April 21 — June 2
Ginger Frye, Candace Hitt, Christan Mitchell, Benjamin J. Netterville, Chris Wallace, Andrew James Williams

Ginger Frye has spent the past two years exploring the life of her grandfather by documenting the effects that time and trauma have had on his body. As she created this very intimate work it evolved beyond holding onto the life of her grandfather, and became an exploration of the universal experience of mortality. She began reaching out to more people to understand how time affects the body, as well as to look at how the aging body is perceived in society. Her thesis work is a contemplation of age, trauma, mortality, and how these things affect the bodies that we live in. Frye has become increasingly interested in how a person's life manifests itself in the flesh, and how much one can tell about a life lived by simply viewing the body. In American society aging is seen as a negative experience that should be hidden from view and avoided, but Frye believes that growing old is a privilege that many people will never get the opportunity to experience. In her work she is subverting the idea that aged bodies should be devalued by displaying them larger than life in their natural state.

Candace Hitt's work explores the figure in a surreal aquatic atmosphere. It is a physical representation of the emotional transformations that we experience. She uses water as a medium of reflection and distortion. The moments captured allow the viewer a true emotional and environmental experience.

Christan Mitchell's work strives to entwine the topics of psychology and femininity. Her illustrations of lace represent the act of toiling endlessly on a task that is distinctly feminine. Christan's work examines the female psyche and condition in a scientific and histrionic manner.

Benjamin J. Netterville's work typically delves into two facets of what interests and influences him as a southern artist; one is the humor of word play, whereas the second is a comment on current sociopolitical issues. In the case of his thesis, he intends to shed light on the current U.S. housing market and its volatility as well as the strength and determination of people to survive within their means. The use of the shotgun house directly references his regional influence of the southern Louisiana landscape, while the visual humor of the work can be seen as a veneer to mask the serious nature of displacement and poverty. His intention is to create a dialogue among the viewers. The contradiction between the seriousness of the issue and the inflated foolishness of the image is meant to refresh the audience's personal awareness of the crisis at hand.

Chris Wallace's work explores narrative as a form through the repetition of subjects, and the relationship between recurring shapes, colors, and figures. There is no specific story that the work describes, rather what is presented to the viewer is a deconstructed space that presents just enough information for the viewer to reconstruct and make sense out of the chaos. I examine the possibility of taking two or more disparate and fragmentary elements with no obvious relation to one another, and allowing them to find common ground, to somehow co-exist. Not in harmony, as might be the traditional painter's preoccupation, I prefer to allow the objects of my paintings to try and contradict and negate themselves, but compromise, creating uneasy juxtapositions.

Andrew Williams continues to believe that everything is connected. By acknowledging a collective human history that includes innovation, communities, societies, struggles, governments, wars, and traditions we inevitably dictated our present reality. Within this reality patterns of cause and effect can be seen in recurring cycles. This balance seems to be a governing force of our known universe, yet for some reason I was raised in a reality that constantly pushes the limits of both the physical and creative worlds while all but erasing the barrier that once lay definitively between them. This body of work explores the effect of scale and production on the tension of earth and the human perception. Embracing the chaotic process of ceramic while creating abstract parts that reference the building blocks of life I have been able to create an installation that comments on its own history and evolution. Whether this is a viewer's first time experiencing the installation or the twentieth time, the installation seems to embrace the variety of perceptions it can be viewed in.