"Connection" - Recent Work by Stephanie Imbeau

Florence Native Stephanie Imbeau's "Connection" will include fiber art, ceramics, and a unique onsite installation of a structure made of umbrellas. Her practice investigates the way individuals seek community, personal security and a place to belong. She uses representations of protective structures as anthropomorphisms to explore this universal human impulse. These basic forms of shelter also provide the framework for a conceptual mapping of the barriers drawn to create safety and claim meaning using physical spaces. The simple outline of a house, for example, is both a boundary and a claim, “I am here” – with walls and a roof.   She uses a variety of mediums with a specific interest in materials that posses the opposing qualities of utility and fragility, such as clay, cardboard and umbrellas.

Stephanie Imbeau received a BFA from The Ohio State University in 2004 and MFA from Newcastle University in 2007. Her competition-winning work Shelter made her the first female artist to adapt Channel 4’s Big 4 in London in 2009. She was the youngest artist in the show Homeland [In]Security: Vanishing Dreams at Dorsky Gallery, Long Island City, NY in November 2014. She has exhibited in Germany, France, England, Greece, and various locations in the US and has been featured in print in the UK and Korea. She currently lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Recent Works: 2013-2016 by Paul Yanko

Since 2004, Youngstown, Ohio native Paul Yanko has been teaching in the Visual Arts Department at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, South Carolina. He received an M.F.A. in painting from Kent State University in 1995 and a B.F.A in illustration from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1991. While residing in Ohio, Yanko exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions at institutions including the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art and the McDonough Museum of Art. In 2002 he was the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.

His work is included in private and public collections including the Cleveland Clinic, The Greenville County Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Carolina Collection at MUSC in Charleston, SC.

The works on display are bold acrylic paintings of abstract geometric designs.

"The densely layered compositions characteristic of my painting are reflective of a desire to reconcile formal painterly concerns with an interest in creating process-derived imagery. I remain equally influenced by emblems of Modernist geometric abstraction in addition to the characteristically intense, saturated hues found in commercial sign painting and toy construction sets.

"I develop my paintings systematically through an additive process of layering acrylic paint mixed with acrylic mediums onto masked areas. I initially establish sets of vertical and horizontal bands, applied to either a square or rectangular format, with function as an armature on which subsequent color shapes are layered. As I paint, I allow shapes to shift in registration in order to reveal varying amounts of underlying color."

"Bindings" by Lee Ann Harrison

Lee Ann Harrison is an instructor in visual arts at the Community School of Davidson, N.C.  Harrison received her M.F.A with emphasis in sculpture and painting from Winthrop University.

Harrison's installations evoke fragility while dominating the gallery space.

"I explore installations using the enclosure of a room and the addition of sculptures to occupy and command the space. Three-dimensional forms hang from the ceiling in a looming, intrusive manner, yet other installed forms offer tentative, fragile illusions. The human form is my inspiration – then, I contort, deconstruct and reconstruct it to highlight deformity, missing appendages, and bindings to limit movement.

"My intent is to create a reflective and charged viewer response as I share narratives on the gay life experience. Twisting and contorting materials illustrate the confining contradictions of a gay individual 'passing' in a predominately straight world. This duality is integral and the materials serve as a mirroring of the conflict."

"Abandoned Spaces" by Robert O. Keith IV and Meagan Skinner-Keith

“Abandoned Spaces” features work on a common theme of “abandoned architectural spaces that are gradually being reclaimed by nature,” according to Keith. Meagan Skinner-Keith uses photography, while Robert O. Keith IV creates large paintings that are often curved, both adding an immersive effect for the viewer and playing the nature of the normally flat two dimensional medium. Skinner Keith met Keith at Colorado State University.

Keith is a recent MFA graduate of USC and the couple now reside in Columbia, where they have launched an online artist’s collective.

"In my current work, I borrow from abandoned spaces that are slowly being consumed by nature leaving them in a state of chaos and disorder. As I paint, I distort these spaces by curving, expanding, and stretching the dimensions across a flat surface to best display their natural beauty. I directly explore these spaces in depth which enables me to identify and connect with the mood of each structure.

"I work to bring out the rich, earthy colors and focus on intense contrasts to aid in conveying the temperatures and moods in each location. Through distortion, I am also able to drastically portray the gradual changes each space undergoes over time. It is my intention to showcase these unique and beautiful abandoned spaces so that they can be shared and enjoyed by everyone."

Meagan was born and raised in a small town in Southern Virginia, where she lived for most of her life. She grew up exploring the woods, rivers, and lakes around her house and has always been fascinated by the power of nature. Now a grown woman, she still loves to explore the natural landscape around her. Mixing in her love of the past, she seeks out and explores abandoned structures that are falling to ruin in order to capture both the raw power and the beauty of nature reclaiming the earth.

