Events

On View: November 21, 2024 – February 1, 2025

Public Reception: November 21, 2024  5:30 – 7:30PM

Artist Statement:

“I work in oil on panel or canvas, preferably from life, as the nuances of light captured by the human eye exceed the capability of a single photographic exposure. I find this facilitates a more painterly approach. I believe that still life narratives can be contemporary and not just a reflection of nostalgia for a vanished past. A lemon may have symbolized transience in a Dutch still life, but in my work, it can play a variety of formal and domestic roles in addition to being a code for the 17th century. The same objects recur in in different roles, and the table becomes a stage, or, in postmodern terms, a field of signs and signifiers. Still lifes provide endless opportunities within a studio, while plein aire landscape painting requires travel. Landscape is my most abstract work, with a direct response to an environment. For forty years, I painted largely plein aire landscapes in trips to Italy and Vermont; however, since 2019 my continuing interest in photography and my use of a new limited palette has led to my current series of photo-based downtown landscapes, undertaken during the COVID shutdown. My work is usually small in scale, as I like the intimacy of a small painting as well as the enhanced visual weight of the individual objects. The brushstrokes are also more apparent in a small picture, counting for even more, as does the frame that completes the piece—a lesson I learned from Robert Kulicke, whose small still life paintings had a strong impression on me. He also taught me frame design, construction, and finishing techniques, as well as his concept of “eclectic framing”—the use of historical designs in conjunction with contemporary work.”

About the Artist:

Peter Jones is a figurative painter with a deep respect for the abstract accomplishments of the 20th Century. He grew up in the artists’ community of Woodstock, New York, where his mother painted portraits and his father painted mural commissions for the Federal Government projects during the Depression. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 1969, and focused on still life painting in the early 70s during his first teaching experience at Sullins College. Following seven years as art director of Vermont Life Magazine he came to Louisiana Tech in 1980, and taught there for 31 years. During that period he had two one-man shows at A.M Adler Fine Arts in New York City, and one-man shows at Amherst College and in Woodstock, New York, Charleston, West Virginia, Charleston, South Carolina, and Charlottesville, Virginia. He had a 25 year retrospective in Ruston in 2005 and an exhibition of still lifes at the Alexandria Museum in 2006. Since his retirement he has continued to exhibit still lifes and landscapes in group shows in Louisiana and national juried shows. In 2023 he had a retrospective exhibition at ULM’s Bry Gallery.

Image:

Gardenias with Peach in Hand
(Ovid’s Judgement of Paris)
Kulicke cast Louis XIII reproduction frame
2005

Julie Crews is an oil painter. She grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, but has called many other places home. A few include northern California, which taught her how to ease into her 20’s; Louisiana, which enriched her southern vision for ten years; and Huntsville, Alabama, where she now lives with her husband and five children. She operates an open studio and gallery in a 122-year-old cotton mill, repurposed as Lowe Mill Arts and Entertainment.

Julie paints what takes her out of the studio: the life it takes to nurture a family. When she is in the studio she escapes certain domestic tethers, but on the canvas before her remain the scenes of her life. Fires burn in the backyard. Cars wait at a red light. Children swim and leaves settle on the forest floor. Weather, traffic, landscapes encountered while running errands around town, and her interactions with the people closest to her influence her work, naturally. But recreating these scenes gives permanence to the emotional undercurrents of her life.

I’ll Be Right With You is an ongoing narrative of the pursuit of living a well-curated life, and even though curating her emotions is one of her most challenging charges, Julie Crews does not hold back. With works entitled I Can Do Hard Things and Wake Me Please When This is Over, she is hopeful that every soul viewing the exhibition I’ll Be Right With You will find work that resonates with them in a deep and meaningful way.

About the Exhibition:

Angela Fraleigh’s paintings explore the rich history of academic and avant-garde art, focusing on themes of gender, sexuality, femininity, and power dynamics. Her work intertwines realism and abstraction to create lush, complex pieces ranging from intimate portraits to monumental figure paintings that reimagine women’s roles in art history, literature, and contemporary media.

Fraleigh’s work challenges viewers to reconsider the passive roles of female characters in art history. “What if the female characters we’ve come to know from art history – the lounging odalisques, the chorus that whispers in the background – present more than a voyeuristic visual feast? What if these characters embody a flickering of female power at work? Can we see these passive characters as subversive and powerful? And if we do, how might if affect women today and of the future?” – Angela Fraleigh

About the Artist:

Born in 1976 in Beaufort, SC, Fraleigh earned her MFA from Yale University and her BFA from Boston University. Her solo exhibitions have appeared in Hirschl & Adler Modern, PPOW Gallery in New York, Inman Gallery in Houston, Peters Projects in Santa Fe, and James Harris Gallery in Seattle. She has also created site-specific projects for the Edwards Hopper House Museum, the Vanderbilt Mansion Museum, and the Everson Museum of Art, among others. Fraleigh currently lives and works in New York, NY, and Allentown, PA, where she is a Professor at Moravian University.

On view May 23 – August 3, 2024