The Maude Kerns Art Center is proud to present “Piecing It Together: A Regional Collage Exhibit,” opening with a free, public reception from 5-7 pm on Friday, June 19.
The exhibit features the work of 69 artists from four states and celebrates the versatile and inventive art of collage. By juxtaposing and layering images, playing with multiple perspectives, and exploring diverse media, the selected artists create striking and often surprising visual statements. The Title Sponsor for “Piecing It Together” is Les Schwab Tire Center.
The exhibit is on display through July 17.
Springfield resident Sheary Clough Suiter was born and raised in Eugene. She moved to Alaska in 1976, where she lived the Alaska “Last Frontier” lifestyle for 35 years. Returning to the Lower 48 in 2011, she savored the grandeur of the Rockies for 12 years from her studio in Colorado Springs before moving back to the Pacific Northwest, where she now proudly resides in Springfield.
A former dental hygienist, Alaska fishing lodge owner/operator, travel planner, literary journal editor, and author, Clough Suiter has pursued her visual art career since 1992.
“My primary medium has been encaustic painted on a wood panel. Recent work embarks on new directions with the use of stitching and reclaimed textiles, to create art forms that speak to greater sustainability in my art practice,” the artist said.
Clough Suiter said that “the artwork submitted for (this exhibit) employs deconstructed figurative elements from my 2019 installation, ‘I Never Played With Dolls.’ Although this new work re-imagines how the baby face is contextualized within each piece, the image continues to carry with it considerations of non-binary ways of being and thinking.”
The artist continues, “When we look at a newborn and ask ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ we are categorizing, defining, limiting. A baby’s face is an open expression of a full range of possibilities – much like the art I seek to create in this phase of my art-making career.”
Awards recognizing her expertise in encaustic include a Permanent Collection Purchase by the Anchorage Museum of Art, a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Project Award, an International Encaustic Artists Project Grant, and an Alaska State Council on the Arts Career Opportunity Grant, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Clough Suiter received a month-long artist residency in Listowel, Ireland, where she painted, exhibited, and taught workshops.
Her fine art is represented in Anchorage, Alaska, by Stephan Fine Art; in Camas, Washington, by the Attic Gallery; in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, by Stones, Bones, & Wood Gallery; and in Colorado Springs, Colorado, by Kreuser Gallery. When she’s not traveling in her camper van along the back roads of America with her artist partner Nard Claar, Suiter works from her home studio near the Willamette River.
The Maude Kerns Art Center, located at 1910 E. 15th Ave. at the corner of 15th and Villard, is Eugene’s first non-profit community center for the visual arts. Gallery hours are from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, and noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday when exhibits are on display. More: mkartcenter.org.
