SCULPTURE BY CAROLINE SMITH
+ UNIQUE PRINTS BY TERESA COLE
JULY 10 – AUGUST 15
Whitespace is pleased to announce a two-woman exhibition opening Friday, July 10 through August 22. The exhibition, Agents of Seduction, features New Orleans printmaker Teresa Cole and Atlanta sculptor Caroline Smith.
Printmaker Teresa Cole, teaches at Tulane University, New Orleans and holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute of Art, and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work represents a fine balance between science and craft manipulation from its construction to its presentation. Though many prints utilize digital aspects, she hand carves each mark on nontraditional materials, such as masonite and pegboard, to create her unique images.
The prints began as an exploration of patterns and illusion. Incorporating many qualities inherent to the science of optics, her work investigates notions of ornament, decoration, and beauty. Through elegant layering and magnification, she examines how the repetition of patterns is used to distort information to elicit a complex sense of security. The prints thus create a safe space where the viewer can be captivated, persuaded, and seduced to contemplate the complexity and layers of contemporary existence.
In the same space, Atlanta native and Tulane University graduate Caroline Smith examines human existence through large, organic sculptures. Smith’s work finds inspiration in primitive and animalistic motivations found deep within human nature. She portrays the fundamental struggle in expressing the deep desires of the heart through the prism of the conscious mind. Her curvaceous and leafy creatures flow in familiar human gestures to tempt viewers to reconnect with their primal instincts while reminding them of the humanity so easily dismissed in others. Smith aims to “pry at those uncomfortable, awkward edges of life, between animal, plant, and human.”
Her sculptures juxtapose course earthenware, silky porcelain, and shiny gilded ornament, as a representation of the hidden beauty in the everyday life. Hostile and tender, fierce yet vulnerable, fearsome and fragile, the creatures are entangled in their own internal and external struggles.