OPENING: JULY 11, 5–9 PM, free to the public

Artist talk with David Butler: 6:30 PM

Attire: Earth tones, gold & green

Location: 23 Emory Place, Knoxville TN

At 6:30 PM, previous Executive Director of the Knoxville Museum of Art, David Butler, will speak about his work which celebrates the beauty of Appalachia.

Appalachia’s sprawling beauty has captured the imagination of artists for centuries, finding profound experiences within the environment. The Romantics, lovers of the Sublime, and the influential Hudson River School all depicted mountainous landscapes in their classically inclined compositions. Landscape art played an important role in the preservation of the Smoky Mountains, saving them from development, and instead establishing them as a National Park.

Though a favored historical genre, landscape paintings persist in the contemporary milieu through reimagined configurations. This deconstruction of the natural world can be seen first through impressionism’s thick, imprecise brushstrokes. Modernism developed this complete abstraction, depicting nature through color fields and geometric shapes with seeming detachment to reality.

The technological revolution of the last fifty years have radically shifted humanity’s relationship with nature, forcing artists to reexamine their perspectives as they experience an era unlike any other.

GARY HEATHERLY

PAUL PAIEMENT

Artists Ann Marie Auricchio, David Butler, David Underwood, Gary Heatherly, Micah Ofstedahl, Paul Paiement, and Joseph Ashman each approach landscape from different angles. Through expressionist practices, Butler’s energetic marks buzz with life and Ashman’s vistas leap into an imagined, hyper-chromatic realm. Underwood and Heatherly piece together understanding from captured photographic documentation, creating visual poetry. Ofstedahl and Paiement tackle the unseen impact of people on the natural world through their transparent overlay on realist imagery. Ofstedahl merges a sort of spiritual mystery with the manufactured pulse of electricity and wifi signals, traveling unseen through the air. Ann Marie Auricchio expresses the energetic motion of the land through a focus on color and form, which radiate poignant emotionality.

In the vein of the transcendentalists, these artists seek a deeper understanding of the world by looking at nature instead of the man-made world alone. They break apart and recreate their reality, reforming it into the hybridized one in which we exist—that of technological existence translated through electricity and code, and pairing that with our intrinsic physicality, as creatures borne of the earth, the soil, and the waters.