Professor Emeritus Mary Stewart Opening Solo Exhibition at Venvi Gallery
Parable of the Jar, digital collage plus drawing. 36”H x 80” W, 2018. Unframed. Mary Stewart: Same Stream Twice
February 1, 2019 – March 1, 2019
Venvi Art Gallery
FSU Art Professor Emeritus Mary Stewart is opening a solo exhibition, Same Stream Twice, during the First Friday event of February at Venvi Art Gallery. The exhibition features multi-media works exploring the complexity of change. As Stewart questions in her artist statement, “what forces drive change—in nature and in ourselves? What is the rate of change, and how might it vary from person to person or from site to site? How does change in one person or object trigger change in another?”
Professor Emeritus Mary Stewart taught in the Department of Art at Florida State University from 2006 to 2017. Her work has been shown in over ninety exhibitions nationally and internationally, and she has received two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants for collaborative choreography. She is also the author of Launching the Imagination: A Comprehensive Guide to Basic Design, a best-selling design textbook. She received a Southeastern College Art Association Excellence in Teaching Award in 2010, the FATE (Foundations in Art: Theory and Education) Master Educator award in 2009 and the National Council of Arts Administrators Award of Distinction in 2008. Most of the large-scale images in this show were completed during an artist’s residency at the Jentel Foundation in northeastern Wyoming.
Building on her background in printmaking and drawing, Mary Stewart combines digital photography with drawing and painting to create large scale invented landscapes and investigations of water that range in size from 20 x 30″ to 44 x 124.” Derived from photographs taken in Costa Rican rainforests, Continuum and Ricawater suggest connections between the macroscopic with the microscopic.
Same Stream Twice, digital collage plus drawing. 44”H x 90” W, 2018. Unframed. $5000.
Stream Twice evokes the complexity and flow of both time and a river. Lines and Spaces and Cadence celebrate patterns and colors found in the high plains of Wyoming and South Dakota. Surface Tension reveals the complexity of water through multiple layers of information. A new series of encaustic paintings titled Pentimento combines historical Italian texts with glowing layers of wax-based paint.
As noted by ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, experience is ever-changing: even when visiting the same location, we cannot enter the same stream twice.
Pentimento 1-16, 12×12” each, 2018. Encaustic on wooden boards, cherry frames.