Exit Strategy - Vista Studios Show April 13-25

Exit Strategy - Vista Studios Show April 13-25

The resident artists of Vista Studio are making plans to move! In their upcoming show, Exit Strategy, they will exhibit new work reflective of their focus over the past year, and a variety of mediums will be represented. The show runs from April 13th- 25th. There will be an Opening Reception and Open Studios on April 20^th from 5-8pm, which is a free event, open to the public, in conjunction with Artista Vista. Refreshments will be served. The gallery will be open 11-5pm April 20-23^rd, and by appointment April 13-19, 24-25, (803) 252-6134. 

Pat Gilmartin continues to expand her interest in mosaic glass and fused glass and will have several new pieces to show. She also has been experimenting with combining her previous figurative ceramic work with glass mosaics, finding the possibilities to be exciting and unlimited. 

Heidi Darr-Hope’s work, Incidental Findings, came out of a 3 day-experience working with abstract painter Brucie Holler. Beginning with a blind contour drawing to start her composition, Heidi stepped out of her comfort zone to create the new work, “reinforcing the importance of trusting that there is great value in getting uncomfortably lost. I learned that when I allow myself to move beyond what I already know, I am free to make incidental findings and unintentionally discover where I just might need to go next.”

Sharon Licata will be offering a series of new abstracts primarily in Alabaster with a side trip into some Georgia Marble. These sculptures represent the heart-felt feelings of the years at Vista Studios and the new winds blowing as the artists prepare for the move. 

Stephen Chesley says, ’The heritage of landscape painting is long and rich anchored in our most primal beginnings. Contemporary landscape painting with current ideas of modern abstraction read as figurative models of nature. The diminishing asset of the natural world is the challenge in this era of exponential domination.'

Michel McNinch has been working with familiar subjects in a large format. Come see the oysters glisten on a 3 x 4 foot canvas.

Also included in the show are Eileen Blyth, Stephen Chesley, Robert Kennedy, Kirkland Smith, Laura Spong, and David Yaghjian.

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For more information and hi-res images, please contact Kirkland Smith, (803)622-7838, or Kirkland@KirklandSmith.com.

Pat Gilmartin

Stephen Chesley

Heidi Darr Hope

Eileen Blyth

Michel McNinch

David Yaghjian

Sharon Licata

Vista Lights 2016 - Mark Your Calendar!

The resident artists of Vista Studios present new work in Harvest Art from November 16th-29th in the gallery at 808 Lady Street. They will open their studios to the public and will host a free Opening Reception on Thursday, November 17th from 5-8pm during the Vista Lights celebration. Vista Studios is home to 12 artists and each will be presenting new work.

Eileen Blyth will present Manic Weather II, acrylic & graphite on paper. It is part of a group of work done during a residency in Italy last Spring.

Stephen Chesley will offer works that exemplify the poetic peace of the ordinary. These recent works will offer studied relief from an increasingly frenetic world, and summon a rich solitude. Chesley’s palette of blues and greens connote symbolic dispatches from nature highlighting the fragile gift of water, sky, and trees and their increasing demise.

Pat Gilmartin is continuing to work with glass mosaics and fused glass. For Vista Lights she will have several new pieces to show, including an intricately patterned mosaic gazing ball. She also has some new additions to her popular series of small, sculptured ceramic faces. 

All year long, Heidi Darr-Hope has been breathing, thinking, and making mandalas.  This is partly due to an on-line E-Course she’s developing.  Creating Brave: Mindful Mandalas is an eight-week class on how to use mandala making as a form of stress reduction and healing.  But making mandalas is nothing new to her as she’s been creating these circle drawings for her own private use for many years as a way to play, de-stress, unwind and get lost in the creative process.  Normally, the daily drawings are sketchbook doodles and as thoughts come to mind, they are written within the mandala. For this show, she has created larger ones on canvas.

Sharon Collings Licata is returning to some of her earlier figurative forms, both animal and human, by continuing these series: Repose (rabbit) Shore Repose (egret) and Moon Goddess (reclining nude). The subjects emerge from the stone as simplified, graceful forms.

During the past year, Laurie McIntosh was commissioned to create 16 original works for the courtyard gates of the newly renovated Richland County North Main Library. Several of the paintings created from this project will be exhibited during this show as well as new pieces from her Pages series. Pages is part of an ongoing series of deconstructed paintings created with multiple layers of calligraphic marks and grounds. The deconstructed pages are then reassembled and unconventionally bound to create new visual relationships between the images. 

