Main Gallery Exhibition
October 10th – November 27th, 2024
Soft Opening:
Thursday, October 10th, 2024
From 3 — 7 PM
Opening Reception:
Friday, October 18th, 2024
From 6 — 9 PM
ARTalk Performance & Q/A with Brittany Watkins:
Saturday, November 16th, 2024
From 2 — 3 PM
ARTalk Performance Description
Watkins’ surrealist-inspired performance exists on-site in conjunction with her large-scale installation work. This temporary display presents living sculpture (or live collaborators) clothed, painted, directed, and placed throughout the space by Watkins. These objects may lie, stand, sit, or move throughout the work in silence or while engaging audience members with questions, requests, short narrative bits, gestures, or offerings. These momentary encounters extracted from everyday life will surely draw mental associations, memories, or unexpected sensations in response to the recontextualized thing.
Different from a theatrical performance, this work cannot be recreated. It is not rehearsed, but instead driven by a series of actions that stream from consciousness in real time. The living sculpture’s brightly colored costumes converse with the sculptural installation like a living breathing painting that exists only in the present. Lines between art, artist, and viewer are blurred as audience actions and reactions become part of this impermanent living work.
Impermanence & Abject Space Exhibition Description
Dipped in a lukewarm bath of brightly colored self-awareness, Watkins acknowledges a contemporary world enthralled with the screen just a fingertip’s length away. It’s easier not to question; instead, we deny. “Impermanence & Abject Space” is about facing oneself. From the abject, found and discarded goods, once deemed useless, emerge. Piled, stacked, fragmented, stitched together, overturned, and slathered in layers of paint. Watkins scrutinizes the material world examining the human experience through a laborious analytic process, driven by anxiety-fueled curiosity.
For the first time in one space, abstract paintings are placed alongside mixed-media “remnant works”, and installations that blur the lines between painting and sculpture. Hand-stitched fibers manipulated within the traditional, wall-bound paintings, continue to evolve. New remnant works utilize an expanded list of deconstructed domestic materials mined from past temporary installations—as each installation moves from the living present into memory, its physical form returns to waste.
Teetering back and forth between deconstruction and rebuilding, Watkins’ process underscores alleged binaries such as life—death, rich—poor, and happy—sad. These contradictions challenge viewers to consider the who, what, where, and why of art/life with relation to institutional hierarchies. This exhibition highlights the function of art in contemporary society, urging viewers to consider widely accepted value systems that drive a product-based life.
Biography
Brittany M. Watkins (b.1989, Carrollton, GA) is a distinguished multi-disciplinary artist, gallery director, and educator based in Columbia, SC. Renowned for her large-scale installation works, Watkins has earned notable accolades including the South Carolina Arts Commission State Fellowship in 2024, the South Arts State Fellowship in 2022, and the ArtFields’ Juried Panel Prize in 2018.
Watkins holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art from the University of West Georgia (2012) and a Master’s Degree in Studio Art from Florida State University (2016). Her graduate studies ignited a passion for fostering contemporary art in the Southern United States, leading her to establish artist-run spaces and pop-up exhibitions in Tallahassee. She went on to serve as president and exhibitions coordinator of 621 Gallery from 2018-2019 and was appointed Director of Goodall Gallery at Columbia College in July 2023. Her position as gallerist, curator, and community organizer continues to be shaped by an examination of contemporary society at the center of her artistic practice.
ARTist STatement
As daily life becomes more deeply entrenched with the screen just a fingertip’s length away, the rapidly expanding consumer culture infiltrates the collective consciousness.
My art examines the emotional, physical, and political detritus that overflow in present day America. I examine the relationship between private, psychological space and its counterpart: the public, edited, physical world through a lens of psychoanalysis and social critique. My process begins with collecting (things and information). Cast off materials, discarded or overlooked for a failure to serve the “intended purpose”—here, a line is drawn between the object and the individual, connecting widespread socio-economic concerns to personal fluctuations in stability. Domestic space (the home) acts as a metaphor for the mind and gateway to the psychological.
I arrive equipped with only a color and the edge of an idea, ready to learn from each place, situated in time among history and present day. An immersive installation comes to life in real time as I transform the space in real time. Viewers are invited to enter the artwork as if stepping into a painting. This reality, separate from ordinary life and traditional art viewing, highlights the social psyche linking place to the formation of self/identity.
Vibrant colors first appear joyous and light-hearted but upon closer inspection, formal arrangements of charged marks highlight the underlying damage masked by layers of paint. Emotional tendencies such as insecurity and dependence emerge alongside a compulsive process, exerting a need for control like posturing the self for public display. This work acknowledges the facade of the mediated image that is further perpetuated by social media. The material excess, self-aware in its presentation, questions narratives that equate wealth and external gratification to happiness. These experiential and abstract painted works focus on the present moment, imploring viewers to consider their relationship to the material world.
This exhibition is funded in part by a grant from South Arts in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and South Carolina Arts Commission.
Generous Support is provided by Media Sponsor
