found objects

Public Radio

Artists Talk with LVA: January 4, 2024

Carnegie Center for Art & History opened "Intentionally Intimate: The Choice to Work Small," which runs through March 16 & the artists, Wendi Smith, Nancy Currier, Caroline Waite, Kay Grubola, and Rachel Singel joined us this week.

Wendi Smith’s work has been exhibited regionally for over thirty years. She has been a member of local co-ops Zephyr and PYRO Gallery, as well as a supporter of the local arts scene. Exhibit credits include Four Star Gallery in Indianapolis, the Carnegie for the Arts in Cincinnati, and Zephyr Gallery in Louisville. She has taught fine arts at Bellarmine University and Indiana University Southeast.

Nancy Currier is a painter who also creates drawings and mixed-media sculptures. She grew up around art as the daughter of the esteemed Louisville painter Mary Ann Currier. She also has taught art at Louisville's Foster Traditional Academy.

Caroline Waite is from an English village called Cookham Dean, known for its famous and eccentric resident, wartime artist Stanley Spencer whose stylized scenes in the 1940s of Cookham village life and residents have hung in the nation's leading museums. He described Cookham as a “village in Heaven”.

In England, Waite taught at Northbrook College, Sussex North East Wales University Telford College, Shropshire. Since moving to the U.S. in 2001, she has lived in Texas and New Mexico but prefers her current home Louisville.

Kay Polson Grubola is an artist and independent curator in Louisville, Kentucky. Creating assemblages using natural found objects, Grubola’s work is a celebration of nature. The work is also an allegory for the natural process of human life, both its ascendance and its decline. She has shown her work nationally and internationally. 

Grubola was the Executive Director of Nazareth Arts, a regional arts center on the campus of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth in Kentucky, as well as the Artistic Director of the Louisville Visual Art Association.  For 10 years she taught drawing and printmaking at Bellarmine University and Indiana University Southeast. 

Rachel Singel is a printmaker and faculty at the Hite Institute at the University of Louisville. Rachel has participated in residencies at the Penland School of Crafts, the Venice Printmaking Studio, the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, and Art Print Residence in Barcelona. As an artist interested in working using non-toxic methods, Singel, has studied with the founder Grafisk Eksperimentarium studio in Andalusia in 2018 and worked as a resident artist at Wharepuke studio in New Zealand.

Public Radio

Artebella On The Radio: September 2

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Wendi Smith, Elegy, runs from Friday, Sept. 3 through. Sunday, Oct. 10 at garner narrative contemporary fine art and she talks with us about it this week. Tune in to WXOX 97.1 FM, or stream on Artxfm.com Thursdays at 10 am.

Smith has been a practicing artist for over 40 years, an art educator, and a gallery manager. Her work is an intersection of ritual, ritual objects, and the Natural world. She adapts reliquaries, totems, and prayer sticks to reflect the sacred quality of Nature.

There will be no reception for Elegy but the artists will be present from 5-6 pm Friday, September 10, Friday, September 24, and Friday, October 8.

Public Radio

Artebella On The Radio: May 6

Bette Levy & Kathleen Loomis are exhibiting new work together in PYRO Gallery’s new exhibition, "Reconfiguration". They joined us to talk about it on WXOX 97.1 FM, or stream on Artfm.com.

Bette Levy views the creation of her art as a continuum where every work is influenced and enhanced by previous artwork. With each successive piece of art, she is incorporating gained knowledge and capabilities. She also believes her understanding of her artwork only becomes clear after the work is completed. Levy has no pre-conceived interpretation or meaning of her work other than its form. And this often changes over time as a result of life experiences and perceptions.

Kathleen Loomis thinks of “reconfiguration” slightly differently than Bette does – for her, it’s the finding of old things and giving them new life in art. She is a world-class pack rat, acquiring stuff from the street when she walks, checking out other people’s junk on trash pickup day, accepting discards from friends, even tearing apart old books that she knows nobody will ever want to read. Loomis likes to reassemble these disparate things and see what happens when they get into small groups and start to talk to one another.