Kirkland Smith continues to collect, sort, and assemble everyday household disposable objects into representational art. Her assemblage work evokes nostalgia while also seeking to challenge consumer habits. 

Ever optimistic, Laura Spong works to capture the energy and excitement of doing new things. Responding to the upcoming changes in the gallery and to the future, in general, Laura’s work Dispense with Doubt reflects her attitude that it will be different, so let’s move on and into it.

South Carolina State Parks have been inspiring Michel McNinch this summer.  She is in love with painting her home state.

David Yaghjian claims he is still trying to learn how to paint. His latest attempts involve looking at a covered chaffinch cage, which caught his attention when watching the movie Arabian Nights: Volume 3.  He worked from amodel that approximates the real thing.

Also showing in the show are Robert Kennedy, and Walton Selig. Gallery hours will be from 10am-5pm daily. The gallery will be closed Thanksgiving Day. For more information, please visit their website: www.VistaStudios80808.com.

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For more information and hi-res images please contact Kirkland Smith atKirkland@KirklandSmith.com or on her cell: 803-622-7838.

Kirkland Smith

www.KirklandSmith.com

@KirklandTSmith

MARGE LOUDON MOODY - Made in America 1983-2013: Collage

Marge Loudon Moody

Made in America 1983 – 2013: Collage

Gallery 80808, Vista Studios, 808 Lady St, Columbia, SC, 29201

November 8, 9 and Nov 11, 12 noon to 5pm each day 

Reception November 7, 5 – 8pm

Press Release

In the final exhibition of several shows held this year celebrating her 30-Year retrospective, artist Marge Loudon Moody will be displaying some of her graphic work in an exhibition entitled Made in America; 1983 – 2013: Collage, at Gallery 80808, Vista Studios, 808 Lady Street, Columbia, SC, 29201. The opening reception is Thursday, Nov 7, 5 – 8pm, and the exhibition, which is free and open to the public, runs through November 11.  As in previous shows, 35% of sales will benefit the homeless – in Columbia, ’Transitions’ Homeless facility. 

Moody’s artist statement reads: ‘My work is inspired by the spirit of place. I make abstract acrylic paintings on canvas, collages and mixed-media pieces, which, through a rigorous process of working and reworking of composition and art elements, arrive at a harmonious expression of the essential nature of the subject.  

My collage work often employs ‘found’ materials and involves layering and precise juxtaposition of line, color, shape and texture.  Life experience may be similarly layered.  At times, subject matter serves as metaphor for intangible ideas. It examines boundaries, and addresses the fragility of existence, of presence, of absence, and of memory’. 

Selected small collages that span 30 years (1983 – 2013) on a variety of themes will be on view. Such themes include the City Scene series; Bird Series; Precious Threads series; the Square series and the Urban Instincts series.

‘Marge Moody: Collage’, an essay by David Houston, 2000

“By its very nature collage is an open text that, when successful, establishes an empathetic link between the artist, the image and the viewer.  The subtle nature of this communication, as does conversation, is renewed with each encounter and makes significant demands on both parties.  The artist must rely on a sure sense of composition to shape many different elements into a unified work, while the viewer is challenged to look beyond the convention of semblance and respond to a poetic language that often relies on ambiguity and abstraction.  Outliving its modernist heritage, the collage sensibility is now the very foundation for our understanding of the world:  as we read a magazine, shop, use the computer, or drive down the strip, we enter the realm of collage.

Within this context, the collage pieces of Scottish-born artist Marge Moody address a different realm than that of our cacophonous lives.  Cutting and pasting, mark-making and layering are all techniques which, in her hands, bring order rather than celebrate randomness.  Relying on subtle relationships and the carefully considered play of tension her work abjures absolutes and contrasts sharply with the media-conscious narratives of much contemporary art.  For the knowing viewer, references abound.  Partly conscious but mostly not, Moody’s use of the language of the twentieth century abstract art relies on intuitive borrowing rather than outright appropriation or ironic quotation.  For viewers unfamiliar with this tradition, these works invite an individual response and succeed in communicating the satisfaction of aesthetic engagement and delight.  Above all, the works by Marge Moody invite all of us to rediscover the almost forgotten experience of genuinely looking at art.”

David Houston was former head of Visual Art at the SC Arts Commission, Columbia, SC; former Director of Rudolph E. Lee Gallery, Clemson University, South Carolina; former Head Curator of the Ogden Museum, New Orleans, Louisiana; and former Director of Curatorial, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art,  Bentonville, AR

For additional information contact the artist at moodym@winthrop.edu , visit her website at www.margeloudonmoody.com or follow her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/margemoody