Projective Eye Gallery, Fall 2021
Earthbound Riches: Stacy Kranitz and Caroline Hatfield
August 16-October 29
Reception: Thursday, September 2, 6:00-8:30 pm
The Projective Eye Gallery presents works by Stacy Kranitz and Caroline Hatfield in Earthbound Riches.
Working within the documentary tradition, Stacy Kranitz makes photographs that acknowledge the limits of photographic representation. Her images do not tell the “truth” but are honest about their inherent shortcomings, and thus reclaim these failures (exoticism, ambiguity, fetishization) as sympathetic equivalents in order to more forcefully convey the complexity and instability of the lives, places, and moments they depict.
Kranitz was born in Kentucky and currently lives in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. Kranitz is a current Guggenheim Fellow. Additional awards include Time Magazine Instagram Photographer of the Year (2015), the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography Award (2017) a We, Women Grant (2020) and a Southern Documentary Fund Research and Development grant (2020) Her work was recently shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2019). Her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) to Me, will be published by Twin Palms.
Caroline Hatfield’s creative practice utilizes sculpture, installation, photography, and writing to explore themes of landscape and science fiction. After completing a Sculpture BFA at The University of Tennessee, she earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from Towson University. Hatfield has been included in numerous publications and has exhibited artwork nationally at venues such as the Mint Museum in Charlotte and The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington, DE. Recent solo exhibitions include Land and Water at 500 X Gallery in Dallas, TX and Unearthing at Target Gallery in Alexandria, VA. Hatfield is a recipient of the Trawick Contemporary Art Prize as well as a South Arts Cross-Sector Impact Grant. She lives in East Tennessee, where she works professionally as a woodworker and educator.
"I explore the concept of landscape as medium, rather than subject," Hatfield writes in her artist statement. "Depicting strange, desolate environments and sublime forces, my work references the abstracted, altered land of our world while shifting outwards towards a science fictional realm. Sculptural landscapes composed of industrial references, geological formations, and mutable material accumulate into form, while emanating an energy of transformation and process. Elemental models, miniatures, and depictions of alternative ground are found in the balance of presence and absence, creation and destruction, artificial and organic, potential and waste."
Spring 2021
Working Title 2021
January 22 - February 26
This exhibition featured recent works by faculty and staff in UNC Charlotte’s Department of Art + Art History and included a diverse array of work, from still-life paintings to digital design. Working Title: 2021 offers us insight into what faculty have been working on in their own studios during this most unusual time. Exhibiting artists include Malena Bergmann, J.B. Burke, Keith Bryant, Bobby Campbell, Jane Dalton, Shelley Ellis, Cynthia Frank, Heather Freeman, Maja Godlewska, Aspen Hochhalter, Eldred Hudson, Anna Kenar, Kit Kube, Andrew Leventis, Jonathan Pellitteri, Marek Ranis, Kristin Rothrock, Thomas Schmidt, Erik Waterkotte, and Deborah Wall.
See photos from this exhibition in Rowe Galleries in Fall 2020.
Stefanie Dykes: Signs + Gestures
March 19-June 18
Stefanie Dykes: Signs + Gestures exhibited a selection of three of the artist’s collaborative, print-based projects: Signs of the Times 2009, Token Gestures 2013, and Great Salt Lake Ephemerides 2019. Dykes’s collaborative projects are extremely well-researched, centered on a carefully considered theme or question, involving a wide range of artists often from all over the world. Each project is produced by Dykes using a combination of both traditional and digital graphic processes. Dykes takes a key role in the production of her collaborative projects, often requesting only a drawing or digital image from the participating artist, to be generated into a matrix and printed by the Master Printer, Dykes herself. The three exhibited projects included works by over 30 different artists from all over the United States and abroad.
Stefanie Dykes is an artist, printmaker, and curator based in Salt Lake City, Utah. She is co-founder of Saltgrass Printmakers, a print studio, gallery, and Salt Lake City institution since 2003. She has curated print exhibitions with the Hong Kong Open Print Studio and has exhibited at Impact Conferences (the International Multi-disciplinary Printmaking, Artists, Concepts and Techniques) in Dundee, Scotland; Bristol, England; Barcelona, Spain; Estonia; and Hong Kong. Dykes has received multiple artist grants at both the state and federal level.
Fall 2020
No Redactions
Through January 8
Sheryl Oring transforms spoken words into visual entities. In so doing, she provides more personal and diverse perspectives on public opinion while giving a more empowered presence to individual voices. These unredacted transcriptions, taken during interviews with random volunteers, act as platforms for different voices and characterize the broad scope of our national conversation.
In 2004, with support from the First Amendment Project (Oakland, CA), Oring staged the first performance in her I Wish to Say project. Motivated by her belief in our Constitutional right of free expression, Oring created this project as a way to amplify the many voices that she felt were not being heard in this country. I Wish to Say is a multidimensional project where Oring sets up a portable office - complete with a manual typewriter - and invites people to dictate postcards to the President. Once a performance has concluded, Oring produces facsimiles of the transcriptions and mails the original postcards to the White House. To date, nearly 5,000 postcards have been sent to the President as part of this project. Performances have occurred around the country and, thanks to a grant from the Creative Capital Foundation, saw two national tours. Last March, Oring visited UNC Charlotte and staged three I Wish to Say performances. Nearly 40 responses were recorded and are included in this exhibition.
As an added component of this exhibition, Oring created 15 new designs that will be shown on five digital billboards located in and around uptown Charlotte.
Sheryl Oring is an artist, author, and educator. Currently, she is the Chair of the Art & Art History Department at Wayne State University in Detroit. She previously served as an Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses in the New Media and Design curriculum and in the Lloyd International Honors College. She earned her M.F.A. in Visual Art from the University of California, Sand Diego and her B.S. degree in Journalism from the University of Colorado, Boulder.