PYRO’s new exhibition, RECONFIGURATION, featuring work by Bette Levy and Kathleen Loomis, opens on May 2 and runs through May 30. The gallery is open Friday and Saturday, from 12 to 6 PM and Sunday from 1 PM to 4 PM, and by appointment.

Fiber

Vignette: Stephanie Tanner

"Up The River" by Stephanie Tanner, Mixed Media Fiber Art Metal, Wool, Driftwood, 12x60in, 2018, $600

"Up The River" by Stephanie Tanner, Mixed Media Fiber Art Metal, Wool, Driftwood, 12x60in, 2018, $600

Stephanie Tanner makes sculptures that scream out to be touched. The tactile quality of the wool she often uses is particularly alluring, but more importantly, the pieces communicate an emotional intensity that is utterly compelling.

"Holding Fast" by Stephanie Tanner, Concrete, Wool, Wood, 8x22x18in, 2018, $250

"Holding Fast" by Stephanie Tanner, Concrete, Wool, Wood, 8x22x18in, 2018, $250

“I like to think of myself as a woven word artist,” explains Tanner, “a poet that wants to hold words in my hands and show how they appeared as I wrote them. I write passionately about love, loss, longing, and mental illness. My rendering of each poem uses discarded household objects, concrete sculpture and various types of fiber (wool, yarn, fabric etc.) to move the poem from paper into this dimension.”

The recognizable objects are filled with fabric situated in forms and patterns suggestive of the ordinary contents or attachments, but the softness of the materials, including the delicate interplay of pastel colors that suggest Baroque paintings, lends a dream-like quality to the sculptures. Tanner’s formal education may have not included an art degree, but her work is nonetheless filled with academic references from history, even while it expresses complex emotional states that reflect.

“I am stubbornly self-taught in that I learned my techniques through a great deal of curiosity and experimentation. There is never a sketch or a plan…just the thought ‘I wonder what would happen if I did… X?’ and then surrender myself fully until it tells me it is finished. My goal is to bridge the gap between poetry and visual art and create a fuller sensory experience.”

“I loved the people I worked for but found the 9-5 life unfulfilling. I quit in 2008 after the birth of my daughter and jumped head first into art, pursuing a career as a professional photographer. After 9 years of photographing weddings, babies, and families my heart once again felt restless and I felt a desire to further push my creative limits. I began exploring all kinds of artistic mediums but none of them felt right for me. I had always written poetry but in 2016 I began weaving as a way to battle my chronic depression and anxiety and it quickly moved from a hobby to a full-time passion. Recently I have been working on larger pieces that incorporate my poetry, weaving, and found objects.”

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On September 29, Tanner will be part of the Louisville Visual Art’s Juried Exhibit in the 2018 Portland Art & Heritage Fair. The exhibit will be available for viewing at the Marine Hospital from 11am-5pm. Jury prizes will be awarded at 2:00pm.

Hometown: Grew up in Germany, Alabama, South Carolina, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. But for the last 15 years, I have called Louisville my home.
Education: Degree in Hospitality Management, MBA, Johnson and Wales University
Website: www.iamstephtanner.com
Instagram: iamstephtanner

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"Starships" by Stephanie Tanner, Wool, antique fish basket, 24x18in, 2018, $300

"Starships" by Stephanie Tanner, Wool, antique fish basket, 24x18in, 2018, $300

“Nowhere to Keep This” by Stephanie Tanner, Wool, vintage suitcase, 26x20in, 2018, $425

“Nowhere to Keep This” by Stephanie Tanner, Wool, vintage suitcase, 26x20in, 2018, $425


Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2018 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved. In addition to his work at the LVA, Keith is also the Managing Editor of a website, Arts-Louisville.com, which covers local visual arts, theatre, and music in Louisville.

