Exhibition dates: February 17 - March 10, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday, February 17 from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Cammie Bello, images from research
Erin “Cammie” Bello graduated from UNCA in 2019 with a double major in Art History and Classical Civilizations. Her research on Dionysiac imagery and the cathartic response to ancient Greek theatrical performance respectively, were both published in the Journal for Undergraduate Research. While attending UNC Asheville, Erin received multiple awards, including the Guy Cooper and Elizabeth Ray Award for Ancient Mediterranean Studies, and the S. Tucker Cooke Scholarship for Art History.
After graduating with distinction in both majors, she was accepted to the Art History MA Program at John Cabot University in Rome where she was awarded a scholarship for study. During her time in Italy, she interned with Dr. Bernie Frischer during his Rome Reborn project before the project’s debut to the public in 2022. Her research in Rome was dedicated to the toga, a pivotal garment of the ancient world, and its depiction in statuary. During her stay she also received her PADI diving certificate and began to explore research into underwater archeology in the Mediterranean. She completed her MA in 2021 with distinction in her major.
Erin returned to Italy again in 2022 to complete the post-graduate certificate program for the Association for the Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA) in Amelia. The summer was dedicated to the theft and plunder of the art and artifacts from vulnerable countries destined for museums and private collections. Following a previous interest while at John Cabot, Erin pursued underwater cultural heritage loss across the Mediterranean, and along the East coast of the United States. In conjunction with other scholars in the field, such as Dr. Peter Campbell, she documented the criminological factors associated with subaquatic cultural heritage loss.
Since returning to the US, Erin has worked through an online company tutoring in Latin, Ancient Greek, Art History, and Ancient Studies. In addition to preparing her research for publications, Erin has created content for a historical online video series, All About the Ancient World and is currently a private art liaison between individual artists and businesses to connect buyers with desired pieces.
Lillian Bailey Hoover, Abbaye de Lehon , Oil on Dibond, 2019
Lillian Hoover earned her BFA from the University of North Carolina Asheville in 2002 and her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005. Her paintings are included in several public collections including Baltimore Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and DC Commission on Arts and Humanities. In 2020, Hoover received a Pollock-Krasner Grant. Other honors include the Bethesda Urban Partnership’s Trawick Award, multiple Individual Artist Awards from MD State Arts Council, the Bethesda Young Artist Painting Award, numerous selections as semifinalist for Baltimore's Sondheim Prize, and a travel grant from Philadelphia’s Center for Emerging Visual Artists. She has been awarded fellowships to attend residencies at I-Park, Vermont Studio Center, Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists, Monson Arts Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recent solo exhibitions include Presence In Absence at Goya Contemporary (2021) and In This World at BlackRock Center for the Arts (2018). Her work has appeared twice in New American Paintings and was selected for the cover of the 69th issue. Hoover teaches drawing and painting at MICA and Towson University.
Sally Garner, Rippled Generations, Paper raffia and Cotton, 2021
Sally C. Garner is a native of the Southeast, growing up in North Carolina and currently living in Georgia. She has been creating soft sculpture installation works ever since first learning that her love of fiber could inform her sculptural work at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. From a series of art that was first conceived in school, Sally crocheted art installations using non-traditional fibers to create works that incorporate both the nostalgia associated with traditional crocheting and the contemporary appeal for artwork that abstracts metaphors and enchants the senses.
After graduating with an BFA in Studio Art, Sculpture in 2013, she continued to live, work, and create art in the mountains of North Carolina until 2020, when she decided to begin graduate school. Sally is currently seeking her MFA in Studio Art, Textiles at Georgia State University, in Atlanta, GA, where she is experimenting in fiber and textile techniques that were previously unavailable to her — weaving, wet-felting, knitting via machine, fabric dying and sewing. Her work is now trying to seek a connection between humanity and the environment, taking a critical eye to the changes we have tried to make so far. Weaving has become the primary tool that she wants to explore this concept with because of its metaphorical connection to knowledge.
