"FROM THE CENTER: Maps, Wefts, Shifts, Hoops" curated by Marcia Weese
“Pink Corset” by Marcia Weese
“It is an ongoing and noble process of liberation to free our true natures.”
Enjoy a talk with Elizabeth Newman, Emily Payne, Augusta Talbot, and Marcia Weese (curator) the artists of "FROM THE CENTER: Maps, Wefts, Shifts, Hoops" from their opening reception on Friday, April 14, 2023.
Carbondale Arts presented “FROM THE CENTER: Maps, Wefts, Shifts, Hoops” a group exhibition curated by Marcia Weese at the Carbondale Arts Gallery, on display April 14 - May 18, 2023. Featured artists included Elizabeth Newman, Emily Payne, Augusta Talbot, and Marcia Weese. The community was invited to the opening reception on Friday, April 14, from 5-7pm at The Launchpad, with an artist talk at 5:30pm.
This group show bound together four women: all mid-career artists, all witnesses to the everyday. All have been wives, all are mothers, and all continue to weave life’s fabric in the studio. The warp and weft are palpable in these works. The domestic chores, the subjugation, the transcendence, the perseverance, the folding of sheets, the mending of nets, the flapping of wings.
Each artist works in multiple materials-- sculpture, collage, wax, assemblage, drawing, etching, painting, printing. Each employs a serious and whimsical approach to art making. Each bears a message; to rise continuously with the rigor and honor of being female, of being human.
About Our Sponsors:
This exhibition was generously sponsored by A4 Architects and Harry Teague Architects, as well as an anonymous donor. Thank you!
A4 Architects was founded in 2000 with the aim of doing architecture, planning and interior design that is sustainable, practical, appropriate and delightful. Our practice is broad, ranging from the planning of new urban neighborhoods to the detailing of interior spaces. We can help you with feasibility studies, building design or renovations. We are clear in our thinking about design, but flexible in our search for the best solution for our clients.More at a4arc.com.
Since 1975, Harry Teague Architects (HTA) in Basalt, Colorado has produced buildings that are shaped by the principle that design matters, and that well designed buildings can make a significant contribution to the well being of individuals and communities who use them. HTA buildings have nurtured and inspired families, communities, businesses and institutions throughout the Rocky Mountain West and beyond for almost half a century.
More at teaguearch.com.
Elizabeth Newman, sculptor, Santa Monica, CA
Elizabeth Newman is a sculptor. Having grown up in the Midwest, along the shoreline and woods of Lake Michigan, the natural world has always been her muse, the subject of her artistic investigation. She is an obsessed collector of objects from her personal environment as well her own family’s generational belongings and history.
As a sculptor, she has been particularly attracted to the immediacy of drawing and the process of making monoprints, for it is difficult to find the same spontaneity and sense of play in the making of sculpture.
Learn more about Elizabeth’s work at https://www.10grandpress.com/elizabeth-newman-prints
Emily Payne, installation artist, Berkley, CA
Emily Payne is an installation artist who works with a variety of materials including wire, used book parts, graphite, found wood and metal. She creates bodies of work that explore the interplay between light and shadow, 2D drawings and 3D sculptures, and the way objects and drawings can energize and animate the space around them.
She has done two different artist residencies - one at the Vermont Studio Center and the other the SIM residency in Reykjavik, Iceland - and found them immeasurably helpful in developing seeds of ideas. The starting points for recent bodies of work, including “Tending” and the “Burst” series emerged as a result of being set loose in an unknown place and seeing where she landed, what she found there and where she pointed her feet.
Learn more about Emily’s work at www.emilypayneart.com
Augusta Talbot, mixed media artist, San Francisco, CA
Augusta Talbot sees her work as a continuously evolving conversation among various media, primarily about process rather than product. It is an exploration within several mediums with no single approach and no foreseen goal. An interrogation rather than a fixed statement.
The domino effect of global pandemic, climate change, social upheavals and the struggle to preserve democracy, taken together, threaten to overwhelm our senses. Her collaged shapeshifters and their cousins, the Covid notebooks and the otherworldly creatures, exist not so much to make sense of things, but to make visible glimpses--often fleeting or “slipping” – of humanity, its instability, its silences and stillnesses, its metamorphic impulses, its ultimate mystery. Perhaps, as well, an ongoing effort to trace, in some modest sense, the play of self and other in our acts of perception.
Learn more about Augusta’s work at www.augustatalbot.com
Marcia Weese, artist, printmaker, Carbondale, CO
Marcia Weese grew up in downtown Chicago and spent her childhood roller skating between the dense urban landscape and exploring the natural world of crows, lightning bugs, oak trees, and prairie grass. Her deepest inspiration comes from Nature. This world informs her art, which these days takes the form of works on paper and prints.
With a background in sculpture, Weese works with several monotype techniques that combine texture with sculptural forms while capturing a luminosity that makes these voluptuous works on paper glow from within. Using the printing process to build layers of color, she ‘carves’ into the color field by wiping away just enough ink to reveal the hidden image. There is a palpable ‘object’ quality in Weese’s work that tugs on the boundaries between painting, drawing and sculpture.
She dedicates this current series, HOOPS, to centuries of brave women who have been subjugated by the patriarchy to dress up, truss up, shut up, and carry on, not unlike caged butterflies. Here, the hoop skirts evolve into winged creatures that take flight in the night. Free at last.
Learn more about Marcia’s work at www.marciaweese.com