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A group show of Andrew Blanchard and Teresa Prater, November 2-December 6, 2007.
Aberrant: Deviating from the right or normal way.
Teresa Prater
The digital photographs I am presently exploring are reminiscent of the
narrative charcoal drawings that I created over a period of ten years.
Moving from charcoal drawings, to traditional photography, then to
digitally manipulated photographs I strive to engage the viewer with
seductive figures, distorted reality, and dark undertones. Working
solely with the figure as subject matter, references to mythology,
archetypes, fairy tales, and human relationships are intertwined among
the images. Using textures and images of nature as a component of the
layering, the work evokes both aesthetic appeal and mystery. I am
interested in having the viewer both startled and awed
Created using Photoshop, the final products are a mix of scanned silver
gelatin prints and digitally created photographs. All initial
photographs are mine and I use family, friends, and models as
resources.
Teresa Prater is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Studio Art and Chair
of the Department of Art and Design at Converse College, where she is
responsible for teaching classes in painting, drawing, design, and book
arts. She received her BFA from the University of Tennessee in
Knoxville and her MA and MFA in painting and drawing from the
University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She is a versatile artist
working with charcoal, oil paint, photography, and artists’ books and
has won numerous awards over the years. Her most recent work is highly
manipulated digital photographs that focus on the figure.
Her drawings, paintings, photographs, and artist books have been shown
in twenty-five one-person exhibitions and over 100 exhibitions
nationally and in Mexico and Switzerland. Teresa has curated four book
arts exhibitions and has taught workshops in the book arts for several
years. Teresa was one of six visual artists selected by the city of
Spartanburg to participate in the Cultural Exchange Program in
Winterthur, Switzerland, where she exhibited her charcoal drawings and
participated in a one-week residency. She has been a fellow at the
artists' residencies Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The
Hambidge Center in Georgia.
Andrew Blanchard
My current body of mixed-media prints deals almost exclusively
within the self-narrative genre. Simply put, I make work about myself.
The people I have had contact with, places I have inhabited, and the
journeys taken have all shaped my existence in ways I can barley
describe audibly. Rather, in an attempt to give the viewer a visual
taste of the rich experiences I have had as a boy and a man, the prints
that grace this exhibition space are all based upon various topics dear
to my life. Though many included in this grouping are current themes
that are presently weighing heavy on my psyche, my aim is to use found
imagery that the viewer can relate to and quite possibly place
themselves in their own self-narrated adventure.
Appropriation is quite simple as it applies to my personal history
and current artwork. Growing up in an antique and junking family, I was
accustom to spending many long hours in dusty buildings biding my time
flipping through old books, stacks of records, important-looking
documents and the like. Also, vintage advertising on aged memorabilia,
as well as old signage, really puts me in a reminiscent state;
conjuring up my youth spent without folks my own age amidst piles of
other people’s stuff. I feel like I am an old man much more so than
feeling the short thirty years I have lived thus far. To use found
imagery is an act of paying homage to my youth , recollecting bits and
pieces and reprocessing them to create a visual story.
I have a passion for spotting old books, which are my main source
of imagery, such as the 1965 Boy Scout manual I bought on Main Street
in Spartanburg, or the hymnbook Stephen Long claimed first at the
Salvation Army. These records of history and the images within hold
several more meanings than what you may interpret at face value. To me,
it’s a whole world of metaphor and analogy I can salvage and manipulate
to tell you my life’s adventure.
Andrew Blanchard was raised in Waveland, a small beach community on
the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Like most boys who grew up close to a
beach, he fished and swam until the ring of the dinner bell. At a young
age, he became fascinated with the bold, curvilinear woodcuts of
another Coast native, Walter Anderson. From this early inspiration, he
established his love for printmaking.
Blanchard earned a B.A. degree from the University of Southern
Mississippi in 2000. Shortly thereafter, he traveled to Paris, France
to work and study with Frederic Possot, a master lithography printer.
This experience solidified his desire to be a lifelong
artist-printmaker. In 2004, he earned his M.F.A. degree from The
University of Mississippi in Oxford, MS.
In the last three years, Blanchard has been included in over two
dozen national and international juried printmaking exhibitions,
including the 30th and 31st Bradley International Printmaking and
Drawing Exhibition, the last four Parkside National Small Print
Exhibitions and the Harnett Biennial of American Prints. He has won
awards for his lithograph-silkscreen combination prints in the Sumei
International Printmaking Exhibition and the Delta National Small Print
Exhibition. In addition, his prints have been collected throughout the
United States, as well as in France, Bulgaria, South Korea, and the
United Kingdom. Throughout 2007, several of his lithographs are
traveling from Wales, U.K. to London, England, then to Belfast, Ireland
as part of the Stone-Plate-Grease-Water International Contemporary
Lithography exhibition. Blanchard is currently the Assistant Professor
of Printmaking and Photography at Converse College in Spartanburg,
South Carolina.
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