June 28 – August 10, 2019
Exhibition Opening: Friday, June 28, 5–8pm
Live Music by: DJ David Wiley
Member’s Preview with Artist-Led Tours: Friday, June 28, 11am–1pm
At Creative Growth, the artists lead the way. The studio’s non-directive philosophy, coupled with support from fellow contemporary artists, has provided artists working in the studio with the opportunity to develop bodies of work that are exhibited, collected, and celebrated worldwide. Inclusion in major contemporary art exhibitions and collections is essential for any artist’s career and creative development, but just as important is the artist’s presentation and interpretation of their own oeuvre. Unfiltered: An Artist-Curated Exhibition will transform the Creative Growth gallery into an experimental curatorial space as five artists take over the gallery with installations of their work.
We have much to learn from the artists at Creative Growth. By curating exhibitions of their own work, Kim Clark, Carlos Perez, Ray Vickers, Joanna Beal, and Lynn Pisco will reveal the depths of their individual processes and provide insight into how each artist conceptualizes their creative expression over time. Kim Clark, Ray Vickers, and Lynn Pisco are each making selections from their prolific bodies of work. Clark has been attending Creative Growth for 19 years and in that time has developed a distinctive body of paintings, drawings, and textiles that translate celebrity culture into expressively hand drawn and embroidered portraits. Vickers’s decade of artwork similarly derives from pop culture. In his case, the themes and graphic style of comic books and action movies provide fodder: super-hero masks and bat-like ink blots multiply over planes in tessellated designs; stylized faces, eyes, hands, and arrows are arranged in energetic and narrative patterns; and a series of work focusing on vengeful and dead bunnies reads as frames in a graphic novel. Pisco is choosing several themes in her corpus of cartoons to present on the ramp.
Carlos Perez’s oeuvre is populated by ceramic, drawn, and sculpted monsters around which he weaves complex mythologies of good and evil. For the exhibition, Perez has created a rare large-scale wood and textile sculpture that continues the monsters’ stories that he has been telling at Creative Growth since 2008. Joanna Beal will also be presenting new work for Unfiltered. Best known for her densely wrapped fiber sculptures, Beal is using her curatorial platform to introduce a new ephemeral modality in which she builds layers of paint, tape, and paper to install site-specifically.
Accompanying Unfiltered: An Artist-Curated Exhibition is a group show of work made by artists in the Creative Growth Saturday Youth Program.
