About - Art In The Park

Art in the Park: New Forms From the Southeast

About

In my teens I studied Sculpture at my high school and at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. As an undergraduate I became interested in Architecture, receiving a BA in Architecture from Yale College in 1985. In 2012, after 22 years as an architect I decided to become a sculptor. While still working as an architect I sculpted in my free time, and pursued two summer sculpture residencies. In October 2013, I stopped working as an architect altogether to start and pursue a sculpture career full time. Since 2012, I have explored a range of sculptural media, materials and subjects. I have also received three public art commissions in Washington, DC and one in Maryland for a giant endangered Bog Turtle the Art Deco Community Center in Greenbelt, MD. During this time I have renewed a lifelong interest in wildlife that lives in, on, or near the water. Much of my artwork focuses on this “water” wildlife rather than the figure. It is the beauty, power, athleticism, and for some of them their social natures that draws me to these animals.

Aaron Benson Facebook | Website

About

Benson Sculpture LLC creates sculpture worldwide with budgets ranging from $10,000.00 to $395,000.00. We are very aware of the city, state, federal and global policies and guidelines that govern all aspects of public work and function extremely well inside these parameters. We have worked with engineers, city planners, architects, legal teams and city and civic organizations to produce work. Our works have always been produced inside set budgets and we have never failed to meet a scheduled deadline. Many of our works have addressed specific issues that are particular to a certain culture, city or event. We are very innovative in developing works that not only narrate a story but we do so while adhering to fundamentals that we feel are critical when producing public work. These fundamentals are to produce a piece that creates a sense of community ownership of the work. To create works that fit in to the overall aesthetic of the community but also adds to the ever growing sense of who and what the community stands for, deems important and seeks to declare to the greater human community they are a part of. And finally to produce work that has a physical and conceptual longevity equal to that of its location.

You’re Doing Great! Size: 8’/3’/3’ Material: Stoneware, patina

You’re Doing Great was created in collaboration with the artist’s niece who made a 2-dimentional drawing of the piece being presented. After being given the drawing, the artist decided to make a sculpture from the drawing using stoneware and applying patina to match the drawing. The viewer has to be engaged in a way that creates and stimulates past memories as the primary component of the work. It's the fond walk down memory lane that we are hoping to create. There is no greater impact on humans than that of our childhood memories. The piece is designed to create good will and joy in a viewing public that is on a walk in the city park. By this engagement the viewer is also favorably impressed with not only the city of Macon, Georgia but also with Mercer University.

Jenn Garrett Website

About

With a Masters in Interior Design focusing on Mid- Twentieth Century Architecture, Jenn Garrett takes architectural approach to sculpture. The process of developing a sculpture evolves from a sketch on paper, to a scale model, to 3-dimensional computer renderings and fabrication drawings to find the most efficient and exact method of producing the work. She developed the practice of engineering her ideas through drawings while teaching technical drafting and presentation drawing as a graduate student at the University of Florida. Her work reflects time spent studying sculpture in Italy, including in-depth studies in stone carving and the subtractive process and her time growing up in Chattanooga, TN. Her latest body of artwork has been influenced by her role as mom to two children, wife to a scientist and the strong relationships she has with her extended family, many of whom reside in Gainesville, FL where her studio is located.

Aisling Millar Website

About

Aisling Millar was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1982 and immigrated to the United States in August 1994. She moved to Jacksonville, Florida in 2000 to attend the University of North Florida. In 2005 she graduated with Bachelors of Arts in Education, Cum Laude and in 2011 she graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics and Sculpture. She then received her MFA in Sculpture from East Carolina University in 2014. Aisling was the Instructor of Record for Sculpture Survey, Drawing I, Design I, and Design II at East Carolina University while working towards her MFA. Aisling primarily creates outdoor steel sculpture and has exhibited her work throughout the southeastern United States including Greenville, NC, Sebring, FL, Portsmouth, VA, Chapel Hill, NC and Kissimmee, FL. She also exhibits indoor work in both local and regional shows. She recently completed a commission of concrete mosaic benches for City of Greenville, NC, for permanent placement in the Dream Park. She has completed commissioned murals and portraits for individuals and businesses throughout Florida. She is a member of the Tri-State Sculptures, the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance, the College Arts Association, and the Golden Key International Honour Society. Millar has been awarded many scholarships throughout her studies at East Carolina University including; the Tri-State Sculpture Scholarship, the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance Scholarship, the Dean Lichtmann Scholarship, the Clair E. Armstrong Scholarship, at two Student Research Grants. While attending the University of North Florida, Aisling was the recipient of the Kris Wardlaw Scholarship for the Center of the Arts in Vero Beach, two Elizabeth Edgar Hall Scholarships, the Leslie Baddard Scholarship, and a travel scholarship to attend the 6th International Conference of Contemporary Cast Iron Art in Kidwelly, Wales. Before teaching for East Carolina University, Aisling earned teaching experience in the Visual Arts while working as the Lead Museum Educator for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, FL from 2009 – 2011 and with Duval County Public Schools as the Visual Arts Teacher at Lake Forest Elementary School of Visual and Performing Arts from 2005 – 2009. She has also worked with Art with a Heart in Healthcare at Wolfon Children’s Hospital, the Ponte Vedra Cultural Center, and Young Rembrandts. She taught a painting workshop at the Seaside Playgarden Woldorf School and has provided private instruction to both children and adults.

