March 30th 2007
CONTACT: Lori McMahon, Executive Director
704/636-1882

EXHIBITIONS:
Alpha Genesis: New Paintings by Patricia Rendleman in the Norvell and Stanback Hall Galleries
New Sculptural Works by Charles Farrar in the Osborne and Woodson Galleries

EXHIBITION DATES:
April 14, 2007 ­ June 9, 2007

PUBLIC RECEPTION: Friday, April 20, 2007, 6:00-8:00 pm Free and Open to All

GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday-Saturday, 10-5
Walk-in self-guided tours are welcome during gallery hours. Groups may arrange a guided tour of the exhibitions by calling 704/636-1882 at least one week before requested tour.

Intuition meets Divinity in the Spring exhibition season at the Waterworks Visual Arts Center. The new exhibit features Alpha Genesis: New Paintings by Patricia Rendleman in the Norvell and Stanback Hall Galleries and New Sculptural Works by Charles Farrar in the Osborne and Woodson Galleries. The exhibits will be on display at the Waterworks Visual Arts Center from April 14th through June 9th. The opening reception will be held Friday, April 20th from six to eight pm.

Rendleman¹s painterly works are spontaneous expressions that evoke an ³art for art¹s sake² approach. Bright white stripes, spunky spots, and bold planes of colors are flaunted in this new series of contemporary surfaces. Farrar¹s sculptural vessels of turned wood, by contrast, are far removed from such bold spontaneity. Like Rendleman, Farrar not only expands upon the qualities of a chosen medium, he intuitively liberates it. However, he does so with quiet reverence.

Pat Rendleman believes that art‹and in her case, painting‹should not attempt to represent objects or places in any literal fashion. She experiences the challenges of her contemporaries who are simplistically categorized into one of two irreconcilable forces that have taken hold since late Modern art, those being abstraction and realism.

Rendleman¹s new body of work, Alpha Genesis, investigates the beginning sources of art and contemplates the time circumstances of her own work coming into being. She advances an art historical tradition that reaches back to ancient cave drawings to the Egyptians, and streams through the work of twentieth century artists such as Matisse, Kandinsky, Picasso, Mondrian, and her own mentor, New York painter, Knox Martin.

Expressionism and Abstraction, as Modern art currents, serve as deep influences in Rendleman¹s work. The artist extends the notion of ³the genius of omission,² as exemplified by Matisse, whose pared down paintings gave importance to the spaces around the placement of simplified objects to help energize the overall painted surface.

Rendleman¹s works attempt an unequivocal flatness as an embrace of the medium itself devoid of linear perspective and narrative content. This is an approach noted by critics like Clement Greenberg as the essence of the painterly medium.

It was also an approach closer to that of non-objective art, a movement which took Abstraction to new places. Most simply put, no objects are evident in a non-objective work. The artist stresses the elements of design and uses line, color, shape, form, and texture to build on the physical properties of the materials chosen.

Knox Martin¹s early works (1953-1970¹s) involved vast intersecting geometries of their own, as brightly colored abstractions. Rendleman recounts that one of her most influential experiences came in a trip to Umbria, Italy, where she was mentored by the legendary Martin. Through his teaching she abandoned perspective and learned the importance of light in painting.

Rendleman uses mixed media, generally latex and acrylic paints, on un-stretched canvas or board. Acrylic offers the plasticity for the speed favored by gestural painters to amplify the look and feel of high energy strokes and gesturing pathways of color and line. Latex supports a raw, immediate surface texture.

The two effects maximize the painterly result that calls attention to the particular physical properties of paint. Pat Rendleman is a native of Salisbury, North Carolina who has traveled extensively and established herself as both artist and actress.

Her work is included in private collections such as the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills and the ³North Carolina Collection² at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC.

In 1990, Rendleman showed at the Waterworks; she has also exhibited in Chelsea, SoHo, the Lincoln Center, and Ezair Gallery in New York City. In the Osborne and Woodson Galleries, artist Charles Farrar¹s exquisite sculptures travel far beyond the realm of craft in their conceptual clarity and formal cohesion. Much like a tree in a forest harbors the breath of life in its organic state, Farrar¹s woodturnings also contain a special inner essence.

The artist writes: ³Wood radiates divinity. In turning, I explore the depths of its very soul ­ releasing its inner essence. It tells me what it wants to be. The extent to which I¹m able to listen determines the degree of my success.² Farrar considers the formal qualities of his pieces and seeks a delicate and purposeful balance between line and form. The rhythmic beauty of undulating wood grain, organic curves, and natural voids create a pleasing three-dimensional dialogue between these two formal characteristics. Starting with a piece of wood often weighing between fifty and a hundred pounds, the turner creates his art using a custom built Nichols lathe. Farrar¹s fascination with the many properties of wood began when he was a child growing up in Southern Virginia, an hour¹s drive from where the first English and Africans landed in 1607 at what became know as Jamestown.

The body of work represented in New Sculptural Works includes ³heritage pieces² specially created for the exhibit. The series is intended to honor the artist¹s African American ancestors during this four hundredth anniversary (2007) of Virginia¹s Jamestown settlement. Farrar has two works on permanent display at the U.S. Embassy in Madagascar and has also produced a piece for the Hewitt Collection, a group of work considered to be one of the most important collections of art produced by minority artists. Farrar will hold an artist lecture Tuesday, May 8, from 7-8 PM.

Accredited by the American Association of Museums, the Waterworks Visual Arts Center¹s mission is to offer an innovative program of exhibitions, education, and outreach that inspires and educates its regional audiences in the exploration of the evolution and forefront of contemporary art.

The Waterworks is funded by individual memberships, corporations and businesses, foundations, the City of Salisbury, Rowan County, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, a federal grant-making agency dedicated to creating and sustaining a nation of learners by helping libraries and museums serve their communities, supports the Waterworks Visual Arts Center.