Rote Dysfunction

FAB Gallery is pleased to host an exhibition by artist Kara M Gunter. The exhibition will be on view September 25, 2009-October 20, 2009. Please join us for this exciting event!

Kara M Gunter was born in Lexington, South Carolina. She earned a BFA at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC and a MFA from the University of South Carolina in Columbia where she studied sculpture. Kara teaches ceramics and design at Lander University in Greenwood, SC.

Kara M Gunter’s sculptural installations explore, “themes of a personal yet universal nature, using my created vocabulary of object symbols. The major themes in this work are dysfunction and repetition; or more specifically, the dysfunctional nature of repetition—the well-worn rut in the brain that leads to certain compulsions, negative thinking, and the otherwise fruitless over-workings of the mind. While specific themes are personal in nature, I believe one can also see these dynamics play out on the larger familial and societal scale.”

For more information about Kara, and to view more of her work, visit

her website.

Presenting: Professors!

FAB Gallery, located in the beautiful atrium of the Visual & Performing Arts Building, is pleased to present the 2009 Faculty Triennial Show.

Generally held every three years, these comprehensive exhibitions showcase the achievements of individual faculty members and highlight artistic developments in the department as a whole during the intervening period. Each exhibition is new and exciting. Many of the longer-term faculty members have been exploring exciting new art forms since the last exhibition and the work of new faculty members will be introduced to our community for the first time. One thing that remains constant is the broad range of media you will see -painting, sculpture, graphic arts, wood working, film installations, and computer-generated art-that is practiced and taught on our campus. The exhibition not only reflects the creativity and dynamism of the art department itself but also the current art scene across the United States.

This year's exhibition presents the works of Tolulope Filani, Lesile Rech, Steven Crall, Kimberly Ledee, Ellen Zisholtz, Scotty Peek, Frank Martin, Jonathan Walsh, and Jim Arendt. The diversity of approaches and techniques present in the exhibit defy easy categorization. Self-reflective, formal, pure, expressive, historical, and contemporary are all words that can be used to describe the works of these practitioners. It is our hope that the University and surrounding community will find these contemporary works of art to be both challenging and exciting.

The Department of Visual and Performing Arts continues to make bold moves in art production, inspiring students, the public, and our colleagues across the University. Art production is the physical manifestation of the intangible. Ideas, emotions, narratives, and experience take shape during this exhibition. The exhibit will be on display August 24-September 25.

FAB Gallery is pleased to host an exhibition by artist Jonathan Walsh. The exhibition will be on view April15, 2009-May15, 2009. Please join us for this exciting event!

Prelude is a video installation based on images of the artist’s family residence and daughter. The dreamlike qualities of this brief film, accompanied by the musical score preformed by the artist, evoke a common longing for an idealized past. “Its about life,” says the artist. Super-8 film, popularized through innumerable silent family films, is employed by Walsh to create a wistful and ambiguous narrative.

Jonathan Walsh is a Professor of Digital Media in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at South Carolina State University. His multimedia installations have been exhibited in the US and Canada including the Bourget Gallerie, Concordia University; Articule Gallerie; Cégep de Vieux Montréal; Université du Québec au Montréal; Exquisite Corpse ArtSite, Burlington, VT.; City Gallery, Charleston, Spoleto Festival, USA, ‘Montréal: Projections in Public’ site-specific exhibition, and the Gibbes Museum of Art. In 2001 his installation ‘The Philosopher’s Bookshelf’ was part of the 2001 Triennial at the South Carolina State Museum, Columbia. His installations have also been exhibited at the IP Stanback Museum’s “In Pursuit of Equity… Artists Celebrate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Brown versus Board of Education Decision”, exhibition; VAV Gallerie, Montréal; and the Halsey Gallery, Charleston.

Annual Awesomeness!

The Student Art Exhibit enters its 36^th year with guest juror Frank McCauley. The School of Visual and Performing Arts in conjunction with the I.P. Stanback Museum is pleased to exhibit the hard work of our student body April 22^nd-May15th.

Frank McCauley, Assistant Director and Curator at the Sumter County Gallery of Art, says, “I consider it an honor and privilege to have been asked to select work for this year’s South Carolina State University Student Art Exhibition. Both the high quality of the pieces submitted to the show, and the large number of works, made my task difficult, but at the same time enjoyable. These exceptional works demonstrate a high level of quality and ambition.