“Cloud Cognition” Dimensions: 8’ x 3’ x 8’

Lying down on a sunny Sunday morning, with my hands behind my head and the sky above, the clouds allowed me to travel to places unforeseen to all but me. The organic shapes of the clouds twisted and turned into the landscape of my mind. The planes that broke through the clouds carried various characters of to distant places as well as inspiration and timeless dreams. Christopher M. Lavery www.christopherlavery.com Christopher M. Lavery has exhibited his work nationally in Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, San Francisco, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Denver Art Museum, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as internationally in Columbia, Czech Republic, France, Israel, Mexico, Palestine, and Peru. In 2008, he was awarded the Emerging Public Artist Project Grant from the Colorado Percent for the Arts at Denver International Airport for his project entitled Cloudscape; a monumental scale project that won an award in 2010 from the Americans for the Arts Public Art Network. Christopher has held residency at the well-known Vermont Studio Center where he began to develop a new body of work about the rapidly developing global warming crisis and the melting of the polar icecaps. Christopher is a practitioner of a profession that is able to ask questions as a basis for its objective reality and creates works that reflect his personal questionings/observations of the world. He often researches his work by visiting the site or place that the artwork will be exhibited and is informed by the nature of a space—often influenced by the specific characteristics of the site, place and cultural connections. He is an artist who puts into his practice visual art as a philosophical way of living, stating that an “Art practice in the postmodern era is questionable and undeniably dysfunctional due to the nature of equal sensibilities developed towards undefined or lost humanitarianism.” “The Word Bubble.” Most commonly we identify a word bubble/speech bubble as a method of articulating language, conversation, thoughts, speech and dialogue in comic books. This kind of “bubble” is a graphic that lies somewhere in between a signifier that contains written language and form; it can simultaneously convey abstract information, such as emotion, through its shape. There is a coded language that has developed in the balloon form that we can quickly recognize by how it has been drawn; speech, thought, action, soft/loud spoken words, sounds from non-humans and machines, color variations, etc. Historically the speech bubble can be linked to or traced back to illustrative devices, called speech scrolls, used in early Pre-Columbian works to denote songs and sounds. As most of my work incorporates the use of sound, as either a subject or material, I find the bubble to be an intriguing form. It is both abstract and illustrative, most commonly used to denote sound. At times the sound is based on the abstraction of language carried though the word bubble. The subject I am trying to reference in this work is that of language, where the spoken becomes visual. It is a common shared experience, but those experiences are vast in number, leading to unique individual interpretations. A sound component comes from a self-designed, portable web server broadcasting a wifi signal. Any person with a smartphone, laptop, tablet etc could connect to the wifi signal and listen to audio files of field recordings, that consist of the words North, South, East, and West spoken in several different languages and mixed into a singular audio composition.

Christopher M. Lavery Website

About

Christopher M. Lavery has exhibited his work nationally in Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, San Francisco, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Denver Art Museum, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as internationally in Columbia, Czech Republic, France, Israel, Mexico, Palestine, and Peru. In 2008, he was awarded the Emerging Public Artist Project Grant from the Colorado Percent for the Arts at Denver International Airport for his project entitled Cloudscape; a monumental scale project that won an award in 2010 from the Americans for the Arts Public Art Network. Christopher has held residency at the well-known Vermont Studio Center where he began to develop a new body of work about the rapidly developing global warming crisis and the melting of the polar icecaps. Christopher is a practitioner of a profession that is able to ask questions as a basis for its objective reality and creates works that reflect his personal questionings/observations of the world. He often researches his work by visiting the site or place that the artwork will be exhibited and is informed by the nature of a space—often influenced by the specific characteristics of the site, place and cultural connections. He is an artist who puts into his practice visual art as a philosophical way of living, stating that an “Art practice in the postmodern era is questionable and undeniably dysfunctional due to the nature of equal sensibilities developed towards undefined or lost humanitarianism.”

