SALISBURY — Waterworks Visual Arts Center will host an opening reception for the exhibit Memory: Nature and Nurture from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday.
Light refreshments will be served during the event, which is free and open to the public.
Informal gallery talks with the exhibiting artists begin at 5 p.m.
Four female artists examine the function and meaning of memory and its role in nature and nurture in shaping cultural norms for women.
Through vastly different life experiences, creative process and inspiration are highlighted in a woman’s life through visual representation in various mediums.
Diana Greene of Winston-Salem discovered that she unintentionally collects dresses. Dresses can be a touchstone or even a talisman for memory.
“A Dozen Dresses: The Recollection” is a photographic narrative featuring photographs of different dresses from various stages of Greene’s life.
“This series is unsentimental. It explores the theme of fashion as personality, clothes as symbols, dresses as conduits for dreams and mistakes, identity and loss,” Greene said. “Clothes change you, please you, pull you down, sex you up or hide you.”
Her special performance piece, based on the photographs, will be shown in the Norvell Theatre on Thursday, Aug. 15.
The show is moving, funny, and visually rich with images, video, and music.
Greene’s photographs have been exhibited at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, The Light Factory in Charlotte, PhotoSPIVA, university and commercial galleries, and public libraries.
She has earned numerous awards and fellowships, including the Weir Farm artist in residency fellowship and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Greene writes short stories, NPR commentaries, documentaries, and articles about art and artists.
Allison Luce of Mooresville is an artist and art historian whose work in ceramics, printmaking and sculpture has helped to define a new movement of contemporary artists.
Her current body of work titled “Primoris Ortus” explores concerns about fragility and femininity. From afar, her pieces seem to be beautiful flowers of different shapes and colors intertwined with each other, but on closer inspection, the intricate details and flowers begin to look more like snakes and vines. Using clay as a metaphor for the body, she creates structures that are symbolic of the body and soul.
“These sculptures are about birth, growth and temptation,” Luce said. It is this play between innocence and experience that forms the basis of my work.
“I call into question embedded attitudes, opinions and beliefs regarding the value of woman’s work, the messages and myths regarding family, as well as how longing and nostalgia influence our memory.”
Luce currently lives in Charlotte, where she is a studio artist and an adjunct art instructor. She has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions and her work is included in private collections.
Kristi Ryba of St. John’s Island, S.C. uses vintage family photographs to create paintings based on the iconography and the sacred hierarchical messages of Medieval and Renaissance altarpieces and illuminated manuscripts in “Significant Moments.”
“My intention is to construct a new reality from personal memory combined with family history,” she said. “Embedded attitudes, opinions and beliefs regarding the value of woman’s work, the ordinariness of daily life, the significance of memory, and the role of nature and nurture in shaping cultural norms are what interest me.”
Ryba’s award-winning work has been widely exhibited nationally and is held in numerous private collection and corporate collections including the Medical University of South Carolina, Maryland Printmakers Society and Southern Graphics Council.
Kathy Sosa’s series of portraits titled “Adornment and Identity” is a celebration of women.
With bold striking colors, Sosa creates powerful portraits of women portrayed in her own sense of style and color that is both traditional and modern.
Her two series, “Huipiles” and “Trees of Life” are influenced by the rich cultural heritage of Mesoamerica.
The “Huipiles” series is inspired by the vintage textile patterns of the traditional blouses worn by the Mayan people.
The women in this series are beautiful and proud in the colorful woven and embroidered huipiles against collaged fabric backgrounds.
In the “Trees of Life” series, Sosa reinterprets a popular Mexican folk art form, originally three-dimensional ceramic folk art forms.
She interprets the trees of life two-dimensionally and with a contemporary edge. They depict female figures wearing elaborate headgear filled with symbols representing what the woman is thinking about at an imagined moment in time.
Limited edition prints of Sosa’s work have been sold in a national home decor retail chain. She has been commissioned by the Texas Conference of Women to paint design icon Martha Stewart. Her creative work has earned numerous awards.
In addition to the professional exhibitions, Waterworks will feature a selection of work in a solo exhibition from this year’s Dare to Imagine Award winner, Kaitlin Crouch.
Crouch is an art student of Stacey Rollins at East Rowan High School.
She plans to attend Western Carolina University to study graphic design and marketing.