Eating Grapes with a Fork and Knife
November 29, 2016 – January 8, 2017
Opening Reception and Artist Talk:
November 29, 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Winston-Salem-based artist Elizabeth Alexander describes herself as a domestic archaeologist. Her sculptural work transforms the signs of status and cultural relics such as decorative wallpapers, antiques, architectural details and heirlooms. As she alters found objects of aesthetic beauty, she uncovers and reimagines stories of the American Dream.
For Alexander's 12 x 12 exhibition, the artist creates an elaborately reworked period room as a contemporary response to SECCA's historic spaces, gardens, and architecture.
Artist Talk hosted by Mary Anne Redding, 12 X 12 Juror: Assistant Director/Curator, Turchin Center for the Visual Arts.
About the Artist
Elizabeth Alexander is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in sculptures and installations made from paper and found objects. She holds degrees in sculpture from the Cranbrook Academy, MFA, and Massachusetts College of Art, BFA. She has fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the St. Botolph foundation, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and was awarded the title "Best Artist of Boston" for 2014 by Improper Bostonian magazine. Her work has been highlighted and reviewed by publications such as Hyperallergic, School Arts Magazine, Boston Magazine, The Boston Globe, Art New England, The New England Journal of Aesthetic Research, Santa Barbara News-Press, The Detroit Free Press, New Glass Review, Open Letters Monthly, and Berkshire Fine Arts. She is currently Assistant Professor at the UNC School of the Arts.
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