Rebecca Randall Bryan Art Gallery /Coastal Carolina University, Conway, SC

Denise Stewart-Sanabria: Quantum Continuum, 

 February 29 and runs through Friday, April 1, 2016.

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I installed a new iteration of my quantum physics multiverse installation at Coastal Carolina University with the hanging plexiglas portal this spring. The gallery space enhanced it in some really cool ways- the green walls on one side of the gallery, which I divided by hanging sheets of 4' x 8' plexiglass, suggested one world, while the white on the other suggested another.

 

The excellent lighting did great tricks with shadows.

The wall monitor playing a slide show on a loop created an interesting recto/verso view of the installation. The black silhouette rear view is just as important as the charcoal drawn fronts of my pieces.

photo credit Daniel Cross Turner

Gallery director Jim Arendt leads a class discussion.

photo credit Daniel Cross Turner

Lecture day.

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One of my favorite side diversions when visiting a new place I'm exhibiting in is just wandering around aimlessly with my cameras and looking for interesting stuff. Conway has a small and really welcoming downtown. Arendt had encouraged me to visit the historic haunted graveyards, and what I found was rather tragic. Besides the expected civil wall casualty graves, there were an astounding number of children's graves from one family, just in one year. I discovered there was an influenza epidemic that was almost as horrific as the 1918 one that roared through here in 1858-1859. I had never seen tombs with glass-enclosed marble statuary before. 

On a lighter note, though the downtown had a diverse bunch of excellent restaurants and trendy stores(Black Thai was my favorite restaurant), a local coffee roaster (Rivertown Roasters), they also had some remnants of the previous century, desperately still clinging on. What is not to love about a department store time has past by? Though their mannequins have been through many violent battles, they persevered. Though it was April, Christmas lingered on. It made me miss Knoxville's last 20th century downtown remnant, J's MegaMart.