Some artists are driven to work across disciplinary boundaries, informing their work through many different areas of knowledge and culture.
One such artist is Alyson Shotz, and you’ll be able to see her work and hear her speak this month at the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Her exhibition, “Alyson Shotz: Un/Folding,” opens on Saturday, Sept. 14, with a public conversation that includes the artist and the Weatherspoons’s curator, Dr. Emily Stamey, from 5:30 to 6 p.m. and an opening reception from 6 to 7:30 p.m. The exhibit runs through Dec. 22.
Stamey notes that Shotz’s work treads a line between order and chaos. “There’s remarkable precision in each piece – whether a folded ceramic sculpture or a densely constructed thread drawing – and yet we also see elements of chance. Shotz strikes a remarkably elegant balance between calculation and serendipity.”
Readings in physics and mathematics inspire the artist’s research, as do the study of feminism and the history of domestic crafts. Shotz also combines the digital with the analog in her work. She simultaneously embraces new technology while honoring the hard work and great attention to detail needed to craft complex pieces by hand.
For the “Un/Folding” exhibition, the artist’s interest in the act of folding as a natural phenomenon, a method of inquiry, and a structural technique is explored. Works in the exhibition span the last five years of Shotz’s artistic practice.
Visit https://weatherspoonart.org/ for more information on this and other exhibitions.