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Mixed Media

Vignette: Curtis Uebelhor

"1894 World Geography Redacted" by Curtis R. Uebelhor, Mixed media, 12x18x1.5in, 2015, collection of Jeremy Efroymson

"1894 World Geography Redacted" by Curtis R. Uebelhor, Mixed media, 12x18x1.5in, 2015, collection of Jeremy Efroymson

When Curtis Uebelhor was last on Artebella (July 2014), we described him as a “mixed media“ artist, but the word “interdisciplinary” has since gained usage and seems perhaps more apt. Like so many creative, Uebelhor seems to have a restless imagination that is not easily contained by any one medium. He is best known for his found-object constructions:

“I usually strive to utilize my fondness for ‘stuff’ by being very selective in the objects I pick for individual artworks.  An idea may lay dormant for quite some before just the right object(s) is found or decided upon. Such is the case for ‘Latchkey # 2’ and ‘1894 World Geography-Redacted’. The keys, faux marble blocks, photograph and textbook had been in my possession for quite some time.”

"Willard Carpenter Home- Drive-by Archeology" by Curtis R. Uebelhor, Mixed media, 24x30x1.5in, 2017,  $350.00

"Willard Carpenter Home- Drive-by Archeology" by Curtis R. Uebelhor, Mixed media, 24x30x1.5in, 2017,  $350.00

“With the recent Drive-By Archeology Series I have departed from that work plan somewhat by limiting the objects used in a specific collage to only things collected at a specific site on a specific date. The series started in 2012 when I filled in as interim director of the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art and was staying in town during the week at a private residence, and then at the USI guesthouse. I collected bits of ephemera from the yard of those houses and took photos of both places. Being in that historic town and revisiting the Historic New Harmony sites and the Working Men’s Institute and its plethora of odd and interesting collections became a starting point for this series that continues to evolve. The element of chance is an important part of these pieces; how to interpret what is found to make a cohesive composition shifts my role as curator from judiciously selecting items from an existing collection of objects to quickly jurying objects in or out of a collection as they present themselves ‘in the field’. “

“Willard Carpenter Home” and “Willard Library”, both seen here, are the most recently completed works in this series.

The artist here shares two pieces, “Focus, Please Focus,” and “Le Grande Bicentennial Tribute,” that are distinctly different from his sculptures, 2-D works that use intense color and patterns of shape in a whimsical manner.

“A sense of humor or playfulness is pervasive even when tackling serious topics like climate change, gender issues and our current political scene.”

"Focus, Please Focus" by Curtis R. Uebelhor, Acrylic on canvas, 24x30in, 2017, $300.00

"Focus, Please Focus" by Curtis R. Uebelhor, Acrylic on canvas, 24x30in, 2017, $300.00

Uebelhor currently has a one-person exhibition: Hunting and Gathering, at St. Meinrad Archabbey Library Gallery in St. Meinrad, IN that continues through February 20, 2018. He also has two sculptures in: The Chair: writ small - Invitational Exhibition, University of Southern Indiana, McCutchan Art Center, which runs through February 19, 2018

Hometown: Ferdinand, Indiana
Education: BS, Art, University of Southern Indiana; MFA, Sculpture, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville; Teaching Certification, University of Southern Indiana
Gallery Representation: New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, Arts Council of Southwestern Indiana

"Latchkey II" by Curtis R. Uebelhor, Mixed media, 15x12x1.5in, 2015, $300.00

"Latchkey II" by Curtis R. Uebelhor, Mixed media, 15x12x1.5in, 2015, $300.00

"Willard Library-Drive-by Archeology" by Curtis R. Uebelhor, Mixed media, 24x30x1.5in, 2017, $350.00

"Willard Library-Drive-by Archeology" by Curtis R. Uebelhor, Mixed media, 24x30x1.5in, 2017, $350.00

"Le Grande Bicentennial Tribute" by Curtis R. Uebelhor, Acrylic on handmade paper 26x36x1.5in, 2016, $400.00

"Le Grande Bicentennial Tribute" by Curtis R. Uebelhor, Acrylic on handmade paper 26x36x1.5in, 2016, $400.00


Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2017 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.

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