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Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Visual Art Smart art in a small town
Posted By Barbara Schreiber on Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 2:55 PM
After a two-week hiatus, (which we’re blaming on the holidays and assorted crises) the Point8 Blog is back with the third installment in our series on local artist collectives.
Salisbury is an underappreciated town offering affordable Victorian houses, a charming and useful downtown, a bookstore with three cats that give you hairy eyeball when you walk through the door, and a shop that has declared itself “Home of the Cheerwine-Banana Smoothie.” I love Salisbury.
This Friday, I’m heading there for the opening of Abundance/Abundance Lost at the Waterworks Visual Arts Center, another one of Salisbury’s treasures. Waterworks is no longer in the building from which it derives its name but is now housed in a former car dealership — a low-slung, airy brick structure that was renovated to include several spacious, inviting galleries.
In addition to responding to community needs by offering classes and exhibiting the work of Rowan county artists and students, Waterworks has become a place where Charlotte’s contemporary artists can exhibit their work in the classic clean, well-lighted space.
Abundance/Abundance Lost is the latest effort of ARPA 10, a group of artists who met in 2005 when they were affiliate artists at the McColl Center for Visual Art. They take their name from the restaurant where they would gather for conversation and where they eventually hatched the idea of showing together. Since leaving McColl, ARPA 10 has mounted four exhibitions and presented at Pecha Kucha Night Vol. 3.
The artists of ARPA 10 are Linda Luise Brown, Alyssa Wood, Paula Smith, Jennifer Parham Gilomen, David Edgar, Michael Simpson, Charles McMurray, Laura McCarthy, Felicia Van Bork and Amy Sanders. About one year ago, these 10 very different artists were moved by the economic collapse to choose the theme of plenty and loss for their Waterworks exhibition. Since then, the theme has evolved into something more nuanced, and much of the work in the exhibition addresses the healing and the lessons learned after loss.
Abundance/Abundance Lost includes luscious abstractions, meditations on domesticity and the environment, minimalism and more in such diverse mediums as painting, printmaking, video, ceramics and recycled plastics. You’d think that such variety would result in cacophony, but ARPA 10’s exhibitions tend toward a unified elegance.
The opening reception for Abundance/Abundance Lost is Dec. 4, 6 p.m.-8 p.m. at Waterworks Visual Arts Center, 123 East Liberty Street in downtown Salisbury. The exhibition runs through Feb. 13. For further information, contact Waterworks at 704-636-1882.
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