FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 3-February 2, 2014
Form Transformed: Five Sculptors
Janet Wheeler, Janathel Shaw, Rosemary Luckett, Michelle Frazier, Dana Brotman
Opening Reception: Friday, January 3, 2014, 6-8:30pm
Encore Party: Thursday, January 23, 6-8:30pm Touchstone Gallery presents a "Roundtable Sculpture Discussion" as part of the Form Transformed: Five Sculptors exhibit. Find out how these sculptors - Wheeler, Shaw, Luckett, Frazier, and Brotman think and work.
Saturday, February 1, 4-6pm Touchstone Gallery presents a "Wine and Poetry" event as part of the Form Transformed: Five Sculptors exhibit. Introducing Laura Schulkind reading from her upcoming poetry chapbook Lost in Tall Grass. Her poetic images reflect the process these five sculptors use in transforming familiar materials into new forms.
Sculptors Wheeler, Shaw, Luckett, Frazier and Brotman transform earthen materials and detritus into elegant sculptural forms using fire, colorants, adhesives, carving tools and imaginations keyed into limitless possibilities of three dimensional constructions. They share a love of materials, storytelling, and an internal inclination to build--to transform one form into another form.
Frazier, Shaw and Luckett’s figures are created in a dialogue with sources as diverse as mythology, autobiography and social commentary. Frazier and Shaw build with clay using glazes, and oil paint on heads, torsos and bodies. These clay figures, and those of soapstone, speak about universal and social themes and provocative historical scenarios regarding the human condition from the female perspective. Luckett melds together cast-off manmade and natural objects into figures characterized by images inside images. Emphasis is placed on form, texture, patina and transmutation of one object into another.
Dana Brotman turns her attention to three dimensions using gourds-hollowed carcasses-which have been transcribed with hieroglyphics that, like the eyes of women she usually paints, are both foreign and known. Likewise, Janet Wheeler reveals a sensitivity and deep respect for humble materials: delicate seed pods, bamboo, red osier sticks, iridescent oil sticks on Hosho paper, bark, and raffia. Each of Janet’s are at once ancient and yet contemporary. Her compositions exude a sense of the sacred found in Nature.
In this exhibit each finished piece tells at least one narrative through a vocabulary of forms, colors and textures. The history implicit in recycled articles reveals another level of story. Add to that clues left behind in the formation process and yet another story plane becomes evident.