From the Fringe

About

In various literal and abstract manifestations, this exhibit reveals melancholy, humorous, and defiant reflections on the points of departure that tether them to this time.

From the Fringe brings together selections of work from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s 2016 MFA class. Through a diverse and eclectic series of works grounded in the voices that defined each of these young women from Serbia, Barbados, and the Midwest to the South the voices that ground them tie them inextricably to home. Ivana Beck finds ways to describe her fragile relationship to family and country as an immigrant from Serbia. Growing up on a farm in Virginia, Alex Soler describes her most formative relationship being with her horse, those tactile, sensory, and non-verbal impressions are imbedded in her sculptural language.

Midwesterner Amanda Crary creates an artifact of meal shared with family through cyanotypes that capture the fleeting quality of those quiet moments, her work tries to hold onto the intangible and succeeds in freezing time. With humor and flamboyance North Carolina artist Carmen Neely’s mixed media paintings unravel a private language that she cultivated as an only child bringing inanimate objects and scribbles to life. Kate Robinson similarly opens up a Lemuel Gulliver’s world of fantastic fragile precarious structures. Sheena Rose is a giant in her self-portrait; we look up at a bold force pivoting from us as she addresses identity as a black Caribbean woman. Her current work explores racial, cultural, and sexual identities constructed from her home in Barbados. From upstate New York, Soper uses her own body as a point of departure, her strange and suggestive rubber tube reliefs punctuate the buoyancy and deceivingly playful aspects of this show and the common drawing vernaculars these woman share regardless of their medium. There is an immediacy and urgency here as each artist reaches both outward and inward to grasp at another place, another self.