Power. Privilege. Status. Business as usual?
*Photo above: Bob Trotman, Stain, 2014.
October 11, 2016 – November 13, 2016
Opening Reception:
October 11, 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
In an allegorical setting that suggests a corporate office, SECCA presents sculpture and video works by Bob Trotman. Trotman's wooden figures of businessmen harken back to traditions of carved religious figures and nineteenth century "show figures" while commenting incisively on contemporary symbols of power. As an artist and son of a banker, Trotman's installations ask us to see, in his words, "the elaborate posturing of power, privilege, and pretense that secretly, or not so secretly, shape the world we live in."
About the Artist
Bob Trotman was born in Winston-Salem, NC in 1947. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Washington and Lee University and for 35 years has maintained a studio in the foothills of Western North Carolina. Self-taught in art, he has received two NEA grants and four grants from the North Carolina Arts Council. His work is in the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The North Carolina Museum of Art, The Weatherspoon Museum of Art, The Mint Museum of Art, The Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design, and The Museum of Art and Design in New York, among others.
About 12 x 12
12 x 12 artist salon series presents 12 artists from North Carolina, the 12th State. Each Salon is a pop-up exhibition and conversation with the artist. The series schedule consists of three exhibitions per spring and fall seasons in 2016 and 2017, beginning March 1st, 2016. At the end of the salons, a group exhibition in our Potter Gallery will bring together all twelve artists.
The twelve artists in the series represent a diversity of artistic practices and cultural backgrounds. At salon events, each artist will share ideas and processes of their studio practice in the midst of recent, new, or site-specific work presented in SECCA's Preview Gallery. Each artist will discuss their experience first-hand, inviting the public to ask questions and to engage in conversation. Like a studio visit, these salon events are a social space for the discovery and discussion, providing invaluable feedback to artists and insights to those who come to experience them.
12 x 12 gives artists from across North Carolina a public platform for continued artistic development and recognition in the place where they live and work, and beyond. At the same time, the series aims to push conversation around contemporary art forward and to consider the significance of localism as a curatorial framework. What does it mean to these artists to be working in the South and Southeast today, especially after the Internet and Globalization?
The 12 x 12 artists were selected by Cora Fisher (Curator of Contemporary Art, SECCA) and four guest jurors: Linda Dougherty (Chief Curator & Curator of Contemporary Art, North Carolina Museum of Art); Lia Newman (Director and Curator of the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College); Marshall Price (Nancy Hanks Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University); and Mary Anne Redding (Curator, Turchin Center for the Visual Arts).
An arts initiative sponsored by the Flow Foundation