Please join us for our Lee Gallery exhibit, Yours Mine Ours, featuring MFA students Jason Adams, Carly Drew, and Ann Pagelow Kaplan, now showing through Friday, April 5. And please join us for the Reception on Friday, March 29, 6:00 - 8:00pm and Artist Talks on Wednesday, April 3 at 2:00pm.
This week marks the opening of Clemson University’s Masters of Fine Arts showcase, “Yours Mine Ours.” The show is a culmination of the artists’ graduate careers and will exhibit sculptures by Jason Adams, drawings by Carly Drew, and photographs by Ann Pegelow Kaplan in the Lee Gallery. Though all artists are very different respective studio media, the works complement each other well. The pieces emanate personal service and social interaction, personal history and interaction with the natural landscape, and a reflection on isolation in accordance with a personal connectedness in the world.
The curious gallery goer will be confronted most immediately by Jason Adams’s large steel and canvas structure that captures a hope-filled essence of human connectedness. Through performance demonstrations, viewer interaction and process, Adams hopes to “re-calibrate ordinary activities to engage personal and social mechanisms of care.” The interactive sculptures become a vehicle by which a connection is made between the spirit and outward gestures, tying together inward care, concern and respect with outward demonstrations of service, humility and selflessness. The artist calls upon the viewer to allow for transformation; to seize everyday trials and opportunities as a means of selfless giving and outreach.
Viewers will be struck by the raw beauty of rural landscape and historical acreage that characterize the drawings of Carly Drew. Her rendition of detail and meticulous application of fine lines weave together layers of landscape that conflict and harmonize with one another. The works touch upon themes of both personal history and native history and how those histories link an ephemeral landscape to the ever-changing present property. She highlights how the economy, agriculture, science and both the rural and domestic life effect and change the land. The realistic drawings spark a conversation centered on memory, earthen environments and the emotional attachments to both.
Ann Pegelow Kaplan's photo series, vast and beautifully daunting, will allow the viewer to transcend the gallery and travel to Jerusalem, Iceland, and the artist’s hometown of Charlotte, N.C. She hopes the viewer finds the “surprisingly ordered beauty among people and the settings we live in” amidst the chaos of daily contemporary life. Pegelow Kaplan uses these extraordinarily alluring locations to foster and encourage meditation on the experience and place within the world, paralleling the constructs of isolation and interconnectedness. The artist will be exhibiting video work that alludes to the movement and harmonious nuances that characterize these contemplative destinations.
“Yours Mine Ours” will be up from March 25 to April 5 with a reception taking place on March 29, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. The artists will also provide an open discussion about their work on April 3 at 2:00 p.m. in the Lee Gallery. All events are free and open to the public.
