Welding and watercolor: New art exhibit debuting in Carson City

The Capital City Arts Initiative announces its exhibition, Works: Some Water Some Welded, with artwork by artists Susan Glaser Church and Stephen Reid at the city’s Sierra Room located in the Carson City Community Center, 851 E William St. The exhibition is available to the public starting Friday and through June 30. CCAI will host a reception for the artists from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday in the Sierra Room.

Susan Glaser Church, a native Nevadan, was raised on her family’s ranch east of Elko. The junkyard was her playground, and it was there she developed an interest in rusted and repurposed metal. She learned to weld while helping her father repair damaged machinery during the haying seasons. She studied at the Academy of Art in San Francisco and joined the California Blacksmith Association and expanded her tools to include some metal forge work.

Now that she’s living back on the ranch in eastern Nevada, found objects and fabricated metal have become the basis of most of her work with a theme of rural issues often running through her sculptures. To create her art, Church uses traditional forging, plasma cutting, and MIG welding.

“The history and evolution of rural America is chronicled in junkyards throughout the West, and the relics I find there are the basis for many of my sculptures,” Church said. “Like a magnet to iron, I seem to have an affinity for anything rusty. The patina of time gives obsolete machinery and broken tools a second life in the work I create. I use this medium to depict many of the elements of living with the land and enjoy the serendipity and whimsy of using found objects to compose my artwork. It is a way of honoring the past while contemplating the future.”

Stephen Reid is an artist living in Dayton. His work spans the disciplines of painting, sculpture, installation, and printmaking. While living in Japan, he became aesthetically drawn to Sumi-e drawings and their humble figure/ground compositions. This led to the use of ink and watercolor to investigate the self through viscera and absurd conditions. This body of work is further influenced by Reid’s exposure to various physical and psychological traumatic occurrences, experiences that have fueled an exploration of competing concepts: vitality and mortality, beauty and repulsion. Through abstraction, these images provide an interesting minimal space for inquiry.

Reid received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. While pursuing a career in art, he has held numerous positions including in the military, aerospace, teaching, and currently for the Nevada Arts Council. Reid’s work has been shown in the U.S. and Japan. His paintings reside in the VCU Medical College as well as several private collections.

The Sierra Room is open to the public during Carson City official meetings including the first/third Thursdays, 8 a.m.-5 p.m., and Monday-Thursday, 5-8 p.m. For Sierra Room access, call 775-283-7421, or check meeting schedules at www.carson.org/government/meetings-and-events.

The Capital City Arts Initiative is an artist-centered organization committed to the encouragement and support of artists and the arts and culture of Carson City and the surrounding region. The Initiative is committed to community building for the area’s diverse adult and youth populations through art projects and exhibitions, live events, arts education programs, artist residencies, and its online projects.

For information, visit CCAI’s website at www.arts-initiative.org.