Collective Dialogues

The Collective on Depot Exhibits at Turchin Center Beginning November 6

Story by Anna Oakes

Pictured from left to right: a closeup of a mixed media sculpture by Sean Matthews; Peter G. Oakley working in his studio; a painting from Dan Kaple’s “Assassins” series.

As the name implies, the members of The Collective on Depot—a three-year-old working artists’ studio located in downtown Boone—have found art to be not merely a solo endeavor, but a social one.

In that vein, The Collective on Depot will present an exhibition of new work titled Collective Dialogues at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts’ Mezzanine Gallery, located in the museum’s East Wing. The exhibition is one of three new fall exhibitions opening at the Turchin on Friday, November 6, with a free public reception from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. The exhibition will show through February 6, 2010.

“This stimulating exhibition,” reads a description in a Turchin Center brochure, “is the result of The Collective’s effort to challenge one another, experiment with new ideas and investigate alternative directions within each artist’s work through a collaborative endeavor.”

Studio members showing work in this exhibition are Jamie Carroll, Chris Curtin, Dan Kaple, Brian Knox, Sean Matthews, Virginia Nuckolls, Peter G. Oakley, Uijin Park, Melissa Reaves and Christian Smith. Travis Donovan, a founding member of The Collective who recently left to attend graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill, will also participate in the exhibition.

Brook Bower, assistant curator at the Turchin Center, is a recent member of The Collective but will not be showing in the exhibition because of her affiliation with the Turchin and because she joined the studio after the exhibition was selected by the museum. Bower works in ceramics, collage and photography.

The Collective formed in late 2006 with four original members—Curtin, Matthews, Donovan and Park—who initially leased a space on Howard Street that is currently occupied by Appalachian Voices.

The Collective moved to its current location—a mostly subterranean, unfinished space beside Black Cat Burrito—in spring 2007, and since then the studio has grown to a current membership of 11. Within the space, the artists work in a diversity of media and forms, including ceramics, mixed media, sculpture, stone carving, metalsmithing, painting, pen and ink, auditory art, music, printmaking and word art.

Members of The Collective said that creating and working under the same roof with other artists has proven to be inspiring.

“Our work is what it is because we interact,” said Oakley. “It’s the force that we try to be in each other’s lives. We try to convince each other to be artists.”

Added Kaple, “My work’s changed drastically since I’ve been here, I think.”

Peter G. Oakley’s stone carving of a 1906 Corona IV typewriter will be included at the Turchin Center exhibition beginning on Friday, November 6. The exhibition will show through February 6, 2010.

In particular, several members pointed to the motivational skills of Nuckolls, who they described as “a mother hen” of the studio and an artist who is prolific in her creation of metal jewelry and other functional pieces, such as baskets.

“Virginia was such a motivator. She was always out there doing something,” Matthews said. “Virginia lit a fire under all our asses.”

Reaves, who is based in Boone and tours across the country as a rock, funk and soul songwriter, vocalist and guitarist, said that being part of The Collective allows her to explore experimental music and sounds—or “auditory art”—without worrying about the material’s marketability.

“It’s very nice for me to get away from that and not worry about that and just be creative,” she said. “I can just be my creative self without the music industry looming over me.”

Two summers ago, The Collective participated in a group exhibition in Winston-Salem, which went really well, Matthews said. The success of that show inspired the members to submit an exhibition request to the Turchin Center. The studio submitted examples of their work to the Turchin in February and were notified of their acceptance this past spring.

“One of the things that we did find so interesting was that everybody was involved with everybody else’s work,” Bower said.

“[Part of] the mission of the Turchin Center is actually exhibiting artwork from regionally significant artists,” she added. “All of their work was exceptional.”

For the Turchin Center exhibition, The Collective members were asked that at least 50 percent of the works they show be new works and to venture outside of their comfort zones and experiment.

For more information about The Collective on Depot, email thecollectiveondepot@gmail.com. For more information about Turchin Center exhibitions and programs, call 828-262-3017.

The Members
Meet the members of The Collective and learn about what they’ve prepared for the Turchin Center exhibition.

Christian Smith (words)
Smith is an artist who constructs and deconstructs poetry. His works for exhibition include constructed and deconstructed poems and a collaboration with fellow members Jamie Carroll and Sean Matthews involving the transfer of poetry to wooden surfaces.

Melissa Reaves (auditory art)
Reaves has created four auditory art pieces in a body of work titled Perimeters. The experimental pieces have been recorded on the keyboard, are very ambient and feature very low notes, said Reaves. The pieces will be presented in controlled areas where visitors will be able to hear them. Reaves also plans a live performance of the pieces sometime during the duration of the exhibition by a chamber-sized instrumental group.

