repurposed materials

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.

Interdisciplinary, Installation

Vignette: Shane Smith

 "Ed Reimann Visitation" by Shane Smith, Windows & mirrors & projector & screen & fake flowers & paint on wood, 12x24x16ft, 2016, NFS

 

"Ed Reimann Visitation" by Shane Smith, Windows & mirrors & projector & screen & fake flowers & paint on wood, 12x24x16ft, 2016, NFS

It is a misnomer that visual artists are less articulate, that a talent for expressing themselves in visual terms somehow comes at a price: the inability to verbally engage intellectually or socially. It is as hoary a cliché as the notion that great art comes from madness – Van Gogh, or that Monet painted as he did because of his failing eyesight.

So when Shane Smith offers the following as his most recent artist’s statement:

Preachin' to the choir,
just a liar vyin'
for retention.

"Learning Curve" by Shane Smith, Chair and table and bed slats and nails, 17x3x5 ft, 2016, NFS

"Learning Curve" by Shane Smith, Chair and table and bed slats and nails, 17x3x5 ft, 2016, NFS

We should take care to assume he has no more to say. In a 2017 interview with Not Random Art, the Interdisciplinary Artist refers to his own mental health issues as, “…more helpful than hindrance…but really, this, film and design are what help form my aesthetics.” Smith has a lot he can say about his work, beginning with this honest appraisal of where it comes from.

Smith’s work is rustic and playful, polished and serious. “Learning Curve” suggests that we should climb the ladder, but it also feels as if you might be positioned at the bottom of a roller coaster. Are we to think that getting ahead in life puts us at risk at being crushed by the weight of responsibility? In the installation entitled “Ed Reimann Visitation” we encounter a tableau that touches upon themes of mortality and remove through media that reach beyond the deceptively simple yet highly evocative objects placed before us.

The Wilmore, Kentucky native has recently returned to Kentucky after several years in Pennsylvania, and in 2017 exhibited at Pilot Projects and AUTOMAT in Philadelphia, and the Petzel Gallery in NYC. 

The artist in the basement.

The artist in the basement.

Hometown: Wilmore, Kentucky
Education: BA, Asbury University/NYCAMS
(New York Center for Art and Media Studies); 
MFA-PAFA (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts)
Website: www.shaneallansmith.com
Instagram: @shane.smith.art

Scroll down for more iimages

"Pretty Pretty" by Shane Smith, Paint on socks and five pocket organizer, 1x2.5ft, 2017

"Pretty Pretty" by Shane Smith, Paint on socks and five pocket organizer, 1x2.5ft, 2017

"Caskpit" by Shane Smith, Paint on wood on wood, 8x3.5x3.5ft, 2016, NFS

"Caskpit" by Shane Smith, Paint on wood on wood, 8x3.5x3.5ft, 2016, NFS

"This Ain't Water" by Shane Smith, Paint on colander, jug, hose spray nosel, funnel, 3x1.5x1.5 ft, 2017, NFS

"This Ain't Water" by Shane Smith, Paint on colander, jug, hose spray nosel, funnel, 3x1.5x1.5 ft, 2017, NFS

artsquared-artebella-1.jpg

Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2018 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved