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Focus on Arts: Five for the Show
Five from Winston-Salem selected by the N.C. Arts Council for visual-arts fellowships.
In the exhibition in Rocky Mount, Carlos Gustavo's Birdhouse with quilt at night.
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Published: August 24, 2008
ROCKY MOUNT -- The N.C. Arts Council has been awarding fellowships to visual artists for almost 30 years, and the exhibitions by award recipients are always worth seeing, since they're intended to showcase some of the state's most vital contemporary art.
The Rocky Mount Arts Center is the only venue where you'll be able to see this year's exhibition. It's a bit far from Winston-Salem, but the show will nonetheless be of special interest to Triad viewers, because more than one-third of the artists -- five out of 14 -- live in Winston-Salem.
All five are represented by impressive works in a show that's also strong as a whole. A specially appointed panel of visual-art experts chose these artists from a pool of more than 300 North Carolina artists, who applied for the council's fellowship awards for 2006 and 2007.
Most of Terri Dowell-Dennis' works in the show are inspired by the Genesis story of the creation of the first man and woman. Particularly striking are three large drawings that form her series "In the Beginning," which includes an image of Adam and Eve fused as a single figure, based on an Albrecht Durer print. Clinical-looking renderings of disembodied human bones float against gray-blotched neutral grounds in the other two drawings. The ribcage in Ribs is presumably Adam's, since one rib is conspicuously missing. Also of special interest is her Dinner Party in the Fertile Crescent, which incorporates a triangular expanse of flax and barley seeds, and 13 clay bowls, each containing a miniature human skull. Formally inspired by Judy Chicago's iconic feminist sculptural installation The Dinner Party, Dowell-Dennis' piece is a metaphorical treatment of political violence in the Middle East.
David Finn and Page Laughlin, professors of art at Wake Forest University, who happen to be married to each other, are both represented in the show. The highlight among Finn's four unrelated sculptures made of various materials is Golden Handshake/Inside-Out, a gilded wood carving, which suggests a three-dimensional version of a Rorschach ink blot as well as two identically faceless, goofily cartoonish figures shaking hands.
Laughlin is represented by four 4-by-4-foot paintings from a continuing series based on color photos of domestic interiors in architecture and home-decorating magazines. Noteworthy in part for their seductive colors and heavily manipulated surfaces, these paintings emphasize objects -- including black and white versions of the same "running woman" figurine -- that allude to power relationships involving gender and class.
Glenda Wharton, whose work has been conspicuously absent from the Winston-Salem art scene in recent years, is represented by a brief video animation piece and seven animation-cell drawings. These intriguingly strange works juxtapose sensitively rendered views of children's faces with surrealistic fantasy images of hybridized animal, insect and humanoid creatures. All are from a larger, narrative project titled The ZO, a nightmarish "story of abuse and escape" that constitutes "an unrelenting exploration of the human psyche," according to a summary statement Wharton wrote.
Set off against a black background in Carlos Gustavo's black-and-white photograph Birdhouse and Quilt, a patchwork quilt with lots of busily contrasting, decorative patterns weighs down one end of a clothesline that is connected to a tilted wooden post with a homemade birdhouse implanted atop it. Redolent of rural American folk culture, this striking image is flanked in the show by evocative portrait photographs -- one depicting the rugged-looking, heavy-browed face of Stoney Calloway, and the other a clear-eyed, somewhat androgynous-looking Young Woman wearing overalls and wet-looking, slicked-back hair.
The exhibition also includes photographs by Ken Abbott, Jody Servon and Jeff Whetstone; ceramic pieces by Gay Smith and Jerilyn Virden; drawings by Donald Furst; Joshua Gibson's 76-minute film The Siamese Connection; quilts by Sherri Wood, and elin o'Hara slavick's digitally transformed art-historical portraits.
Of several exhibitions now on view in Winston-Salem, I recommend in particular Greensboro artist Michael Northuis' solo show hanging through next Sunday at 5ive & 40rty. Punningly titled "Eye Cons," it includes 18 small paintings and 12 drawings.
Northuis is one of the state's most consistently interesting artists, and these works are typically free-associative, content-loaded and poetically evocative, not to mention hilarious. Their stylized, archetypal figures -- including angels, demons, voluptuous female nudes and people wearing masks and/or helmets -- share brightly illuminated landscapes or murky interior settings with an assortment of carefully modeled objects.
Northuis engages a theological theme in his painting That Which We Know About God, which centers on the head of a masked figure with several sets of eyes. From a faucet in the upper left, a golden liquid -- presumably of divine origin -- pours into a hole in his head, atop of which a miniature TV set contains an image of a headless man in a business suit.
In his environmentally themed Pledge of Allegiance, a curly-haired, blue-uniformed man with a push-button on the right shoulder strikes a robotically patriotic pose, with his right palm clamped over his heart, in front of a field of tree stumps in which a bulldozer roams while a fire on the horizon consumes leftover brush.
■ The N.C. Arts Council's 2006-07 Artist Fellowship Exhibition is on view through Sept. 21 at the Rocky Mount Arts Center, 270 Gay St., Rocky Mount. For more information, call 252-972-1163. Michael Northuis' "Eye Cons" is on view through Aug. 31 at 5ive & 40rty, 451-A N. Trade St. For more information, call 336-724-2474.
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