Burnsville Performing Arts Center is proud to present
Follow the Muse, featuring the artwork of K. Daphnae Koop, Marc Clements, and Ingrid Restemayer.
Show runs July 29 – September 3, 2011
The opening reception will be held at the Burnsville Performing Art Center’s beautiful 2,000 square foot art gallery on Friday,
July 29, from 6 – 8 pm.
Follow the Muse includes intricate artwork by each of these artists, each inspired by unique sources including carved wood, contemporary tribal tattoos, and the plains of North Dakota. The artists utilize mediums such as repurposed wood and glass, stone, and fiber. The commonality in all of the artwork is that each artist celebrates texture in its various forms.
Mark Clements is a painter who finds himself working in stone – more literally on stone. Clements’ 3-dimensional sculptures leave natural stone shapes untouched. His art is in patterned surface treatment, carved relief that is often gilt. His design inspiration is drawn from antique wallpapers, tribal tattoos and even crop circles. The rocks are then stacked into simple Cairns, one of the oldest forms of artistic expression. Delicate curves and florets are often thought of as gentle, temporary images. Clements manages to permanently incorporate them so perfectly with something as hard, heavy and elemental as stone that his sculptures grace the home or garden as easily as a gallery or museum.
K. Daphnae Koop is a painter who finds inspiration in the richly textured surfaces of her hand-carved wood “canvasses”. Layers of paint, color washes, metal leaf, powders, and varnishes create chapters of a theme or story, written as layers are created through build-up. Each repetitive step -- carving, honing, coloring each plank and block is as meditative as it is physically demanding. In Koop’s latest series of paintings, an element of assemblage has come in with the addition of streams of shattered auto glass. The tiny shards glisten and sparkle, while the painted wood catches light like ripples of water. The glittery attraction of the light refraction qualities betrays the sharp glass edges and heavy wooden form. The inherent paradox of light and weight, the marriage of nonrepresentational surface and solid foundation gives these pieces a presence not found in traditional painting.
Ingrid Restemayer is a fiber artist and printmaker whose mixed media work incorporates traditional hand-embroidery techniques, dyed papers and hand-pulled prints combined through collage. Her continual lines of running stitches were born out of inspiration from the Dakota plains’ frozen horizon where one finds excitement and inquiry in the slightest variation. Her work emulates this peaceful beauty in its monotony and conveys calmness through repetition. Intaglio images act as pseudo-illustrations for a kind of narrative when paired with code-like paragraph shapes formed from Restemayer’s hand-embroidery. In this age of instant electronic anything, sustainable tactics in art creation, things made by the human hand often have the power to promote further human interaction.
The vastly different mediums of carved stone, painted wood and stitched paper are exhibited together in this delicious trifecta of haptic surfaces through labor-intensive art making.
Obsessively honed facades are not the only thing these works have in common. The three artists have worked with and around each other for many years – even sharing studio space together. Their work maintains individuality, yet comes together beautifully for this exhibit.
Burnsville Performing Arts Center
12600 Nicollet Avenue, Burnsville, MN 55337
(952) 895-4685
BPAC Gallery Hours: Monday through Friday 9:00 to 5:00 pm, Saturday 10:00 am to 2:00 pm
http://www.burnsvillepac.org/
This week is busy, busy, busy at the Northrup King Building! Ingrid Restemayer Studio will be open for the “First Thursday” monthly art crawl as well as the rest of the weekend for Art Attack!
