For its April exhibition at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios, if ART, International Fine Art Services, will present two solo exhibitions. Winthrop University gallery director Tom Stanley will exhibit “The Neighborhood,” hard-edged narrative paintings completed in the past two years. University of South Carolina MFA candidate Anna Redwine’s exhibition, “Life In One Breath,” will consist of 24 white panels with quick, expressive sketches of insects, birds and other animals. The show will be Redwine’s MFA thesis exhibition.
The opening reception for the exhibition is April 7, 5:00 – 10:00 p.m. Opening hours are Saturdays, 11:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.; Sundays, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m; and weekdays 12:00 – 7:00 p.m. or by appointment. For more information or to make an appointment, contact if ART’s Wim Roefs at (803) 238-2351 or wroefs@sc.rr.com.
Stanley (b. 1950), a Texas native, is among the Southeast’s most prominent contemporary artists and curators. The South Carolina Arts Commission recently selected a five-panel frieze by him for the state art collection. Stanley exhibits throughout the region and beyond, including Europe. He was included in the 2004 South Carolina Triennial, and his work was published twice in the prestigious publication New American Painting.
Redwine (b. 1978), a native of Louisiana, received a BA in English from the University of Mississippi, then came to the University of South Carolina’s art department to pursue graduate studies. She showed at Columbia’s Lewis & Clark Gallery during Vista Lights 2005.
With his new “The Neighborhood” series, Stanley revisits a theme he explored in the 1990s, using elements of imagined and real neighborhoods to create narrative paintings that invite the viewer to take a stroll. The series also is a continuation of Stanley’s paintings about real and mental journeys. In his 1990s series “En Route to Hamlet” he used visual clues from Highway 74 in North Carolina. In his series “Across the River” of 2003 and the “Floating” series of 2004-2005, Stanley explored in fanciful fashion the mysterious, unexplained 1920 drowning death of his grandfather in the Mississippi River at New Orleans. Several Floating paintings will be in the Vista Studios show.
Redwine engages in a balancing act between drawing and painting, as she has for several years. On panels of 2 x 4 feet with white surfaces of rabbit-skin glue and powdered marble, she draws quick, expressive and lively renderings of insects, birds and other animals. She created the works from life, watching the animals outside as she drew them in a minute or two. If the animal moved, the movements became part of the rendering; when the animal left, the drawing was done.
“In East Asian calligraphy,” Redwine says, “this approach is referred to as painting in ‘on breath’. In this body of work, I am using the verb ‘to draw’ to mean not only to place marks on a surface but to extract or distill, in this case the essence of the animal.”
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