SHADOWLANDS

Sep 23 - Oct 31, 2016..........SUMA.......Southern Utah Museum of Art - Cedar City

Resident objectives while at University of Utah: to produce a body of ceramic sculpture that relates to the unique aspects of the Utah landscape. These ten large scale ceramics will be shown along with twenty five "photo manipulations" that also are inspired by landscape and the figure.

My background is in ceramics and photography, with an MFA in ceramics and a minor in photography from the University of Colorado. I taught ceramics at the University of Georgia for thirty years and for the last three years I have lived and worked full time as an artist in my studio here in Salt Lake. I was gallery director for ten years at the University of Georgia and I owned a contemporary art gallery for three years. I have curated and installed many shows over the years. I am a Professor Emeritus from the Lamar Dodd School of Art.

The essence of this exhibition is to present an aesthetic approach to making art that emerges in two rather different media, but that shares a common vision. When I choose to make a photograph, I look for aspects in the landscape that suggest faces and figures that are hidden in the natural forms. Likewise, when I create a piece of sculpture, I work in a way that allows me to find similar images in the clay. I think most of your viewers will see and enjoy the relationship between the photographs and sculpture. I also think they will enjoy the individual pieces and understand the relationship to the land and spirit of the great western landscape.

Brief Statement:
The arid environment in Utah is a land of shadows, of extreme contrasts of light and dark, hot and cold, of parched dry desert and sudden flash floods. A land of fantastical forms sculpted over millions of years by wind and rain, creating hoodoos, mesas, gulches, draws, arches, towers, canyons and buttes. We live in a hostile landscape where plant life has a tenuous existence, but a place where the animistic imagination can thrive in the suggestive, eroded shapes that emerge and cast their timeless shadows.