RE: Surface
RE: Surface is a two person exhibition featuring new works on paper and panel by Gary Carpenter & Patricia Seggebruch. This exhibition will open with a reception for the artist on Friday, March 3 from 6:00 – 8:00pm, with an artist discussion at 7:00pm. The exhibition continues through April 15, 2023.
Gary Carpenter and Patricia Seggebruch spend a great deal of attention on the surfaces of their artwork. Carpenter's collage-drawing and Seggebruch's encaustic-painting working processes include scratching, gouging, mending, and reinforcing, repeatedly building up and tearing down to achieve the work’s ultimate visual balance. This process of continuous erosion and new growth creates textures and depth that belie something deeper. Their work reference surfaces and spaces found in the real world to pair conceptual history with the physical history created by the artists’ hands. While drawing inspiration from the artists’ environments, the acts of creation ultimately gives birth to something new, something that is able to live independently of the artists' original reference sources. Each artists spends a great deal of time developing their artwork, which in turn offers viewers a rich landscape of surfaces to spend a great deal of time exploring.
"I want the viewer to not think of my work as materials and shapes on paper or canvas but as forms that have nothing to do with paper, ink, wax, adhesives, color pencil, paint, and other wet and dry media that are alone prosaic.
Through the combination and manipulation of material, form, spatial manipulation of interior and exterior edges; the image exists because it has to. Anything else would be false. Anything else would be merely a product."
--Gary Carpenter
"This collection of paintings reflect the direction I am always seeking in my paintings and writing; to expose the truth and/or to communicate so that deep, sometimes unpredictable connections occur.
This is not the truth behind a lie or such, but the ultimate truth or the truth of why we are here.
In this series the layers read deep. This depth is reflective of one's self, the layers we contain as we go through our ages and become new versions of ourselves through experience, time, and exposure.
Like humans, these paintings have a history that is legible in their layers, the surface touched by the lines of time and the translucent history of our lives becoming the completed composition of our whole self, in the end.
These paintings began years ago, have gone through transformations, and metamorphosed into their final rendering."
--Patricia Baldwin Seggebruch
Also on view at WheelHouse Art are new works of NFT photography by Mark Lee Webb. Webb uses variations in color, texture, line, and weathering found on commercial trash dumpsters to create his abstract photography. Accidental splatters of paint, forklift gouging, and random patterns of rust found on rubbish bins create an Unexpected beauty. His series of images seamlessly follows the attention to surfaces and the history shared with the work by Gary Carpenter and Patricia Seggebruch in RE: Surface.
“I do not use titles for each piece that might suggest what I see in the shapes and figures because I do not want to lead the viewer into my visions. I want the viewer to make their own discoveries.” –Mark Lee Webb
