Surfacing: Solo Show

"Atlantic Center for the Arts features a storyteller who finds language “unreliable”.  “Surfacing” is an intriguing exhibition that combines the two and three dimensional works of Gainesville, FL artist, Erin Curry. Pieces included in this display are the result of her fascination with marks, traces, and codes drawings can contain, as she grapples for means to decode the space around her.

Curry’s work is a combination of drawing and sculpture with a consistent reference to storytelling.  Within her art, she expresses her fascination with language and the difficultly in translating experiences adequately.  “The fullness of experience is too complex”, says Curry, “the present moment, memory, and our expectations all intersect. Try as we might, something is always lost in translation.”

 â€œSurfacing” is the third exhibition within the newly created alt_space gallery. The gallery name, short for alternative, was formed to feature Florida artists working in the genres of installation, emerging media and other non-traditional art forms.  The exhibition includes two recent series: “what I might have said” and “News”.  Both collections derive their forms from paper objects: the first from origami balloons, the second from the Arts section of The New York Times.

On her process, Curry explains, "What I might have said, responds to a paper origami balloon I kept in my pocket over several weeks. The paper balloon functions as vessel for breath, as well as potential container for words and phrases that cannot be adequately articulated. The air in them becomes pregnant with possibility. The drawings borrow their compositions from the creases left in an unfolded balloon. The marks found in each panel are systemized codifications of text from an old book never read. The marks become asemic, suggesting story and cadence, but denying specifics. They abstract into constellations, map-like and star-like at once.”

News is a collection of tracings of the arts sections of the newspaper onto translucent mylar. The pages fill with empty boxes and only navigational cues remain. Text directs the viewer, but where? The remade newspapers hang perpendicular to the wall and shift slightly in the currents of a room like boats in harbor. How might these emptied pages suggest orientation in a sea of information? Like the newspapers once found in libraries these objects are meant as reference material to be handled and with repeated viewings the pages will pick up smudges from readers reflecting the reader’s activity back to them”.

Erin Curry is a current MFA candidate in Drawing and Sculpture at the University of Florida. She is a Florida native and founding member of Art Lab, a collective for emerging artists in Gainesville, FL.

The exhibition “SURFACING” will open with a reception on Saturday, Saturday, May 4, 4 - 7 PM. Erin Curry will be present for the reception. This exhibition will run through June 15, 2013 and is free and open to the public.  Atlantic Center for the Arts alt_space Gallery is located at 123 Douglas Street in New Smyrna Beach, FL.  For details visit www.atlanticcenterforthearts.org or call 386.423.1753.  For additional information on the artist, visit her blog at www.sculptress-studio.blogspot.com or follow her on Facebook www.facebook.com/ErinCurryArt

In Partnership with the monthly Downtown Arts District Gallery Walk, the Food Trucks will be rolling in.  20 Food Trucks will arrive for the event to draw new attendees and bridge the art organizations participating.   The caravan of savors will be stretched from Arts on Douglas on Magnolia Street to The Hub on Canal Street.  Items to be served rage from Tacos to Lobster and will be available for purchase from 3 PM to 9 PM. "