Virginia artist Rosamond Casey has created a world of fiction in Mapping the Dark: A Museum of Ambient Disorders. Hers is an installation of artworks conceived as a collaboration with ten distinct characters who are compelled to make objects. These artifacts contain a direct imprint of a private sorrow, longing, loss or fear. The various marks and constructions on exhibit were “made” by these individuals from materials that lay at their hands.

The collection contains over 100 images (boxes, books, photographs, collages, clay tablets and drawings.) Embedded in the pieces, with the characters’ own marks, are witness accounts, letters, psychological reports, newspaper and diary entries that combine to build portraits of these ten ordinary lives. Unlike any exhibition the Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum has ever featured, Mapping the Dark is the work of an incredibly creative imagination.

 

Springmaid Watermedia Masters II
Various Artists
October 28, 2007 – January 6, 2008

For over 20 years, the Leroy Springs & Co., Inc. has sponsored the “Cadillac of Water Media workshops” as one instructor noted. Offered three weeks each March and November, the Springmaid Water Media Workshops are internationally renowned for the caliber of faculty members and the quality of instruction. The workshops are held at the Springmaid Resort located adjacent to the museum, and instructors and students from every session regularly visit the exhibitions.

The Springmaid workshop was founded by Stephen R. McCrae, a nationally recognized artist and arts administrator who served as Arts Director and later consultant to Leroy Springs & Co., Inc. in Fort Mill, South Carolina, owner of the Springmaid Beach Resort. The company’s annual Springs Art Show grew under his management to become the Southeast’s largest non-juried art show. Though Mr. McCrae retired in 1981, he remained director of the Springmaid workshop until 1986. He passed away in 2003.

The Springmaid Beach Watermedia Masters II exhibition will feature two works each by the 18 faculty instructors from the November 2007 workshop as well as two of Mr. McCrae’s watercolors. Contributing artists include Carole Barnes, Katherine Liu, Alex Powers, Janet Walsh, current President of the American Watercolor Society and Mary Whyte, among others.

While all the works were created in watermedia, their subjects range from pastoral scenes to abstract portraiture in styles that could be characterized as traditional to contemporary.

 

The University of South Carolina Department of Art’s Ceramic Studio Art Program is an internationally recognized course of undergraduate and graduate study leading to the terminal degree of Master of Fine Arts Ceramic. Associate Professor Virginia Scotchie has headed the program since 1992 and under her leadership it has grown into a nationally recognized state-of-the-art research center for the ceramic arts.

The exhibition will feature 46 works by 23 artists in a range of styles including the functional, figurative and abstract and in media including glazed ceramics, porcelain, stoneware and clay among others.

USC’s Studio Ceramics program has not only produced a large number of gifted artists in the field but has also acted as a seminal force for inspiration in the ceramic art form. In 2001 the department established an exchange program with Tainan National University for the Arts in Tainan, Taiwan, for the MFA students in ceramics. This year a second exchange was initiated with Australia National University of the Art in Canberra, Australia.