Huan LaPlante, Death Song, charcoal, wood, plant-dyed fabrics, fiber paper, thread, and pieces of my grandfather’s shirt, 2022
Huan grew up on the beaches of North Carolina with an appreciation for art passed down from their mother and grandmother. They graduated from UNC Asheville in 2018 with a BFA in painting and an Undergraduate Research Award for their solo thesis exhibition, “Historically Apathetic”. After graduating, they spent the next two years as a mentor at a residential treatment center for adolescents, also attending artist residencies at Penland School of Craft and Chateau d’Orquevaux. Previously working solely with watercolor, Huan now experiments with a range of ephemeral materials such as charcoal, repurposed fabrics, and handmade recycled paper. Their works have recently been shown at the 701 Contemporary Center for Art South Carolina Biennial, the AXA Art Prize in New York, and their MFA thesis show at Clemson University, REFIGURING: reclamation of self and space.
Tatiana Potts, Indispensables, Incessantly, installation, 2021
Tatiana Potts is a native of Slovakia. In her early twenties she studied English for two years in the United Kingdom, and then worked for a non-profit organization in Slovakia. Later, she completed a BA degree from Clemson University with majors in Spanish Language and International Trade. She studied printmaking at the University of North Carolina, Asheville and received her BFA in 2009 and her MFA degree in printmaking at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2016.
She was awarded the Herman E. Spivey Humanities Graduate Fellowship. She spent a month in Poland through UTK exchange program with the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wroclaw. Last summer, she participated in a one month lithography workshop at Tamarind, NM. She exhibited her work nationally and internationally. One of her books is currently on view at the PrintAustin Contemporary Printmaking show, TX. Her work is in a number of galleries, publications, and collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, UK; Printmaking Today magazine, UK; International Print Center New York, and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan. Currently, she teaches at Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC printmaking and book arts.
Hunter Stamps, Mutable, Wood-fired Ceramic, 40 x 20 x 20 inches, 2022
Hunter Stamps is Professor of Ceramic Sculpture in the School of Art & Visual Studies at the University of Kentucky. The abstract mixed media sculptures he creates incorporate ceramic, glass, encaustic and rubber. His sculptures have appeared in over 170 juried, invitational, and solo exhibitions, including galleries and museums across the nation as well as China, Germany, Austria, Croatia, Mexico, and Spain. Images of his work have been published in periodicals such as Ceramics Art and Perception, Ceramics Monthly and other scholarly journals, newspapers, and exhibition catalogues.
Hunter’s work is held in permanent collections at the Cultural Center of Kapfenberg, Austria; Keramik Museum Westerwald of Hohr-Grenzhausen, Germany; The Sculpture Factory and the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute in Jingdezhen City, People’s Republic of China. He is the recipient of the 2017 Merit Award from the South Bend Museum of Art; 2012 First Place in the Material Mastery Exhibition at the Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery, Lindsborg, KS; and the 2011 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship Award from the Kentucky Arts Council in Frankfort, KY. His research has been supported by 17 intermural grant awards and 11 extramural grants: including 5 Artist Professional Development Grants from the Great Meadows Foundation.
Hunter received his M.F.A. from Indiana University in Bloomington in 2005 and his B.F.A. from the University of North Carolina in Asheville in 2002.
Kevin Watson, Madness of Waor (War), AI Digital Composite, 2023
Born and raised in eastern North Carolina, Watson earned his BA in Social Sciences from Western Carolina University, and later a BFA from the University of North Carolina Asheville (with Honors, Departmental Distinctions and Distinction as a University Research Scholar). While studying digital photography at UNC Asheville, Watson developed an innovative visual aesthetic combining photography and clay sculpture to create surreal composites. Instead of relying on models and sets, these digital composites allow Watson the freedom to create the subjects, objects, and environments he chooses, which in turn are used to explore themes that inform his work.
Watson’s composites are visual and allegorical metaphors of the human condition, set in a fictional world of madness known as the Caernival. Watson uses this world as a vehicle to challenge and transgress ideas of normalcy, beauty, deviance, and power. His work is grounded in rebellion and inversion, using opposites as a way to transgress. (For example displaying “deformed” and “ugly” as “perfect” and “beautiful.”)
Watson is a child of Deaf parents (CODA) and was exposed to ideas of “disability,” “otherness” and “normalcy” early on, themes which have become central to his work. He uses these personal experiences to inform the Caernival’s sense of “the broken body,” ideas meant to challenge our own thoughts about “what is normal?” and “what is broken?” He is currently working on a new series about the Caernival body, the Intimacy of Sickness, which explores sickness and disease, focusing on infection, plague and metaphorically the human as virus.