"Backbone" Tim Merry

"Earth and Sky" Mellissa Morris & Claudine Metrick 

"Unwinding" L. Michelle Law

Exhibit dates: August 29 - October 5
Opening Reception September 5, 5:00-7:00pm
Artist Talk at 5:00pm

"Backbone" Tim Merry

Artist Statement: This series is called "Backbone" an important theme in my life to which I've taken a literal and figurative approach.

Literally, a backbone is a main support, or something that resembles the spinal column in function, position, or appearance, like the keel of a ship.

Figuratively, having backbone refers to someone brave and courageous, not cowardly. 

The scale is often monumental with surfaces intensely physical, constructed, worked, and layered, with many works crossing the threshold between drawing, painting, and sculpture.

"Earth and Sky" Mellissa Morris & Claudine Metrick 

Claudine Metrick Artist Statement: Alluring in their surface my paintings teeter between the beautiful and the sublime making allowances for the absurd.  Dark expanses reminiscent of our universe unfurl before the viewer dissolving in large bursts of ethereal light.  There is a vastness in these images which brings us up against our ability to comprehend the infinite.  The works are psychological landscapes filled with images of home, nighttime, clouds and the cosmos.  Collage, stitching, and paint meld together to create rich topographies which embody the processes of regeneration and deterioration. 

The task of creating is about imbuing my materials with life and encapsulating something of our ineffable spirit in the work.  I juxtapose old paintings against new, torn maps onto smoky skies, and paint shavings upon stitching as I search for the magic accident.  This simple practice in the pursuit of beauty brings clarity to my own struggles with mortality, time and loss.  Beauty is tantamount to my work serving as a metaphor for our own frailty.  We are here triumphantly for a time, but in that same moment we are delicate and fleeting.  This enormity brings me into the studio each day to question and examine our experience.

Mellissa Morris Artist Statement: I have always thought of myself as a poet and paint is the medium I use to explore and express my lyrical nature. I adore paint. I like squeezing it out of tubes, scooping it out of jars, and plopping gobs of it out onto my palette. I am attracted to the playful exploratory process of making art work.

I feel my work is gestural, spiritual, narrative, and emotional. I use formal elements like composition and color to organize my images. I use the idea of a landscape in my work at times for the reason that it is the most accessible experience outside of me. I am attracted to shapes and forms found in a natural landscape. They appear and disappear in my work.

I use acrylic, oil, watercolor, encaustic, collage, and drawing mediums like ink, charcoal, pencil, and pastel on paper or wood panel. Recently I have found the courage and freedom to use objects like glitter, hair, and dried flowers in my work. I have struggled a long time with the addition of adding such non-traditional art mediums into my paintings. Discovering that my paintings are more and more about hashing out an internal relationship with my imagination, the contemplation of creativity and its source, and throwing caution to the wind I have been able to add such items in formal experiments.

I express the voice of a woman, a mother, a wife, a sister, and an artist. I make my work because I am the only one that can make my work. My work is my passion and gives meaning in an otherwise meaningless existence. I have always felt a deep internal pulse that drives me to paint… and so I paint.

"Unwinding" L. Michelle Law

This series of three dimensional works by L. Michelle Law is inspired by an admiration for Midwestern architecture and landscape found during childhood walks and Sunday drives with an artistic family. An early fascination with children's book illustration and experience as a staff member at her local library fueled her passion to create narrative art. Her drawing style has been strongly influenced by her mother, a painter and calligrapher, and by the exuberance of her grandmother's freehand embroidery.  Michelle's mixed media work is rendered in colored pencil, acrylic paint, fabric and the occasional flea market find.