A reception for artist Karl Schwiesow is slated for Saturday at the Oats Park Art Centre from 5-7 p.m.
The event also features a gallery walk-though and reception for Schwiesow’s exhibit which is displayed in the Classroom Gallery.
Karl Schwiesow’s “pressplay: Recent works” will run through March 24.
Schwiesow was born and raised in Homer, Alaska, where his art experience began in his father’s metal fabrication shop and in his mother’s yarn shop. As a child, Schwiesow said he was surrounded with creativity and resourcefulness. Boats and all types of marine and industrial materials were constantly being deconstructed, reconstructed, and adapted to suit new purposes.
“My work is a brake-down of what I know of a thing though a synthesis of found and manipulated objects in conversation with hand built clay forms,” he wrote on his website. “I take note of the original function and concept of things, but become unfamiliar through contextual shifts. I deconstruct and reconstruct vernacular. Found objects and forms begin to exist with equal measure of industrial, domestic, or structural association with an overlay of organic touch.
“I cut, combine, layer, pinch, attach, stitch, perforate, bind, suspend, clamp, lift, peg, and twist until original function and context becomes a starting point for dialogue between our shared cultural experiences and assumptions. The work is both formal and object based dependent upon the viewer’s engagement and cultural understanding in order to appreciate them as art-objects.”
Also showing is Kevin Bell’s exhibit in the E.L. Wiegand Gallery until March 24. A talk and reception for Bell is March 10 from 5-7 p.m. Bell’s exhibit consists of painting of the new American West is and titled “Contingent Lands: Place in the Contemporary West.”