Solo Exhibition at Luminary Center for the Arts

[/caption] Solo project of site-specific painting at the Luminary Center for the Arts. On Friday, February 4th from 6-9pm, Lauren Frances Adams will open The Nymph’s Reply, a painting-based installation that combines Elizabethan decorative tropes and John White’s watercolors of native Algonquin Indians as a vehicle for exploring American post-colonialism. An artist talk will be held on March 11. Finding inspiration in Sir Walter Raleigh’s pastoral poem of the same title, the installation is simultaneously visually seductive and chaotic, its aesthetic approachability belying the pedantic critique embedded within the wall paintings. The appropriated references are rendered by hand in the large-scale paintings, creating a surreal juxtaposition of previously disparate elements united by the artist’s process. The result is a barrage of collaged forms confronting the viewer with a dense symbolic field of multiple historical timelines and references, in an attempt to make sense of conflicting colonial narratives. Lauren Frances Adams currently teaches painting in the BFA program and the interdisciplinary MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis. She has exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Charlotte; the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; an ex-Turkish bathhouse in Belgrade, Serbia; Royal NoneSuch Gallery in Oakland, California, and CUE Art Foundation in Chelsea, New York. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and recently completed a residency at the Cite in Paris, France, July and August 2010. She is also a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award. She has an upcoming solo project at Conner Contemporary in Washington, DC.]]>

Local Histories: The Ground We Walk On

Local Histories: The Ground We Walk On an exhibition of over 50 artists from across the U.S. exploring Alfredo Jaar’s idea that “place can not be global,” curated by artist elin o’Hara slavick + art historian Carol Magee, Professors in the Art Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. January 28 – April 29, 2011 OPENING RECEPTION: February 11, 5-9 pm 523 East Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514 USA (formerly the Chapel Hill Museum) Hours: Tuesday-Friday 2-7pm; Saturday 12-7pm; closed Sunday + Monday Special Events: Performances by Cathy McLaurin, Neill Prewitt and Lance Winn March 18, 7 pm Mildred’s Lane Goes Elsewhere: a collaboration between artist J. Morgan Puett and Elsewhere, a living museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, a conversation, April 4, 7 pm Exhibition and events are free and open to the public. This inaugural exhibition at Chapel Hill’s new temporary art space at 523 E. Franklin Street addresses issues of histories and institutions of communities, family, place; commemorative responses; heroes; folklore and buried truths; traditions; memory/nostalgia; longing/loss; progress/development; the intersection of the local and global, and social, legal, political events as they pertain to, influence and construct local histories. The exhibition includes: videos about UFOs in Puerto Rico, the artist Barbara Hepworth and maize-based culture; sculptures utilizing tobacco, chairs, plaster snakes and a model of Michael Jordan’s childhood home; site-responsive and specific installations with red clay, vinyl window drawings and paint collected from local home renovations; paintings of the Middle East and surreal funerals; drawings of plants along the U.S.-Mexico border; interactive performances with bread and thermal imaging; photographs using gems as the negatives and of small towns in Germany, places in China, painters in the Hudson River Valley; and much more. This exhibition represents a unique collaboration between the Town of Chapel Hill and the UNC Art Department and features current and former students and faculty of the department as well as others from the region and across the country.  The exhibiting artists were selected from among over 150 applications.  Participating Artists: Alexis Bravos, Lauren F. Adams, Sophia Allison, Dave Alsobrooks, Patricia Bellan-Gillen, Erik Benjamins, Joshua Bienko, Lynn Bregman Blass, Molly Brewer, Ian Brownlee, Ann Chwatsky, María DeGuzmán, Lee Delegard, Travis Donovan, Jordan Essoe, Ashley Florence, Matthew Garcia, Gail Goers, Heather Gordon, Michael Gurganus, Elizabeth Hull, Brett Hunter, Michelle Illuminato, Michael Itkoff, Andrew Ellis Johnson, Ann Pegelow Kaplan, Susan Alta Martin, Mario Marzan, Cathy McLaurin, Morgan Muhs, Shaw Osha, Lillian Outterbridge, Freddie Outterbridge, Allyson Packer, Jessica Almy-Pagán, John Douglas Powers, Neill Prewitt, Susanne Slavick, Leah Sobsey, Spectres of Liberty, Tracy Spencer, Cici Stevens, Mary Carter Taub, Julie Thomson, Montana Torrey, Paul Valadez, Jeff Waites, Michael Webster, Cathy Weiss, Amy White, Ripley Whiteside, Lance Winn, Denis Wood http://www.facebook.com/LOCAL.HISTORIES.SHOW http://localhistories.wordpress.com/]]>