Room 2
Terry “The Entrepreneur” Gibson, Top Secret Artist, Everyday Icons, mixed media, 2023.
Everyday Icons
Terry “The Entrepreneur” Gibson, Top Secret Artist
Terry is born and raised in New Orleans, LA.
Room 3
Raina Benoit, Eyes that Follow, video projection on object, 30 x 40 inches 2023.
Raina Benoit, Silhouette (La Grotte), Recycled blue jeans, 8 ft x 5 ft x 5 in, 2023.
Silhouettes & Shadows
Raina Benoit
The cave as an origin, a place of shelter, worship, pilgrimage and burial. The cave as an allegory in Plato’s Republic where there are cave dwellers merely looking at the shadow rather than reality, the role of the educator, role of the enlightened in society. The cave as an internal voyage to witness geologic time. The cave as feminine. The cave as vaginal The cave as an opening to an inner world both alluring and frightening, a place of heightened senses. The cave as the beginning, the end, and everything in between, an origin and destination. The cave as witness. The cave as the place for the hermit. The cave as a sensory reset, in a world of silhouettes and shadows.
Benoit's work responds to the sense emitted by a place. Her experience living in multiple communities, has permitted her to observe many environments, often finding a connection to the physical body and its relationship to the natural world. Her work considers the landscape/environment to be a collaborative organism, full of mysticism, anthropomorphism, folklore, news headlines and the feminine grotesque. Benoit's work embraces the handmade aesthetic oscillating between the familiar and the estranged.
Raina Benoit received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Arizona in 2016. She has lived in many places as an educator, artist, and environmentalist. She exhibits national and internationally.
Room 4
Madison Creech & Katie Baczeski, Meat Me Flier, Raw Clay, Plastic, Ground Meat, 2023.
Meat Me In The Plastic Bubble, Baby.
Madison Creech & Katie Baczeski
with performance by Noise, Idaho ((Chad Serhal))
What does it mean to feed something? To host the nutrition of another with your own form? In exploring ideas of meat through experiential immersive experiences, language, textiles and raw clay—collaborators Madison Creech & Katie Baczeski aim to position viewers in the same space of questioning. They tenderize these themes of conceptual meat through the exploration of language and materials that reference the freshness, marinating, processing and preservation of ideas. Meat Me In The Plastic Bubble, Baby, offers the space to consider how one relationship feeds another and the multiple energies it takes to do so.
Madison Creech is a UNCW Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History teaching graphic design and art foundation courses. Creech grew up moving from base to base with her military family. Madison Creech was the 2018-19 Fountainhead Fellow in the Department of Craft and Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. She holds an MFA in fibers from Arizona State University and a BFA and BS in textile, merchandising, and fashion design from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has served as faculty associate at Arizona State University, instructing surface design and served as Visiting Assistant Professor and the Brown Visiting Teacher-Scholar at Stetson University teaching digital art and textile art courses.
Creech has held residencies at Praxis Fiber Digital Weaving Lab in Cleveland, Ohio, Metro Community College Prototype Lab in Omaha, Nebraska, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in Texas, and Techshop in Chandler, Arizona. Her work has been widely exhibited across the country, and she has been the recipient of a number of distinguished awards, including the Juror's Award from the ARC Gallery’s Frayed exhibition in Chicago, IL, the Rudy Turk Award for History in American Craft from ASU, and the Mary Beason Bishop and Francis Sumner Merit Scholarship from the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. She currently co-runs Fried Fruit Art Gallery in the Cargo District in Wilmington, NC.
@madcreecher
Katie Baczeski is a clay-based artist and Assistant Professor of Ceramics at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. Her teaching and creative practices encompass sculpture, installation, performance art, and experiential immersive experiences. She earned her BFA in Sculpture at the University of Connecticut in 2009, and MFA in Ceramics from Indiana University in 2016. Her residencies and exhibitions include: Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center in Denmark; NCECA 2023 in Cincinnati, Ohio; Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine; Peters Valley School of Craft in Layton, New Jersey; and the Iowa Ceramics and Glass Studio in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Baczeski and Creech are the former co-founders of the exhibition spaces Fresh As Fruit Gallery in DeLand, FL and champion art in all forms.