Sunday, May 25, 2014

Article on "Figuratively Speaking" at Customs House Museum



 Below- an article from Clarksville Now. My piece Artemis Redux was supposed to go into this exhibit- but ended up getting randomly sold where it had been previously shown in Abingdon, VA. They were nice enough to let me substitute it with One Step Back.
Artemis Redux: charcoal on plywood, BB pellets, resin, hand built wood altar

One Step Back: charcoal on plywood, silver leaf, glass, hand-built wood altar

Customs House Museum announces  Exhibition winners
Wednesday in Lifestyle


Snippet #2 by Marsha Mack
Girl with the fox fur by Jessica Lewis

By Melinda Ludwig, Customs House Museum
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – This month the Customs House unveiled Figuratively Speaking, its National Juried Exhibition. This is the first time the biennial show has taken on a theme.
Juror Ruth Crnkovich selected thirty-two pieces from over ninety-five entries. She says of the collection “Defining successful portrait painting requires an amalgam of both subjective and objective criticism. On the surface, the first consideration in successful portrait making is the level of resemblance the images has to the sitter as portrayed in the artist’s unique style. Portraits that emit or stir intrinsic feelings, thereby stirring emotive responses from the viewer, represents a higher level of success in the hierarchy of good art making.
Finally, technically speaking, the composition, technique, level of craft, and overall presentation factor into the equation. The portraits in this exhibition successfully hit upon all of these points, albeit at varying levels and the artists should be commended for their competency.”


The Best in Show went to Snippet #2, a ceramic piece by New York artist Marsha Mack. Marsha currently is a Graduate Teaching Assistant, at Syracuse 

University, Syracuse, New York. She was a Ceramics Area Lab Assistant at San Francisco State University. She is Vice President of the Shaped Clay Society and a member of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. The artists says of her work “In today’s world where pop-up ads define pop culture and the most widely read texts are on cell phones, it sometimes seems that reality doesn’t reach far beyond reality TV. With my sculptures I try to emphasize the psychology and the lived experience of the individual.”
Second Place went to Nashville, Tennessee’s Jessica Lewis, and Third to Lucas James of New Hampshire. Honorable Mentions were given to photographer Mitzi Cross and Victoria Goro-Rapaport. Guests of the opening reception voted on the museum’s People’s Choice Award, which was given to Joseph Moniz for his oil painting Ritual.


Figuratively Speaking will be on exhibit through July 13th in the museum’s Kimbrough Gallery.
Located at the corner of Second and Commerce Streets, the Customs House Museum is the second largest general interest museum in Tennessee. For more information on above events contact Terri Jordan, Exhibits Curator, at 931-648-5780 or terri@customshousemuseum.org.