NEW & HOT NC in the News

from The News & Observer

June 23, 2006

If you see only one art gallery show in Raleigh this summer, head to Glenwood South for a look at "New and Hot North Carolina" at Lee Hansley Gallery.
The massive group show includes an eye-watering 39 artists, with the restrictions that they must be working in North Carolina and young (Hansley drew the line at age 35).

With so much work, it's not a tidy package; the gallery is practically overflowing with paintings, photography, prints, sculpture, fine craft and one prominent video installation.

But in general, the artists show a surprising fluency in the language of art history and contemporary art, while trying for what "American Idol" judges call "making it your own."

It takes guts to tackle an old master, but Jacob Kincheloe and James Gage Burkart offer their tongue-in-cheek interpretation of the Jacques-Louis David's "The Death of Marat."

Jean-Paul Marat, a revolutionary, was assassinated in his bathtub by a young girl. Artists have found fertile ground in the story: It inspired David's masterpiece showing Marat as a martyr (now in the Louvre) and a play in which a fictionalized version of the Marquis de Sade stages a musical of the death of Marat within an insane asylum. Now add to the lineage this print, which answers the question, "What if Marat had been murdered in his bathtub today?" Marat's unmistakable form slumps in the bathtub, but it's cordoned off by police tape while an officer ("Gage" is on his chest) takes in the scene. A note in the dead man's hand is not a call to the people of France, but a plea to get all these people out of his bathroom.

Amy Scheidegger's graceful panels, "Mucha Girls with Vegetables," are plainly inspired by Japanese composition, but the Greenville artist adds unexpected blots of color inside and outside the forms to add the appearance of chance to a visual tradition known for its elegant precision.

Lia Newman's long, organic stalactite of a hanging sculpture looks like what Eva Hesse might have made if she had been obsessed with ginger root instead of human skin.

Zeymep Cagle Alkan of Durham has two carefully posed photographs with implied narratives. In one, the shadow of a woman in a lacy dress is silhouetted against a sheet, and she appears to be falling from some height - contentedly. In another beautifully composed piece, a man works in the shadows under an elaborate framework of white pipes, head bent to the task.

Luke Miller Buchanan's paintings-with-found-objects have been widely shown in the Triangle, but his breakthrough here is a work called "Put Your Hand on Your Heart." It's painting-meets-sculpture-meets-curio box; a small wooden panel is nested into a larger L-shaped one above a little handmade shelf of nooks and drawers. The work aches with loneliness: The flock of dark birds scraped into the white paint of the small panel contrasts with an isolated observation tower in the larger panel. In the cubbies of the shelf, there is a spool of thread, a melted tealight candle, a wine cork, matches, a cameo and a dried rose. The assortment is reminiscent of a Joseph Cornell shadow box, but without the glass to hermetically seal these mementos. Instead, you want to pick them up and take comfort in them.

It's about time for this kind of exhibit, reflecting the considerable energy of the local arts scene. Like much else in North Carolina, it's growing, but galleries and museums have been slower to put together broad surveys that help viewers connect the dots. The N.C. Museum of Art's "Crosscurrents" show earlier this year made a stab at a statewide showcase, but the results were scattershot. Other galleries should pick up the idea and organize more exhibits that show off not just the latest, but the greatest.

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from The Herald-Sun

June 25, 2006

Lee Hansley Gallery, 225 Glenwood Ave., Raleigh, through Aug. 19. For information, call 828-7557. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.

The ABCs of art are fairly easy to learn, like the scales in music. The hard part is perseverance and commitment, and, in the grand scheme of artistic success, age has a lot to do with where artists may be in their careers.

For the young ones, ages 21-35, it is a Catch-22. When they are young, just out of school, with a thin resume, it is almost impossible to get into a commercial gallery, and they cannot build a resume because they are too inexperienced for most galleries.

Lee Hansley, who knows as much about the art world as anyone in the Triangle, has looked at dozens of slides and resumes from talented young graduates and turned down most because their track record was too short to invest valuable commercial space on unknowns. With that said, however, Hansley has been thinking for some time about a way to give these young people a platform and ultimately promote a new generation of North Carolina artists, and so the genesis of an exhibition was formulated.

For the collectors, this exhibit is a chance to discover the new Andy Warhols and to catch them at beginner prices.