As is true of most juried exhibitions, the styles and themes of the works on display in this year’s Student Art Exhibition run the gamut. However, what seems to unite them all, in my opinion is a sense of sincere engagement with the world we live in today. Some artists seem to be responding to the political and social issues of our times, others look to the body and how it is represented through history or mass media, and still others delve into the realm of abstraction as a way of expressing emotion and meaning. Many address these issues directly, while others veil their works in fantasy, fiction, or historical reference. Together, these works speak volumes about who we are as a society and culture. “

Garnering special recognition from our guest juror were several works of art. 2009’s Best of Show award was given to Janson Bell, Wesley Coleman, Kendrick Clark for the photographic documentation of their live performance Drench. Harriett Hilton’s Jangled received an award for Best Drawing. Tiziana Collins ran away with the prize for Best Sculpture with her steel wire construction Shapely Shoe and David McLeod’s Pain of My Twin captured with Best Ceramic. Mayan Pride by Tawana Marie Jenkinsn (Rasta) won in the Best Printmaking category and Micah Brown’s enigmatic pinhole photo Frosty the Snowman froze out the competition in the Best Photography category. Pixels were prized with Avery Brown’s digital illustration Me and my Bass Guitar receiving Best Digital Print and Kristian James’s video A Truly Messed Up World for Best New Media. Congratulations!

Carrying Home

FAB Gallery is pleased to host an exhibition by artist Joshua Ellingson. The exhibition will be on view March 23, 2009-April 14, 2009. Please join us for this exciting event!
Joshua Ellingson lives and works as an illustrator in San Francisco, California. In 1999, Ellingson graduated art school and headed west. Since then, Joshua has contributed artwork to popular publications and websites worldwide and worked with clients ranging from toy makers to tequila companies. Much of his art is influence by technology, popular culture, the cosmos, and the potential of the human mind.
In addition to his illustration and design business, Joshua Ellingson is the director for The Local 303, a studio/collective of illustrators and designers in San Francisco, California. The Local 303 provides a professional working environment as well as a space for collaboration, critique and art exhibition. Joshua Ellingson also contributes editorial writing and reviews to Hi-Fructose, a contemporary art and culture magazine.
Originally from a small town near Flint, Michigan, Joshua spent a lot of his childhood at his grandparent's farmhouse. "I've got so many memories from that place. Because my grandparents were antique collectors, the house was loaded with interesting stuff. I was always in the workshop with Grandpa, working on a duck decoy or fashioning my own ninja weapon from chair legs. The house was completely rebuilt by my grandfather, and they even built a big red barn out back. My mother, my aunts and my uncle grew up in that house too so there's just so much history. Most of this series is about keeping that home and those memories close to me, carrying it with me. I don't know what I'm going to do when it's gone."
For more information about Ellingson, and to view more of his work, visit http://www.JoshuaEllingson.com.

Sara Schneckloth:Open Gestures:

FAB Gallery is pleased to host an exhibition by artist Sara Schneckloth. The exhibition will be on view February 18, 2009-March13, 2009. The Artist will be on campus to discuss her work on Monday, March 2nd at 1:00 p.m. in the Visual and Performing Arts Building's Barbara A Vaughn Auditorium. Please join us for this exciting event!
A 2006 graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program in painting and drawing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Sara Schneckloth has just joined the Art department at the University of South Carolina as an assistant professor of drawing. Known for large-scale, bold drawings that explore the relationship between our memories and our physical selves, Schneckloth has won numerous grants, fellowships and other honors, and has exhibited her work as far away as South Africa.
Schneckloth’s work deals primarily with imagined microbiological systems rendered on a macro- scale. She envisions and creates cells, organs, fluids, and tissues, and seeks to assemble the elements into new systems of organic relationship and connection. Schneckloth works in a variety of mediums, primarily in drawing and painting, and looks for ways to take drawing beyond its traditional definition of “mark on paper.” She integrates traditional techniques with non-traditional mediums and approaches to create large installation pieces of fantastic design.
Of her work, Schneckloth says, "I believe that the act of drawing is a way of residing in multiple states of awareness, of present, past, future of what one is, has been, and hopes to become of the physical, the mental, and the formal. I draw as a way to see more deeply, both inside and out, and to elevate the act of seeing to a process that is fully engaging of both body and mind."
For more information about Schneckloth, and to view more of her work, visit www.saraschneckloth.com.

Michael Cassidy: New Work

FAB Gallery is pleased to host an exhibition by artist Michael P. Cassidy. Cassidy’s paintings, drawings, and prints emphasize a synthesis between traditional and experimental approaches to image making. Cassidy’s work challenges the viewer to reconsider the natural environment by skirting between recognition of image and surface. The exhibition will be on view January 15, 2009-February 15, 2009.

Michael Cassidy was born and raised in Michigan. A rural up-bringing created a deep seated connection to nature but an interest in art led him to the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan to attend Kendall College of Art and Design. Cassidy soon found his place in the fine arts department. Graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting and printmaking in 2000 he continued making spiritually based, semiabstract works. Still an avid outdoors-man, Cassidy spent his free time exploring the natural world, but it wasn’t until a move to South Carolina for graduate school that Cassidy found nature an inspiration for painting. The vastly different natural environment of the South moved him to combine memories of adventures in the rural Midwest with new experiences in the swamps and forests of the South to make landscape based paintings and prints. Cassidy received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 2004, from the University of South Carolina, where he is now an instructor of drawing, design, printmaking, and painting. Living in West Columbia, he continues to draw inspiration from the diverse Southern landscape.