Printmaker and painter Dustyn Bork of Batesville brings his colorful, abstract and geometric work to the Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas with a solo exhibition, “Dustyn Bork: Complex Shapes and Empty Space.”

The Arts & Science Center invites the public to a free reception 5-7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 24, 2019. The exhibition is on display now in ASC’s William H. Kennedy Jr. Gallery through Saturday, April 13, 2019. Simmons Bank and the Arkansas Arts Council are the exhibition’s sponsors.

The 21 pieces in the exhibition — acrylic on shaped panels and framed seriographs — are inspired by architectural forms.

A native of Monroe, Mich., Bork is an associate professor of art at Lyon College in Batesville.

Stoveworks will be having an opening reception for Fluctuating Meridians Friday, Feb 22nd from 6-9PM at 1404 Cowart St., Chattanooga, TN.

The work of Erika Harrsch, Andrew O’Brien, Peter Hoffecker-Mejia, and Collective (Amy Sanchez Arteaga and Misael Diaz) explore the political, social, and environmental realities resulting from the territorialization of North America. Through the collision of perspectives, from the individual to that of the collective, Fluctuating Meridians presents the relationships, misinformation, and generative possibilities that exist in the evolving border region, its contiguous places, people, and things. A multi-media installation, the 3rd in Stove Works’ 5-exhibition satellite series, invites visitors to witness, participate, and even collaborate as Fluctuating Meridians unfolds.

A meridian is, essentially, a line on the surface of the earth, and visible at a manageable scale on globes and maps. They are continuous lines traveling North to South passing through exact coordinates. These lines are unchanging, they are immutable, and thus provide fixed points to aid in navigation and location. If one knows where there is, one can deduce where here is.

The body also has lines inscribed on and within it. Some are similar to the longitudinal lines assigned to the surface of the earth. They are means of understanding, of parsing out the unknown into more compliant units. These are made obvious in the shifting growth patterns of hair, under the surgeon’s scalpel, and encoded in morphological stereotypes. On the inside, lines follow similar linear and quantifiable form as well as nonlinear even extra-ordinary trajectories. In modes of Eastern thought, a meridian is an energy pathway, streaming through the body affecting well-being in part or in total. These lines actually work to make the body lineless, an interconnected web of vital energies aggregating in the whole physical being. You. and Me.

So Fluctuating Meridians is an examination of lines, those that define, demarcate and divide, blend and enrich. Chattanooga is a vital tangle of these paths of information. These five artists explore separations and connections, unseating viewer’s presumptions so that we may reemerge, and fluctuate ourselves, disentangling the knot.

This exhibition will facilitate the examination of different questions asked across the US:

Who is and who is not American? Why is this question asked and should it be asked?
What cultural characteristics, geographic locations, environmental factors, histories, politics, etc. compose the individual, the group?
What is other? What is an outsider? An insider? And is assimilation a requirement for citizenship, belonging (or inclusion)?
What internal thresholds, affinities, erasures, censorships, and expressions take place in the construction of personal identity?
How do all of these questions manifest and affect the multiple consciousnesses of humyns not included within the narrow-normal?

The work of Erika Harrsch brings policy and people into the shared space of the gallery, relocating an ICE detention center for undocumented migrant youth from there to here. Her installation questions how do there-places exist in the collective imagination and what forces give form to our imaginings. Much like the real people, places, and things that order, wall, are abstractions. Harrsch’s facsimile proffers an environment that is neither real nor fake, a transitional space to witness and become detained; in body, in mind, and in solidarity.

__

Andrew O’Brien’s photographs are wayfinding devices. They are markers, celestial signatures that identify the final resting place of unidentified border-crossers overtaken by the extremes of their journey. Using a sextant, a maritime instrument, O’Brien conflates perspectives; that of the landscape, those traveling through it, gallery visitors, the artist, and the stars.

__

Peter Hoffecker Mejia designs repetitious constructions, cadenced and patternized, utilizing forms that shift as they are encountered. According to Claire Bishop, a prominent art historian, there is never a single perspective. In fact the perspective that art, particularly painting, was produced from antiquity to the present embodied the narrative proclivities of those in power; the European, male, overseer. Hoffecker-Mejia challenges the laminated voice of History and colonization. By Pete’s telling of his story and its mish-mash of experience, the stories of art’s origin are thrown into question and the boundary between what we know and what we don’t become that much more indeterminate.

__

Cognate Collective’s work fixates on the Mexico, United States border. The collaborative team of Amy Sanchez and Misael Diaz’s Cognates fixation agitates this geopolitical line, lifting it off the map and exploring the cartography of the social.

Programming –
Opening reception – Feb 22nd – 6-9PM
Conversations with the artists – Feb 23 – 4-6PM
Objects We Carry, Stories We Tell – Feb 28 – 5:30-7PM
Reading Group – March 3 – 2-4PM
Beyond the Border – Panel Discussion 5:30-7PM
Sideshow Slideshow – March 8 – 7-9PM
Chess Ninja – March 9 – kids 1-3PM – adults 4-6PM
Reading Group – March 10 – 2-4PM
La Paz Market March 14 – 5-8PM
Reading Group March 17 – 2-4PM
Final Look March 17 – 5-7PM

Fluctuating Meridians will be open from February 22 until March 17, 2019.

www.stoveworks.org

“Migration Now” is a traveling exhibition of a limited-edition portfolio of handmade prints that address migrant issues from the organizations Justseeds and CultureStrike. Justseeds is a decentralized, worker-owned cooperative of artists throughout North America who are committed to social, environmental, and political engagement. CultureStrike is a broad network of artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and other cultural workers who work to transform public views and sentiment around migration, and to fight for equity and full inclusion of migrants and their communities in America’s social fabric.

The artists represented in “Migration Now” explore the migration of people around the world, with special attention to those who have come into the United States from south of the US-Mexico border, including young people known as “Dreamers.” These prints address the underlying social, economic, and security conditions that force individuals to leave their homes, as well as conditions encountered during the journey and at the border. At a time when our nation is consumed by debates over immigration policies, these artworks powerfully remind us of our common humanity and of the forces that drive many millions of people to travel and relocate around the world.

Vanessa Gonzalez is a printmaker, ceramicist, and bookmaker who regularly incorporates mixed media into her work. Born in Texas and raised in Mexico, Gonzalez was always exposed to Latinx art and culture, which inspired her to become passionate about its rich cultural traditions. She currently lives in Memphis, where she earned her MFA at Memphis College of Art and currently works as an elementary school art teacher at a local charter school. Her artwork has been exhibited not only in the United States but internationally as well, in Mexico, Australia, and Germany.

“Mi Casa es Your House” explores multiple factors of Gonzalez’s Mexican-American identity, celebrating and exploring her Mexican heritage and her acceptance of her dual citizenship status with iconic imagery, mixed with expressions of confusion regarding what is required to be part of a nation, an everyday struggle with immigration, assimilation, discrimination.