Meagan spent a decade in Colorado before moving back to the east coast, to make her home with her husband in Columbia, South Carolina, where they have formed an online artist's collective. In addition to photography, she works in graphic design and hand-lettered artwork. She is happiest in nature, especially if there is water close by, and never leaves the house without her camera.

"DigAlogue - a dialogue between the digital and analog in clay" by Danny Crocco

"I feel art has a voice of its own, and is not viewed but experienced. My motivations are based on my experience, and I hope that each person will be able to connect to the work based on their life and thereby delve deeper into the conversation than one person can by oneself.  I am interested in setting up situations that engage the viewer or participant within the larger context of the work."

Danny Crocco has exhibited and lectured on his work around the world. His work has been shown in Koji Pottery Museum, Chiayi, Taiwan; Spartanburg Art Museum; Columbia Museum of Art; Artifacts Gallery Tasmania, Australia; Xalapa, México, as well as numerous regional, national, and international shows. Crocco received his MFA from the University of South Carolina and currently teaches in the visual arts program at Central Piedmont Community College.

"Emerge" - Senior Shows by Graduating FMU Visual Arts Majors

Senior shows are required of all students majoring in Visual Arts. These shows give students hands-on experience in selection and installation of artworks, publicity of exhibition, and external review by the University community and the general public.

Works by Ceramics and 3-D Design Classes

Students in ceramics classes learn processes and techniques in both wheel-throwing and hand building in the art and craft of pottery. Throwing leads progressively toward stoneware clay tooling, decorating, glazing and firing. As they advance through the curriculum, students add ceramic fabrications methods of slabwork, modeling from solid masses, and press molding.  Multi-part forms and porcelain formula clay bodies are created as artistic discipline develops along with the individual's philosopy, critical awareness and asthetics.

Students taking Three-Dimensional Design classes investigate organization techniques, with special emphasis on the plastic controls of form and space.  They learn to use a variety of tools and various sculptural media, including wood, plaster and clay.

What to Make of Silence - Drawings by Aaron Collier

Aaron Collier is a visual artist living in New Orleans.

An assistant professor of art, Aaron has taught drawing and painting at Tulane University since the fall of 2006. His classes are aimed at providing the drawing and painting student with an expansive vocabulary in communicating their personal concerns, posing formal elements as the gateway to conceptual considerations of the work. Aaron's personal work traffics more in glimpse, suggestion, or fragment than in chronicle, consonant with daily experience and our understanding of the world

Solo exhibitions of his work have occurred at Cole Pratt Gallery and Staple Goods, an artist cooperative in the St. Claude Avenue Arts District. He has participated in recent group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and has been featured in New American Paintings.  Aaron's paintings are represented in such collections as the New Orleans Museum of Art, Iberia Bank, and the Boston Medical Center. He has enjoyed artist residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, and ISCP in Brooklyn, NY.

Sculpture by Ellen Emerson Yaghjian

Ellen Yaghjian was born in Atlanta, Georgia and grew up in Larchmont, New York.  She received a BFA in sculpture from the University of Georgia and an MMA in media from the University of South Carolina. For ten years Ellen worked in television production as a camera operator, production assistant, and first assistant director for South Carolina Educational Television, and later as an associate producer at Turner Broadcasting.
 
Ellen returned to sculpture in 1990, hammering and forming copper to reflect her interest in the human form. She also designs large scale copper fountains for gardens and interior spaces, and many of her pieces are one-of-a-kind and site specific. She particularly enjoys the warmth of copper and the colors that emerge through her working process.

Ellen Yaghjian currently resides with her artist husband in Columbia, South Carolina.

"Copper is a very accessible medium for me. The potential to create subtle volume with energy begins with a drawing  on sheet metal.  Through the process of cutting, hammering, and forming I am able to engage my artistic sensibilities and expand through the actions of visual and tactile exploration."

Abstract Sculptural Works by Albert Sperath

Albert Sperath’s long career has always been connected with art and arts organizations. He was the Director of the Kentucky Arts Commission Traveling Exhibition Service in the 1970s and 80s. He went on to assume positions as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Art as well as the Director of the University Museum and Historic Homes at the University of Mississippi in Oxford MS, until his retirement in 2009.

Now living in Black Mountain NC, his life is devoted to his own art. His multi-media sculptural works are painstakingly executed, beautiful and quirky at the same time.

"When I make art, I want to show you something you have never seen before. There may be references to familiar events, shapes and ideas, but the materials I use provide a quirky take on them.
 
"I’m fascinated by manufactured items and their perfectly pristine nature and juxtapose them with naturally occurring materials. Favorite materials are acupuncture and suture needles, fishhooks, cat whiskers, maple and privet twigs, bone, feathers, leather, wire and porcupine quills among others.
 
