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ArtFields is a community arts non profit located in Lake City, South Carolina. We were founded in 2013 with a mission to celebrate Southern art and revitalize our small town through the arts. Our flagship event, ArtFields, turns the town into a gallery as local businesses display hundreds of artworks and artists compete for $100,000 in prizes. During the year, our three galleries feature rotating exhibitions to not only provide a place for artists to showcase their work, but also to create access to the arts for an underserved area. A robust public art collection and art education for South Carolina youth finish off our ever-growing art based programs.
Can text in digital space take us everywhere on the human map? This digital poem re-assembles a sentence spoken by Gabriel Iglesias on the documentary series Inside Jokes (2018) — 'And the next thing you know, there’s Mexicans in Canada.' The poem moves its reader across the world, through countries and territories, among its citizens, crossing borders. Nations and their demonymic forms are collected from Wikipedia. The script is written in p5.js.
Forty burnt books are presented on custom-made steel brackets jutting out from the wall at an angle similar to lecterns or rare book displays. They represent today’s undervaluing of education, the shift from analog to digital technologies, the fraught contextualization of our histories, and the destruction of knowledge. The tattered and charred pages are a visual representation of years of violence that are invisible but nevertheless have real consequences to our communities and our children’s futures. "40 Burnt Books" references the advent of the internet and the reduced reliance on books to transmit knowledge, for good or ill. Burning books is equivalent to censorship and a fear of spreading knowledge. One only burns or bans a book if the content is so offensive or dangerous to those in power. These books were already destined for the landfill, but now act as physical representations of censorship, historical wrongs, and ephemeral violence made real.
One Line Street is an ink drawing composed of one continuous line that never crosses its own path. The drawing of visual artist Overstreet "Street" Ducasse is first in the Pandemic series, which depicts ordinary people during the pandemic. Overstreet, like many visual artists, was hit hard by the pandemic. The T-shirt he is wearing, "DEEPpression", represents his work as an artist and a sign of the times. His neutral expression is a moment in time: the days following the onset of the pandemic and the premature closure of his solo show at the Cummer Museum in Jacksonville. Behind that neutral expression is all of the complexities and worries brought on by Covid and that is reflected by my choice of the one line abstraction; At first glance, the portrait appears to be a simple sketch, but draw closer -- or look within -- and the work appears as though it is a random squiggles, which represents the complex inner workings of the human mind -- or a mathematical problem.
When motion is inherent a story is unfolding. Rather than control a narrative, I invite the audience into a plot already in motion. The audience walks into the story without context, just as we encounter the complexity of our world. Is the lion a wild animal caught in the snare of the encroaching human civilization? Is it a symbol of masculinity, performing its identity with fragile bravado? Is it the desire for life itself that ripples through us all? This piece seeks to disrupt the gaze of the viewer, inviting the audience to question the projections that narrow our understanding of the world. I strive to render realism within the rigidity of stainless steel. All colors are achieved through heat, drawing forth a latent potential within the metal and transforming it into a new form that will never discolor. The transformed metal carries the complex weight of a creature that is both real and mythologized, its intrinsic power magnified by our projections and also endangered by them.