Pyro Gallery will be the venue for "Art Quilts", a solo exhibition of new work by C.J. Pressma from October 5, 2007 through November 10, 2007. "Photographs carry with them a strong residue of objective reality left over from a 19th and early 20th century understanding of the photograph as an accurate record of reality. This residue is what makes photography so believable and at the same time so deceitful," says Pressma. The combination of photographic imagery and the craft of quilting adds layers of tradition and meaning to this body of work. Pressma is a longtime Louisville artist who founded the Center for Photographic Studies, an internationally recognized alternative school of creative photography. He studied with Minor White at MIT and with Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University where he received an MFA. Pressma is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Photography and the Kentucky Arts Council’s prestigious Al Smith Fellowship. He is a founding member of the Pyro Cooperative Gallery and has served as its Administrative Director twice since its founding. Concurrent with the Art Quilt exhibition in the Main Gallery will be an exhibition of wearable artfeaturing the collaborative fiber work of Pressma and Mary Dennis Kannapell in the Garden Gallery (Pyro Gallery's downstairs gallery) . This body of work is an outgrowth of a partnership between Kannapell and Pressma and is called "Wrapture, The Wearable Adventure" to create and market art clothing and other home decor. The show features scarves, jean jackets, wrap skirts, and kimonos of Kannapell's ornate fiber design that employ Pressma's photos on fabric.
The exhibition features 12 large-scale quilts of artfully composed photographic fiber work, the largest of which is 72"x80". Pressma’s quilts explore the use of repetitive pattern, color, and positive/negative imagery, using the inherent power of photographic subject matter that presents fantastic version of reality.
Pressma’s 2005 exhibition at Pyro Gallery, "The Weave Suite Revisited: A Fiber Collaboration", was a large series of collaborative works by Pressma and 16 other prominent artists, each using Pressma’s "Weave Suite" images as the basis for the work. "Art Quilts" is Pressma’s first solo venture into fiber design, a body of work he has been producing for over a year. "My last exhibition involving 16 other artists whetted my appetite for the tactility of fiber and the ability to scale these fiber works to sizes much larger than my work on paper. This exploration of art quilts is a natural evolution; a series of images I have been working on and learning from for over three years," says the artist of this body of work.
LouLife [1]
Posted On: 21 Sep 2007 - 2:13pm
LouLife [1]