"The titles usually have some relationship to the objects, but not always. Perception is Reality is a concept I embrace, and the sculpture associated with it embodies that idea. Jiggery-Pokery, on the other hand, came from one of Justice Scalia’s opinions, and it turns out he did not invent the phrase as I thought. Laughing Turtle did not become laughing turtle till after I made it and laughed at the results.

"Some pieces are almost identical. If I like the outcome of a piece I sometimes reexamine the material and process tweaking it to another slightly different outcome. Recently I was talking about my sculpture with another artist and told him about a piece completed in my freshman 3D design class. Ten years later I made another one but it was 10 times larger and more complex but basically the same idea. I think when you pursue an idea over a long time nuances reveal themselves.

"My desire to make stuff was instilled by my parents. They were professional model builders and were always making something. When I was a kid they made my Halloween costumes from scratch and I always won awards with them.

"Many of these bones were found with a few purchased. Folks often ask where did you get the unusual materials and the reply is, 'On line.'”

Albert Sperath 

Lake Effect - Photography by Bridget Kirkland

Born in 1976 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Bridget Kirkland was raised in Erie, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Mercyhurst University with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Graphic Design and a dual-minor in photography and marketing. In 2013 she earned her Master of Fine Arts in Art and Design from Winthrop University. She is an assistant professor of graphic design at the University of South Carolina Upstate and Co -Director of the student run ad agency “The STUDIO” at the USC Upstate George Dean Johnson, Jr. College of Business and Economics. 

Kirkland has consistently been selected to participate in numerous shows and exhibits across region, including the Annual Artists’ Guild of Spartanburg Juried Show, Spartanburg, S.C., Carolina’s Got Art Juried Competition at the Elder Gallery, Charlotte, N.C. and Upstate’s Gallery on Main. She has also shown a selection of works at Glass Growers Gallery in Erie, PA as well as commissioned installation titled “The Secret Collection” at El Secreto Hotel in Isla Mujeres, Quintano Roo, Mexico. She won both the prestigious Winthrop University Fine Arts Graduate Leadership Award and the Collegiate Advertising Design Award for her work on the Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine Founders Club Brochure in 2013. She has presented multiple papers over the years at Southeastern College Art Conferences as well as was accepted into the 2016 Juried SECAC show in Roanoke, VA. Bridget enjoys traveling abroad to collect endangered glass trash. Some of her most recent glass explorations have been to Cuba and Iceland, where she plans to return Summer of 2017 for an artist residency. Kirkland is also a member of several professional regional and national arts organizations.

"At the end of every experience, an individual is left with only the remembrance. When memories are recalled they often evoke new ones in a different context.

"Recollections are fragmented, surreal and sometimes absurd. During the course of a day, memorable occasions emerge from collected artifacts, noises, smells, or from the views.

"Investigating the reality and imagination inherent in the subconscious often translates into a creative activity for me. Fragments that I recall lead to imagination. These flashbacks, personal collections, and sensations all lead to memory.

"Not all memories or stories are recalled perfectly. It is here that my work begins, in a place where thoughts are patchy and stories are recreated. The stories I tell are fragmented and reveal only a glimpse into the larger narrative.

"I recall memories and interpret through image design."

Senior Exhibition by Graduating Visual Arts Majors

Senior shows are required of all students majoring in Visual Arts. These shows give students hands-on experience in selection and installation of artworks, publicity of exhibition, and external review by the University community and the general public.

There will be an opening reception at 6:30 pm on April 6.

Works by Ceramics and 3D Design Classes

Students in ceramics classes learn processes and techniques in both wheel-throwing and hand building in the art and craft of pottery. Throwing leads progressively toward stoneware clay tooling, decorating, glazing and firing. As they advance through the curriculum, students add ceramic fabrications methods of slabwork, modeling from solid masses, and press molding.  Multi-part forms and porcelain formula clay bodies are created as artistic discipline develops along with the individual's philosopy, critical awareness and asthetics.

Pee Dee Sampler
A selection of works from regional artists

Pee Dee Sampler, a selection of works from regional artists, will be on exhibit in the Hyman Fine Arts Center Gallery at Francis Marion University from May 9 through August 10 as part of the Art Gallery Series.

Artists include ceramicists Jane Crossman, Douglas Gray, and Sasha Federer, painters Anna Coe, Matt Cook, Lynda English, John Lehum and Jackie Wukela, photographers Anna Baldwin, Dewey Ervin, Donna Goodman, and both photographs and acrylic paintings by Tari Federer.

The Hyman Fine Arts Center Gallery is open from 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM Monday through Thursday (note that the University is closed on Friday during Summer classes.) Francis Marion University is located at 4822 East Palmetto Street, Florence S.C., 29506. For more information contact 843-661-1385.