Color & Canon Art Exhibition Coming to Mercer Gallery
[Garden City, KS] February 12, 2021 -- The Mercer Gallery is pleased to host Nick Geankoplis, Kyle Johns, and Flor Widmar from February 16th to March 12th. The exhibition titled Color & Canon will feature recent artwork from the artistic trio along with a select group of ceramic students' artwork.
Widmar is currently instructing ceramics at Emporia State University, while Geankoplis and Johns both now instruct ceramics at Kansas State University. These instructors will host an interactive Zoom ceramics lecture for GCCC art students.
The Mercer Gallery, located in the west wing of the Pauline Joyce Fine Arts Building on the GCCC campus, is open Monday through Fridays, from 9 AM to 4 PM, and Thursdays from 9 AM to 10 PM. When visiting the Gallery, masks are required and social distancing is encouraged.
For more information, contact Gallery Director, Michael Knutson, michael.knutson@gcccks.edu.
ARTIST INFORMATION
NICK GEANKOPLIS - https://nickgeankoplis.squarespace.com/
Artist Statement: I take formal cues from Chinese landscape paintings for my design layouts. Factory produced decals for industrially made tableware are collaged with custom made and hobby craft decals from America and Europe on large handmade porcelain tiles made in Jingdezhen, China, for traditional overglaze ceramic painting. The collaged imagery acts as iconographic artifacts from ceramic history and pop culture arranged to create semi-nonsensical narrative vignettes that highlight cultural hybridity, exchange and commodification thought the lenses of industrial and hobby craft ceramics.
Biography: Geankoplis is a practicing artist, educator, and maker living in Manhattan, Kansas, where he leads the ceramics program at Kansas State University. His ceramics experience spans the better part of two decades, and he has taken his work and research to nearly a dozen countries. Geankoplis began his formal education at Southern Oregon University and completed his BFA at Sierra Nevada College, continuing to an MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. After Graduating, Geankoplis spent four years as an artist and visiting an international professor teaching ceramic design for industry at the prestigious China Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing (CAFA). For the past two and half years since returning from China, Geankoplis has dedicated himself to his creative practice and ceramics program at Kansas State University.
KYLE JOHNS - https://www.kylejohnsceramics.com/
Artist Statement: Kyle Johns uses the vessel to explore various degrees of form, function, and sculptural considerations. From his interest in contemporary design, he experiments with new solutions. Using the traditionally rigid process of mold making common in industrial production, he deconstructs and reassembles plaster mold positives to create many unique forms. Through play, variation, and modification, he looks to change simple variables to create new methods and possibilities.
Biography: Kyle Johns earned his MFA in ceramics from the Ohio University, Athens, in 2015 and a BFA in ceramics at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, in 2010. Kyle was a summer resident at the Bray in 2015 and returns as the 2017 MJD Fellow.
FLOR WIDMAR - https://florwidmar.weebly.com/
Artist Statement: I explore ideas and concepts by making series, groups, and multiples in different themes and variations. The use of repetition has been essential in my work, where I repeat the same elements, building new forms each time. The slight variation between the repeated elements draws the viewer in, as they discover the unexpected in the familiar. Working with ceramic coil-building to create lines is essential for my sculptures and images. Utilizing contrast is an essential inspiration, whether in color and texture or by combining soft and hard materials, like thread and porcelain.
Biography: Flor Widmar was born in California and was raised in Chihuahua, Mexico. She earned her BFA from Sierra Nevada College. Her work has been in various solo and group exhibitions, domestically and internationally, including at Skaelskor Denmark and Utsunomiya Japan. She has been published in Experience Clay by Maureen Mackey.
--
Garden City Community College exists to produce positive contributors to the economic and social well-being of society.