2010 WINDOW TO SCULPTURE EMERGING ARTIST SERIES WINTER EXHIBITIONS

2010 W2S Series
March 5 – April 10, 2010
Willard Tucker: Blackdamp
Main Gallery
and
Carrie Dickason: Cultivating Culture
Euclid Avenue Gallery
Friday, March 5
5:30 – 8 PM Public Opening
6:15 PM The Artist Talks with Carrie Dickason, Euclid Avenue Gallery 
7:00 PM The Artist Talks with Willard Tucker, Main Gallery

This body of work is preoccupied with the industrial infrastructure that keeps online the system of the digital flows of electronic networks that define the space of contemporary life. Since the early 1990’s, the coal industry in Appalachia has converted to a more efficient form of surface mining to meet the increasing demand for cheap energy. After clear cutting the most bio-diverse temperate forest on the planet, heavy machine operators blast away thousands of feet of bedrock to reach razor thin veins of coal, while dumping the rock spoil into the valleys and streams below.

Blackdamp is the name given to poisonous gases that collect in sewers and coal mines, deep within the underground networks that sustain life above the surface. This body of work envisions what happens when the accumulating residues of an abject land-base can no longer be sealed off or sequestered. Once the material consequences of short-term development seep back in, literally and metaphorically, they disrupt the images of speed, simultaneity, and frictionless energy-use that life in the digital age has modeled in our brains.

This installation imagines the electrical grid as a central nervous system. Referencing the drawings of Ramón y Cajal, Agricola’s De Re Metallica and Bodies, The Exhibition, this work assembles an environment from the fractal networks shared by body systems and electric currents. It makes tactile the fragile structures that undergird the technological sublime.

-Willard Tucker

about the artist
Willard Tucker received his MFA in Sculpture from the Ohio State University (2009) and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Kentucky with a BFA in Sculpture (2006). Influenced by the history of the Appalachia region, Will's work highlights environmental concerns that plague today's society. Tucker was recently awarded an honorable mention for the College Art Association Professional Development Grant and a Graduate Teaching Associateship both from Ohio State University. He has exhibited his work in Ohio, California, Massachusetts, and Kentucky. Two of his pieces were included in After the Pedestal, the 5th Annual of Smaller Sculpture from the Region at The Sculpture Center in summer 2009.

Carrie Dickason: Cultivating Culture
Euclid Avenue Gallery

With a mixture of scavenged remnants of contemporary life and natural materials as her “palette,” Carrie Dickason’s installations and collages sprawl across the gallery, inviting an exploration of the intersection of the natural and the man made world. Untitled (Garden, 2010), composed of a mixture of trompe l’oeil manufactured materials, actual building objects, cut and constructed latch hook yarns, real grass, and the like, creates a fragmented interpretation of an urban landscape and draws the viewer’s attention to the layers of history and subtle nuances evident in the architecture of the Euclid Avenue Gallery. Untitled (Carscape) (2009) an undulating and brightly colored topography cast of the interior of her car, using tape and the remnants of an automotive industry foam for gasket rings, humorously looks much more closely at Dickason’s immediate environment. In Untitled (Fuchsia) (2009), a series of collages, she suggests the beauty of nature abstractly recreated, again, with scavenged manmade materials and replicated forms of nature. Cultivating Culture should, as the artist proposes, "generate conversation regarding consumption and disposal, nature and culture."

Cultivating Culture involves scrutinizing the physical artifacts of consumerism and manufacturing in search of an intimate understanding of their subtle material qualities. I prod and splice post-consumer materials - investigating their physical properties of texture, form, and color. I am inspired to work in an organic manner, using the vocabulary of cultivation and growth to coax each piece into its final form. By layering old with new, natural with synthetic, I am interested in developing a language of strata, to generate conversation regarding consumption and disposal, nature and culture.

about the artist
      Admiring the natural tensile structures of a plant is as mesmerizing to me as studying the man-made complexity of scaffolding on a suspension bridge. I am intrigued by the intersections of urban and rural worlds where garish synthetic colors collide with subtle tones of brown and green; where geometric outlines of factories and telephone towers abruptly interrupt organic contours of rolling hills. I find these moments fascinating and poetic -as graphic emblems of power and innovation.

      Using a personal logic based on these observations, I shift synthetic substances into organic patterns and forms. Building with a palette scavenged from elements of contemporary life, I seduce viewers into a world of materiality. I make artwork in order to stimulate others to become more consciously engaged with their surroundings - altering their perceptions of common materials so they will pause and contemplate the world as it is now and how it might be in years to come. 

-Carrie Dickason


Artist’s website

January – February 2010 W2S
April – May 2010 W2S

For more information call 216.229.6527 or go to info@sculpturecenter.org.

The Sculpture Center is a not-for-profit arts institution dedicated to the advancement of the careers of emerging Ohio sculptors and the preservation of Ohio outdoor sculpture as a means to provide support for artists and to effect the enrichment, education, enjoyment, and visual enhancement of the Cleveland community and greater region.

The Sculpture Center receives generous support from Toby Devan Lewis, the Kulas Foundation, the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Bernice and David E. Davis Art Foundation, the George Gund Foundation, studioTECHNE|architects, The Nathan and Fannye Shafran Foundation, a supporting foundation of the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, and individual donors to Friends of The Sculpture Center. It receives additional generous public funding from Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the Ohio Arts Council. 

Gallery hours: Wednesday through Friday, 10 AM to 4 pm, Friday until 7:30, Saturday 12 noon to 4 pm or by prior appointment (Free Parking, Handicapped accessible)