Bradbury Gallery hosts Fall 2009 Senior Exhibition, opening Dec. 3

Nov. 23, 2009 -- The Bradbury Gallery will host the Fall 2009 Senior Exhibition Thursday, Dec. 3, at 5 p.m. The Bradbury Gallery is located in Fowler Center, 201 Olympic Drive, Jonesboro. Held at the end of each fall and spring semester, the exhibition features graduating students from the Arkansas State University Department of Art. This semester, the exhibiting artists will be Jason Abbott, Nicole Davis, Allie Lewis, and Candace Van Assche. The exhibition runs through Saturday, Dec. 19, and is free and open to the public.

Jason Abbott was born in Jonesboro, graduated from Paragould High School in the spring of 2002, and enrolled at Arkansas State University that fall as a mechanical engineering major. In the spring of 2003, Abbott changed his focus and became a student in the College of Fine Arts. As an art student, he served as a staff photographer for the ASU student newspaper, The Herald, and was a member of the Art Student Union. His work has been shown at the Daily Grind, a coffeeshop in downtown Jonesboro, and he has donated work for the Lifeline to Art auction, which helps to support a materials scholarship for art students.

Abbott’s work has gone through many manifestations. Ultimately, he has settled on photography and painting, primarily. He plans to receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in studio art in the spring of 2010. He explains his work by saying, “For as long as I can remember, I have always been interested in astronomy and the night sky. My series of paintings and photographs links two aspects of this for me. With my photographic series, I attempted to capture sights of the nighttime environment and the sublime beauty of the night sky. One of the things I found interesting while choosing locations for these photographs was that no matter where you go, there seems always to be some source of artificial illumination. To me, artificial illumination spoils the night sky but can also be a thing of beauty; hence, I have included streetlights in all my photographic works. While my photographic series was focused on the night sky, my series of paintings are a more imaginative take on what is above the atmosphere.  Most of these paintings are of locations which are purely from my imagination.”  After graduation, he plans to work as a photographer in the Northeast Arkansas area.

Nicole Davis is a Texas native who entered the Fine Arts program at ASU in January of 2006. She has received several portfolio scholarships and will participate in a study in Greece and Turkey, funded by a Middle Eastern Studies Grant, this December. Davis has been included on the ASU President’s and Chancellor’s Lists since she began her studies at ASU. She is a member of Sigma Alpha Lambda honor society, where she served as secretary, as well as the Art Education Club, serving as treasurer. In 2006, her work “Perspective” was chosen by David S. Rubin, curator at the San Antonio Museum of Art, as one of the works in the Juried Student Exhibition held in the Fine Arts Center Gallery. She has also exhibited in the 2006 and 2007 Delta Contemporary Art Gallery holiday exhibitions. Davis states, “After graduation, it is my goal to pursue a teaching career in the public school system, where I hope to inspire students to learn and to reach their full potential. I look forward to instilling art appreciation and promoting creativity and open-mindedness in students.” Next May, she will receive her Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in education.

In discussing her work, Davis said this set of work, “…is based on that which threatens to destroy what society tells us is sacred.” She continues, “I allude to the psychological reliquaries or sacred compartments of the soul that hold what is most treasured. The texts and icons in my work provide clues to content and interpretation. My arrangements are schematic, inviting the viewer to move into a space of speculation. My work is influenced by the history of society’s teachings of what is deemed good or evil, as well as everything I see, feel, and experience.”

Allie Lewis, born in San Antonio and raised in North Dakota, is working toward a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis in art education. She has been included on the President’s List and the Dean’s List and has received athletic honors since attending ASU. She has earned three scholarships from the Department of Art and has twice earned a “Friends of the Arts” art materials award. She is a collegiate scholar in the Gold Key International Honors Society, a STAR Scholarship recipient, and is a recipient of the Comfort Systems USA Scholarship. Lewis has twice participated in “Wine and Art,” a local cultural event, and has exhibited numerous times in the Arkansas Young Artists Association in Little Rock.

Lewis served as the president of the Art Education Club, as a member of the Art Student Union, and as the secretary for the Anime Club. She also participated in the ASU summer program at the Scuola Lorenzo di Medici in Florence, Italy, in 2008, and she feels that the experience had a major impact on her view of art and art history.

In a conversation about the personal nature of her abstract work, Lewis explained her work is “a response to the death of someone close to me. My reaction to this loss was a combination of both rational and irrational feelings, and my drawings were a way to express this difficult experience.”  She said, “Creating art has been a passion of mine since I could remember. In high school, my focus became more and more about art, and when I got the opportunity to travel to study art around the United Kingdom, that passion grew tenfold. When college presented itself, I knew there would only be one thing that I could do as a career.”  After graduation, Lewis plans to teach art in the Arkansas public school system and then move to Italy, where she hopes to pursue her dream of studying art restoration.

Candace Van Assche, formerly Scott, was born in Mountain Home. She began her studies at ASU in 2004 when she received an art portfolio scholarship from the ASU’s Department of Art. In December of this year, she will earn her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a studio emphasis in photography and printmaking.

Van Assche started her college career as a printmaking student interested in hand engraving methods. While she still continues to make prints, her recent work has become almost exclusively photographic.

Van Assche has spent much time experimenting and combining new digital photographic processes, with particular interest in a combination of High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging and stereographic projections. HDR is a technique which requires multiple photographs of the same image using different exposures. Those exposures are then combined, taking certain aspects of each of the original photographs to create a single image that has far greater detail and contrast than is possible alone.

Recently, Van Assche has begun combining HDR processing with a unique kind of photography called stereographic projections (aka spherical panoramas.)



She says of these distorted yet curiously beautiful works, “I often prefer to curve the image into a sphere to give the illusion that it is a picture of a small world. Many other photographers also do this, and these images are often nicknamed “Tiny Planet” photos.” Van Assche currently lives and works in San Diego.

Bradbury Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and 2-5 p.m. on Sunday. The exhibition is free and open to the public. For additional information, contact Les Christensen, director of the Bradbury Gallery, at lchristensen@astate.edu, or call the Bradbury Gallery at (870) 972-2567.
           

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