Hansley invited seven artists who, as he said, have already demonstrated that "they are serious ... and art is likely to be their lifelong pursuit." He then put out an open call to artists who live and work here or are native to the state. As a result of the call, 32 artists, plus the invited group (Meredith Brickell, Ashlynn Browning, Luke Buchanan, Jacob Kincheloe, Jonathan Courtland, Kirk Fanelly and Ahmad Sabha) make up this show.

Not just for decoration

Most of the work is small, intended for the walls of North Carolina homes, and most is conservative and salable. There are exceptions, however, and Durham's Jonathan Courtland is one. He uses rusty steel frames to make light boxes in which he installs found slides that cast wonderful abstract forms.

Charlotte's Laura McCarthy is another. She takes brown paper bags, stiffens them with latex and attaches them to the wall as giant flowers. She has turned very ordinary objects into a stunning installation and makes us want to see how she works her magic on other items.

Among the exceptions are also Charlotte's Kirk Fanelly, Raleigh's Lia Newman and Greensboro's Gina Gibson. Fanelly paints narratives around prepubescent girls and Asian women. The themes are dark and suggestive, subjects that most galleries are reluctant to show. His style of realism in day-glo colors reinforces the "otherworldly" places suggested in his compositions.

Newman uses twine, plaster, hair and iron oxide to make hanging sculptures that call to mind the mysterious presences of Eva Hesse (1936-1970). Here Newman evokes nests swollen with life, metaphors perhaps for female sexuality.

Gibson works with video and invites the viewer to sit and watch a woman who is also sitting and watching. Like so many beginning videos that are produced on a shoestring, this one has no beginning, middle or end. Although a difficult medium, video and its derivatives are the canvases of the future, so Gibson needs to keep at it. This attempt, however, is just too amateurish to tell us much about her ability.

Durham is represented by four artists -- Courtland; Zeynep Cagla Alkan, who does large photographs that range from abstract to surreal; Gillian Parke, who works in ceramics; and Ivan Liotchev, who does delicate abstractions.

Alkan is an example of an artist who has brought images of home into the North Carolina arena. In "Pipes," a composition laced with industrial utility pipes, one lone figure kneels under a sink trying to fix a problem. Beside him, on the floor, is one wrench. The incongruity of one human being with one tool trying to repair a part of a giant plumbing installation makes this a perfect photograph.

Charlotte artist Ana Ayala Melendez' compositions on paper suggest the presence of a female nude against a surface of heavy paint, in shades of delicate white and dribbles of pink. The painting is beautifully done, with highly sophisticated drawing mixed with a deft handling of paint.

Ginny Payne of Cary takes photographs of models in vintage clothing, but shows us certain details that tell us about each one. For instance, we see just enough of a polka dot dress to recognize its 1940s swing skirt. In another, we see a lower half of a formal gown with layers of material gathered on the ground.

Raleigh's Kay Hutchinson is one of the strongest painters in the show. Using the traditional format of the deserted residential street or the small-town business corner, she evokes an Edward Hopperesque scene. Hopper (1882-1967) was a master of lighting these ghostly cityscapes, and Hutchinson has used his ideas to embellish her own. Her paintings are very good and I look forward to seeing more of her work.

Hansley believes that art among our youngest artists is strong and an exhibition would foretell a good future for them and our state. He is absolutely right.

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from The Independent

June 28, 2006

New and Hot North Carolina, Lee Hansley Gallery's recently opened show, sets out to discover and present important, young artistic talent in North Carolina--a worthy and ambitious undertaking for a commercial gallery. After choosing seven emerging artists of merit (ages 21 to 35, who were born, educated or who live in North Carolina) whose work he knew, Hansley contacted art departments around the state and sent out a statewide call for entries. The resulting selection of 99 works by 39 artists easily rivals, even supersedes, results of local juried shows in its high degree of quality and variety.

Artists trained in East Carolina University's art program, six of whom are included in the show, demonstrate a strong tradition of representational rendering that gives the show an immediate stamp of merit. Hansley's survey embraces modes of abstraction, unexpectedly funky mixed media and even a video installation/tableau with equal commitment.

Ceramic artist Meredith Brickell, who resides in Raleigh, is one of Hansley's invitees. She has already been showing a consistently fine body of works in Raleigh venues, including Crocker's Mark Gallery, where her pieces are concurrently on display, paired with paintings by Sarah Powers. Brickell is represented here by three vessel shapes reminiscent of canoes. Their exaggerated elongation creates a unique profile, unusual in the genre's canon. In "Unfold" and "Waterline," visible finger marks dappling the exterior surface contrast with silky interiors, and in "Vessel," traces of the hand give way to a unity of streamlined form, both interior and exterior. Testament to her talent, Brickell has been invited to teach at Penland School of Crafts this fall.

Ahmad Sabha makes clay forms based on the motif of a water tower, meticulously stacking small coils in his Yellow Water Tower series. Capped by a conical "roof," these closed forms are presented on cast concrete bases.

A set of shino wares in the Japanese tradition is presented by Gillian Parke, embodying the aesthetic of "wabi," or unstudied irregularity, that is so prized. There is an organic quality to the shapes and freedom in the effects of materials, which include coarse feldspar and molochite added to the clay to give an irregular pearly, pebbled surface finish.

Hayley Kyle was a pick in the North Carolina Museum of Art's Crosscurrents show last fall. She appears here with four characteristic small, square, layered, atmospheric abstractions.

Zeynep Cagla Alkan, newly graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill's MFA program, was featured last month with fellow graduates at the Ackland Art Museum. Utilizing large format chromogenic prints, her choice of format references both painting and cinematic stills in carefully staged setups. In "Drop," a woman in a lace dress silhouetted behind a rumpled cotton sheet tips sideways and her hair falls forward, freezing the precarious moment before an implied impending disaster while putting a twist on the popular 19th-century device of silhouetted illustrations.

Mary Shannon Johnstone's work has been featured in recent area shows, where she has won juror's awards. Her Silent Home series chronicles transitional moments in the life of a family, as in "Mom at Christmas," in which a woman in profile holds her bowed head in her hands. The blurry focus conveys emotional intensity, a moment in which the subject hides her face from the camera.

Rather unexpectedly, the combinations of corroding metal and slick photography handsomely combine in Jonathan Courtland's lightboxes that frame richly colored slides--in this case, found ones.

Ana Ayala Melendez's flowing monochromatic, biomorphic abstractions on paper present a counterpoint to Ashlyn Browning's energetic marks and knotted lines. Browning is represented by the gallery and has had several shows over the past year, including at Artspace, and is currently on view in a solo exhibition at the Durham Art Guild.

Laura McCarthy's "Brown Paper Vessels," varying sizes of paper bags coated in latex, are affixed to a wall surface so that they resemble a configuration of growing coral. Lia Newman's "Root with Seed" takes the art off the wall, with twine, plaster, iron oxide and hair hanging dramatically from floor to ceiling, invoking the spirit of installation artist Eva Hesse. Robb Dammon's "Khaki Under an Umbrella" makes playful use of printing on a fabric's selvage and trimmings from pants legs to allude to modern abstraction through the traditional medium of pieced fabric quilts, made of necessity in the past with worn-out clothing or saved scraps.

The center of one room in the gallery is given over to an easy chair positioned in front of a television, set on top of another television covered in angel knickknacks, that plays a video of a woman watching television in a humble home environment. Combined with the table by the chair, a plastic cup with a straw and a pill placed on a napkin, these props are enough to powerfully conjure the narrative of chronic illness in "Watching Mom," created by artist Gina Gibson, a recent MFA graduate from UNC-Greensboro.

Representational painting forms the backbone of the show, whether it is the mixed media rendition "Put Your Hand on Your Heart" by Luke Buchanan, combining collage elements with paintings built over a small shelf holding assembled objects like a spool of thread, a key and a cameo, or Patrick Leger's moody nightscapes, the finely rendered oils on panel comprising his Paramount series.

Jacob Kincheloe and James Gage Burkhart's convincingly realized etching and aquatint "The Death of Marat" plays a witty art-historical insider's joke, while Nathaniel Underwood's lovely oils limn the light-infused, spare interiors of the white art studio, punctuated by props of primary colors.

New and Hot proves Hansley's curatorial acumen, satisfies those following artists who are in the process of establishing their Triangle careers, and introduces enough emerging artists from outside our area to enliven this top-flight mix.

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