Reaves has collected sound material that she used in the pieces for about a year and spent about three weeks composing the pieces.

“I just think that you really get to see the true creative nature of somebody when you see what they can do off the cuff,” she said.

Uijin Park (sculpture)
Park has created two steel and paper sculptures and will also include five drawings for his part of the exhibition. Park is interested in the feelings of coldness and rationality evoked by the steel and warmness and emotionality evoked by the paper—and the tension between the two.

Park hasn’t created sculpture since the early 1990s, focusing instead on furniture and functional pieces. Preparing for the exhibition at the Turchin, however, has shifted his priority to sculpture once again.

“As far as I’m concerned, I’m done with functional pieces,” he said.

Peter G. Oakley (stone carving)
After working as a stonemason for nearly a decade, Oakley turned to an interest in stone carving. Working with white marble—“the whiter the better”—he recently has focused on creating stone replicas of everyday products. Included in the Turchin exhibition will be stone carvings of a styrofoam takeout box, a 1906 Corona IV typewriter and a bar of soap.

“I’m interested in the relationship between incidental forms and intentional forms,” he explained. “These things look the way they look because they’re designed to do the things they do.”

The Collective on Depot member Virginia Nuckolls, a metalsmith, stands in the studio’s welding area. The members use a variety of tools to work with media such as metal, steel, wood, paint, ceramics, screenprints and more.

Virginia Nuckolls (metals)
Nuckolls is a metalsmith who creates jewelry and other functional pieces, such as baskets. Currently, Nuckolls works primarily in copper. Her works in the exhibition include copper dogwood flowers and copper sculptural baskets.

Sean Matthews (mixed media, sculpture)
Matthews has spent the past six or seven years studying and creating altars, but he moved away from that focus for this showing for an exploration of form and materials. Interested in defining negative space, Matthews fills the negative space created by a handrail with moss. In another piece, a wooden sculpture leans against a wall—creating negative space—with another form suspended in that space by a chain.

Brian Knox (printmaking)
Knox is the most recent member of The Collective. Knox began screen printing about two months ago, beginning with designs developed using a computer. “I needed to do something new in my life,” he said.

Four of Knox’s prints will be featured in the exhibition.

Dan Kaple (mixed media, painting)
Kaple will include two bodies of work in the exhibition, the first of which include several colorful pen and ink portraits that have a cartoonish, humorous quality to them—although some do have a dark side. The second body of work is a series of portraits of infamous United States assassins—including James Earl Ray and John Wilkes Booth.

“Assassins are kind of like historical car crashes”—you don’t want to glorify them, but they’re still interesting, Kaple said. The portraits were created using hands and knifes, not brushes, to mimic the brutality of the act. They will be hung below eye level and titled for the person who was killed instead of the assassin depicted.

Travis Donovan (mixed media sculpture, ceramics)
Donovan primarily works in sculpture and ceramics and usually creates figurative pieces. For the Turchin show, Donovan experimented with abstract forms of texture. Some pieces have photographic decals imprinted on the clay.

“I’m moving away from strictly figurative stuff and experimenting more with the range of materials in ceramics,” he said.

Chris Curtin (mixed media, sculpture)
Since the early 1990s, Curtin’s work has been “an evolution of an idea of what is art to me on any given day.” His work varies quite a bit from piece to piece and has run the gamut from installation work, freestanding sculptures and whole room environments.

His part in the exhibition will be an installation designed for the space at the Turchin that features a fabricated steel sculture and a video monitor arranged to look like an eye. A video can be viewed in the monitor.

Collective member Jamie Carroll will include mixed media paintings and digital photography in his part of the group exhibition at the Turchin Center.

Jamie Carroll (mixed media, painting)
In his efforts to experiment, Carroll moved away from his usual figurative, portrait and landscape work to create an abstract painting. The painting of a dark, funneling cloud, Carroll said, represents the explosion of new ideas he had that he refined to a single point. This process, however, led Carroll to return to what he does naturally.

Working with every paint except oils and other media such as charcoal and wood stain, Carroll considers the presentation of his works to be very important.

“Paintings should be more than wall hangings—they should be more of an art object,” he said.

Although Carroll has been burned out on art shows for years, preparing for this exhibition has inspired him to begin work on a solo show.

LOCAL WEATHER FORECAST

LATEST COMMENTS FROM OUR READERS

TOP NEWS ACROSS THE NATION

HIGH COUNTRY MAGAZINE