“Verve: The 2015 Alumni Biennial Exhibition,” featuring work by Brandon Boan, Alexandra Giannell, Bradlee Hicks, Zipporah Camille Thompson, Antoine Williams and Ashley York, will open Tuesday, Sept. 1, in the Rowe Galleries. It will be displayed through Friday, Sept. 25.
Brandon Boan’s work has been shown in galleries worldwide – Italy, Russia, Brazil and Sweden – and across the United States from Portland to Pittsburgh, where he currently lives and works. His multifaceted art explores objects, space, sound, light and technology and is often created in collaboration with others, drawing concepts and content from areas as diverse as music, architecture, poetry and computer science
After growing up Germany, Greece and New Jersey, Alexandra Giannell is living and working in South Carolina, having just completed her M.F.A. at Clemson University. Her paintings range from bold portraits that bear witness to Oskar Kokoschka (an Austrian artist, poet and playwright best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes) to intricate abstractions that contemplate ritual practice and religious faith.
After studying photography and ceramics at UNC Charlotte, Bradlee Hicks went on to complete an M.F.A. in sculpture at Yale. After working as a teacher and in graphic design, editing, directing and producing jobs in Colorado, New York and China, Hicks now works as a content strategist for Earth Fare in Asheville, N.C. His current work as an artist is in video, where he draws together his fine arts training with his experience in advertising and a passion for cinema in an effort to “both imitate and infiltrate mass cultural consumption at the source, acting as both mirror and filter.”
While completing an M.F.A. at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, Zipporah Camille Thompson displayed works in solo and group exhibitions throughout Georgia and was recently awarded the Rogers Fellowship for Textile Arts for study at the Hambidge Center, an artist community in Georgia. Her densely layered sculptures and installations incorporate fur, thread, hair, plastic, fabric, twigs and branches, bones and carefully crafted ceramic pieces into tactile “primordial landscapes.”
Throughout his career, Antoine Williams has cultivated his skills as both an artist and a teacher, exhibiting in numerous solo and group exhibitions and serving as an instructor in schools ranging from regional community colleges to UNC Chapel Hill, where he recently received his M.F.A. The realities of race and class in rural America inform his paintings, in which he builds fantastical imagery and complex mythologies, influenced by the imaginative realms of science fiction and larger-than-life narratives in hip-hop.
Ashley York’s latest ceramic sculptures reflect and intersection of nature and technology. On hiking trips through Colorado, she took photographs of the great outdoors, then brought the pictures back to Philadelphia, where she is in graduate school at Temple University. With the images and her experiences for inspiration, York created metaphorical landscapes by using the latest technological advances: laser cutting, CNC milling and ceramic sculpture built by a 3D clay printer that she constructed.
The artists will be present at the opening reception for “Verve: The 2015 Alumni Biennial Exhibition” from 5 to 7 p.m., Sept. 1.