McColl Center for Visual Art is pleased to present an exhibition of new works on paper by two of our current resident artists, Isaac Payne and Felicia van Bork. The work from these Charlotte artists will be on display from November 18, 2011 through January 7, 2012. We invite you, your friends and family to join us and our talented artists for a gallery reception celebrating their exhibition on Friday, November 18 from 6 to 9 PM.
Felicia van Bork:
How to Hang Art, Collage, 11" x 11"
“Until three years ago, I was strictly a painter, but a chance to take a printmaking workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, changed my life as an artist. Almost immediately after that workshop, I began making prints as big as the enormous etching press at the Work Center would allow. And then I began placing prints side by side to make even larger pictures. The limitation of press size led to my making composite images and thereby gave rise to my interest in the meanings inherent in alignment and misalignment. The composite image was a natural precursor to collage, too, as I recently discovered.
The Gates is a wall-sized piece, made of monotype prints arranged in a grid and hanging by magnets. Some elements of the overall image align perfectly between panels, but others don't, giving the impression of a shifting point of view. The central image suggests wrapped, spinning bundles falling from the sky. The bright center is framed by two vertical "gates" of a darker color. Each gate is punctuated by a horizontal red bar like the indicator on a mechanical gauge, measuring energy or time or fuel.
The collages, from a series titled How to Fix Absolutely Anything, are made from torn-up and cut-up monotype prints that I made. The prints I use as raw materials are full of strong color, texture, shapes and gradients, and I incorporate these features in a collage to create abstract protagonists in "real space." Every 11" x 11" collage has a "how to" title, which usually occurs to me about two-thirds of the way through the process of making a piece and which helps me know how to finish the composition.”
Isaac Payne:
Old Covered Bridge, Mixed Media on Paper
“My drawings have incorporated elements of stacked and layered papers for many years and I was always interested in how this related to architectural imagery. After hearing people express their interest in seeing more of this artistic process revealed in the end result, I created a series of new works on paper to better reflect the stages of the process instead of 'covering my tracks' too much. As I created the work for this exhibition, I was challenged to take on a 25-foot wall as a drawing/painting/paper installation which has been a very exciting challenge.
A recurring theme in my artwork is our relationship to architecture and estrangement from nature in the modern land/cityscape. I use draftsmanship and an eclectic range of drawing and painting media to create images of architectural environments that are everywhere in general, yet nowhere specific. My artwork explores human scale as it relates to architecture, where people become part of the abstract organization of an architectural environment, just as they are part of the surface patterning and compositional rhythms on paper. The anonymity of figures and places are intended to encourage viewers to relate their own experiences to these pictorial environments, while also contemplating the layers of shared history that buildings represent.
Much of my artwork begins as abstract fields of ink stained paper. I then reflect on, and re-imagine the places, people and things I have seen, sketched and photographically documented over the years, to see how they may fit with a particular surface or compositional idea. I draw from these sources freehand, in a process of reflection, reinterpretation, and invention. Architecture is also a metaphor for my drawing/painting process; I ‘build’ the illusion of 3D space through draftsmanship and ‘structure’ my pictorial ideas and formal composition.
My mixed-media drawings/paintings explore the intersection of two kinds of space inherently linked in the modern land/cityscape through their relation to architectural facades: the abstract space and rectilinear surface pattern of the two-dimensional picture plane, and that of representational space. Taking cues from twentieth century American artists’ like Romare Bearden, Richard Diebenkorn, and Edward Hopper, I am interested in exploring the spaces between traditions of representational painting and those of modernist painting practices.”