“The Word Bubble.”

Most commonly we identify a word bubble/speech bubble as a method of articulating language, conversation, thoughts, speech and dialogue in comic books. This kind of “bubble” is a graphic that lies somewhere in between a signifier that contains written language and form; it can simultaneously convey abstract information, such as emotion, through its shape. There is a coded language that has developed in the balloon form that we can quickly recognize by how it has been drawn; speech, thought, action, soft/loud spoken words, sounds from non-humans and machines, color variations, etc. Historically the speech bubble can be linked to or traced back to illustrative devices, called speech scrolls, used in early Pre-Columbian works to denote songs and sounds. As most of my work incorporates the use of sound, as either a subject or material, I find the bubble to be an intriguing form. It is both abstract and illustrative, most commonly used to denote sound. At times the sound is based on the abstraction of language carried though the word bubble. The subject I am trying to reference in this work is that of language, where the spoken becomes visual. It is a common shared experience, but those experiences are vast in number, leading to unique individual interpretations. A sound component comes from a self-designed, portable web server broadcasting a wifi signal. Any person with a smartphone, laptop, tablet etc could connect to the wifi signal and listen to audio files of field recordings, that consist of the words North, South, East, and West spoken in several different languages and mixed into a singular audio composition.

Suzy Hendrix Website

About

“I believe in the healing power of art. I believe art brings people of different walks together; together at a fundamental level. I believe that when an underprivileged child perceives beauty in his own environment, then that child will know beauty. If he does not see beauty, he knows not of the existence of beauty and art. I enjoy creating site specific art and placing them in locations in need of beauty; hospitals, public parks, temples of worship.” Travel is her muse. Her inspiration comes directly from that. She toured Europe, Japan, North Africa, and parts of United States extensively as a saxophonist for an avant garde performance art troupe, Urban Sax. This experience was her first taste of site specific art. This travel allowed her to perform in many great architectural wonders of the world; Mont St Michel, Al Haramba, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral of New York. Her love of glass can be traced to a specific moment in time; the Chartes Cathedral of France, where she hung from the bell tower during a performance. Her love of mosaic: perhaps Barcelona, and the great muse that is Prague inspires a love of decorative arts. Her style fluctuates across centuries of muses. Currently based in Memphis, Suzy Hendrix believes in the healing power of art to bring people together at a fundamental level. She believes that art is for everyone and that everyone can be, in their own way, an artist. Suzy incorporates many different mediums into her work, including art glass, mosaic, cast glass, epoxy, steel, aluminum, fiberglass, and concrete.

Cubic Throne -

This piece is functional art. In fitting with the theme of interaction and engaging pedestrians, this throne can be sat upon, climbed upon or one may even rule a nation perched atop! A surreal spin on cubism, Cubic Throne gets a double dose of red with red tiles and pink grout. Sprinkled with stripes and bubbles, it is a playful yet functional sculpture. Fabricated in the same manner as climbing rocks, with fiberglass reinforced concrete, this piece is durable and fun. While on a recent loan in front of a library, children in particular enjoyed interacting with this piece. Cubic Throne became a popular location for “photo ops”. Some tiles are painted with glass enamels and kiln fired at 1250 degrees. This technique allows the paint to fuse into the glass, creating a permanent image.

Size: Width: 45 ½”, Depth: 33”, Height: 32”, Weight: approximately 400 lbs.

YouTunes and Preston Poe

Preston Poe Facebook | Website

About

Preston Poe a visiting artist for the Art in the Park program who will serve the first of two 11-month residencies as a featured artist of the Art in the Park program. He is a video/sound/installation artist from Tampa, Florida, who is the creator of “YouTunes,” a performance, audio art project that he bringing to Macon. Put simply, Poe spontaneously writes, plays, sings, and records songs based off of information about a person he gleans from a short questionnaire and interview.

About The YOUTunes Project:

“ YOUTunes sprang from my love of music and my desire to see the power of music re-personalized and put in service of the lives and hearts of everyday people and freed from the machine of the music industry. At its center, every song is an infinitely personal story. YOUTunes is my attempt to bring music back home.” - Preston Poe

About The YOUTunes Project:

For his first performance in Macon, Poe was given a list of local artists and musicians to contact. Through these interviews, he has greatly expanded the list based on referrals from the people on the initial list. He has made several trips to the city during his first nine months of his year long project and has spent days interviewing members of the local arts community. From these sessions, Poe has created customized songs that were performed live on March 20 at the Art in Park kick off event. He will be returning to Macon to give a workshop to high schools students and to write and perform another group of songs.