October 12 – November 15, 2018
Exhibition Opening: Friday, October 12, 5-8pm
Members’ Preview: Friday, October 12, 11am-1pm
At Creative Growth, innovation happens everyday. The non-directive philosophy, a staff of skilled instructors, professional quality materials, and over 160 individual artists working across media generates a ripe environment for creative exploration and artistic invention. Matters at Hand showcases the innovative and contemporary approaches to wood, ceramic, and textiles developed by artists in the Creative Growth Studio.
An exhibition of entirely three-dimensional works of art, Matters at Hand focuses on the range of singular forms, novel combinations of media, and one-of-a-kind perspectives made material by the artists’ hands. Bringing their distinctive touch to traditional media are Daniel Gardiner, whose embroidered quilt is hand-stitched with his signature circles of red and black, and Dan Hamilton, whose slick, loaf-like shapes in clay are at once uncanny and undeniably formed by Hamilton’s hands. Sher-ron Freeman integrates various found ephemera - keys, beads, bells, and trinkets - into her accumulative knit baskets, creating bright vessels of texture while the textural combinations found in Jo Beal’s wrapped sculptures bring an exuberant effect to the small organic shapes over which she entwines metallic threads with fluffy pinks and reds. Also included in the show is an extra-large wooden boom box by John Mullins, a painterly and massive rendition of his favored subject, and the chunky, colorful ceramic interpretations of squirrels and shoes crafted by Jorge Gomez.
Continuing the site-specific program, Nick Pagan will create an installation of hand-built, oversized sculptures of everyday objects that recreates the experience, in the artist’s words, of what it was “like when you’re a kid and everything seems so big.”
