ST. GEORGE – The Sears Art Museum Gallery at the Dixie State College of Utah Dolores Dore’ Eccles Fine Arts Center, in partnership with the St. George Art Museum, is presenting a new exhibit entitled “A Collaboration,” featuring works from a number of artists and disciplines.

The exhibit will open on Friday, October 29, with a special reception held simultaneously in both museums from 6-9 p.m. The DSC exhibit will be open Monday-through-Friday until January 22, 2011, except during DSC’s Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday breaks, from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission to the show is free to all DSC students, faculty and staff, alumni and the public.

DSC’s portion of the exhibit, “A Panel of Women,” will feature works from artists Sunny Belliston Taylor, Aimee Bonham, Alisha Celeste Tolman, Cathie McCormick and LuAnn Williams (artist bios available at the end of the release).

According to Kathy Cieslewicz, curator of the Sears Art Museum Gallery, each of the artists featured come from a background of traditional realism and have chose this point of departure as a valid form of expression and communication. Cieslewicz added that each of the five artists show unity with strong connections to southern Utah, are all art educators, and have a strong exhibit history.

“This is an exciting opportunity to educate our students and community about nonobjective art,” said Cieslewicz. “Many people do not realize this art form appeared and then has continued to evolve since the early 1900’s.”
 
Cieslewicz went on to say that individual style, freedom of technique, and improvisational expression continues to evolve in many forms today. She noted that abstract and/or nonrepresentational artwork can be conceptually diverse based on the subjectivity of the artist and viewer.

“As viewers experience the art, their life experiences will naturally and logically produce thoughtful reflection and evoke conversation,” Cieslewicz said

At the St. George Art Museum, under the direction of Deborah Reeder, four talented artists, including Lynn Berryhill, Noel Logan, Pearl Meadows and Anne Weiler-Brown, will be featured in an exhibit entitled “Beyond the Literal” in Main and Mezzanine Galleries. In addition, local painter Royden Card will have his works displayed in “Land Beyond Literal” located in the Legacy Gallery.
 
“Creative artists like the those we are featuring in these exhibits continue in this tradition of nonobjective art,” Cieslewicz said. “It has been an honor to work with these talented artists and Deborah Reeder on this event.”

For more information on the pair of exhibits, contact Sears Art Museum Gallery curator Kathy Cieslewicz at 435-652-7909 or at [email protected].
 
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

Cathryn McCormick

Cathryn McCormick is from a rural town in Northwest Illinois.  She studied art and ceramics in Southern California and graduated in Art and Ethnic Studies from University of California, Riverside, 1986. Cathie moved west to teach at the Hopi Reservation. She has made her home in Kanab for 12 years. Currently she teaches in Colorado City, Arizona, and continues her pursuit of ceramics and printmaking in her Kanab studio.   These abstract expressionists works represent mature feelings about the improbable wonders of life, e.g., the marriage of careful planning and uncontrollable events that shape both our dreams and realities, the very sacredness of an object, ourselves included, that has been colored, bent, formed and made beautiful through the process of transformation. Cathie strives to find joy in the ordinary. The creative process calls attention in a new way to the lives we live. Cathie’s work cannot be separated from the people with whom she shares life, nor from the values she has carried from childhood, nor from the landscape that daily renews us all. Yet this work was not created to give a picture but rather a journey into feeling and expression, by herself and the process of the long, hot and volatile Japanese wood fire.
 
Sunny Belliston
 
Sunny Belliston Taylor was raised in St. George, Utah. She received her bachelor of fine arts degree from BYU in 2005, and graduated from The Ohio State University with her master of fine arts degree in 2007. Taylor currently resides in Provo Utah, where she paints and teaches full time as an assistant professor in painting and drawing at BYU. Her work is largely an exploration of the notions of painting, abstraction, and time. She challenges the notion of painting with her sculpted canvases and built surfaces, and she explores the familiarity and unfamiliarity of abstraction as she responds largely to her observations of the modern landscape and its many planes, shapes, and forms. Taylor investigates the concept of time as she juxtaposes past and present, bringing them together into one single visual moment, inviting contrasting senses of nostalgia and postmodern thought.
 
LuAnn Williams
 
LuAnn is a lifelong resident of Southern Utah/Northern Arizona. Her love of nature, family, and community are the inspirations for her artwork. She graduated in 2005 from SUU, with highest honors, focusing on painting and drawing and meeting the requirements for Secondary Education. She is a dedicated teacher, working as the high school art teacher at El Capitan School in Colorado City. She volunteers and works with other schools, including Masada Elementary, The Colorado City Academy, and Mojave College. Today, in addition to the welding of these abstract expressionist sculptures, she is concentrating on large figure paintings and printmaking. This work embodies the experience of seeing something familiar through the unusual lens or frame. Sometimes by contemplation, experience, increased awareness, an epiphany or some other awakening, clarity is given to the indistinct. The sculptures reflect a sort of portal or oculus through which, sometimes magically, we see anew or with a changed perspective.
 
Alisha Celeste Tolman

Alisha Celeste Tolman holds an Associate of Science Degree in Art from Dixie State College, and a Bachelor of Fine Art degree with an emphasis in drawing from Utah State University. Alisha's abstract oeuvre reaches toward a visual description of the innately spiritual or "numinous" by creating fantastic, ethereal landscapes of complex translucent color juxtapositions. Intuitively building compositions from layers of paint or mixed media, Alisha's work reflects the vast horizons and luminosity of her native home in Utah's southwestern desert. Alisha is also working to bring support and recognition of contemporary art and artists by starting a number of community projects, including the downtown "Art Walks," the online arts forum "StGeorgeArt.com," and, with co-director Aimee Bonham, the St. George Art Academy.
 
Aimee Bonham
 
Aimee Bonham was born and raised in St. George, Utah.  She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from BYU in 2002 and shortly there after moved to Chicago, IL.  In Chicago she showed her work in several galleries and venues and has many collectors there.  Bonham currently lives in St. George where she is a co-director and instructor at the St. George Art Academy.  Her work explores the organic nature of life.  She is interested in seeds, their evolution, and their symbolic correlation to the phases of personal development.  This body of work can be read as abstracted landscapes that generalize locations and show movement in a larger context. Carefully considered color palettes and blind line drawings create organic pod-like shapes in motion. The use of color, the employment of paint and pencil and the ambiguity of organic forms allow meditation and contemplation in each viewer. Untitled titles bring the viewer’s experience into her work is an exercise in introspection and exploration.