Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville (TSA GVL) and the Fine Arts Center (FAC) are excited to present their summer exhibition, BIG BODY PLAY, on exhibition from June 7th through September 10th at the FAC’s Sheffield Wood Gallery. Visits to the gallery are by appointment only - Monday - Thursday, 10am -4pm. Sign up for an appointment by using the following link. A closing reception will be held on Friday, September 10th from 6-8pm including artist presentations and performance from 6:30-7.
BIG BODY PLAY is an exhibition that uses humor and imagination to explore the banality of the everyday. This show uses playful colors and materials, on plush, oversized forms to celebrate boredom, experimentation, and absurdity. Addressing themes of the body, pop culture, nostalgia, and domesticity, this collection of soft sculptures highlights the fascination these artists have with their materials and their love of “playing” in the studio. These works push scale while using current material culture as inspiration - these objects tell personal narratives, make punny jokes, and address our need for recreation and distraction.
Featuring work by:
Amelia Briggs is a visual artist currently based in Nashville, TN. Her work has been exhibited internationally and throughout the US including recent and upcoming exhibitions in Paris, France; London, UK; Florence, Italy; Denver, CO; New Orleans, LA; and New York, NY. Briggs has worked for David Lusk Gallery since 2012 and served as the Director for the past four years. In May 2021 she will be stepping down in order to pursue her work as an artist full time. In June Briggs will release a series of mirrors with Exhibition A and her work is included in the current issue of New American Paintings.
Andrea Vail investigates contemporary American society and its objects – specifically home goods deemed stylistically obsolete, or unattractive by the standards of 21st century mainstream culture. Hinged on textile traditions and techniques, her practice materializes as tapestry, woven sculpture, and collaborative exchange. Vail’s nationally exhibited work has received awards from Arts and Science Council; North Carolina Arts Council; HappeningsCLT Visual Artist Grant; CultureWORKS; and residencies with Goodyear Arts, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, and Elsewhere Museum. She is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University (MFA) and UNC-Charlotte (BFA). Vail lives and works in Western North Carolina.
Vail’s collaborative projects include: Bridging (Central Piedmont, Charlotte, NC), a large-scale fabric installation patterned with student- and staff-sourced imagery, Signalling Hello (Elsewhere Museum, Greensboro, NC), a process-based greeting initiative, COLLECTING_PILE, an interactive art work which involves the community as both content and collaborator; Friendge, an ongoing global invitation to collaborate; Woven Community (Richmond, VA), a citywide weaving event ; and Gathering Clouds (Richmond, VA) at Anderson Gallery.
Born in Australia, Coorain studied at Georgia State University, earning an MFA in Photography, and Tufts University and the School of Museum of Fine Arts, receiving a BA in Philosophy and a BFA in Fine Arts respectively. Coorain currently resides and gardens in Atlanta, with plenty of chickens and carnivorous plants.
Jaime Bull builds a cast of sparkly clad forms that embody a strong, sexy, dangerous female presence. She is a collector and uses found, repurposed materials in her work to reference the body with a feminist perspective. Spending her time dumpster diving at the recycling center or scouring Goodwill to amass second-hand tube tops and sequined prom dresses, Bull’s sculptures have the rhinestone aesthetic of a bedazzled jean jacket or a Mardi Gras float. She examines and questions our relationship with the environment by highlighting a preoccupation with hoarding mass quantities of “stuff.“
Bull received her MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Georgia, Athens in 2013. She is a recipient of the Willson Center for the Arts research grant for her thesis work Lady Beasts: An Investigation of Womanliness. She has exhibited in Atlanta with Whitespace, Camayuhs, Hathaway Gallery and at the Airport in Terminal E. Regionally, she has shown work at the Zuckerman Museum of Art, University of North Georgia, Auburn University, Albany Museum and the COOP Gallery in Nashville. Most recently, her sculptures were featured in a two woman show with artist Melissa Brown (Brooklyn, NY), entitled Fountain, at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. She is a Vermont Studio School Fellow, attended a two-month residency at the Bernheim Arboretum in Louisville, KY and was an Atlanta Contemporary Art Center Studio Artist in Residence from 2016-2019. She was featured in and on the cover of the 219th edition of Ambit Magazine, London. She currently lives in Athens, Ga and teaches at the University of Georgia.
Katrina Sánchez is an interdisciplinary Panamanian-American artist based in Charlotte, NC. Working with fibers and mixed materials Kat creates vibrant and tactile works that explore ideas of joy, play, community, healing and renewal. Katrina received a BFA in Fibers from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, is a recipient of the NC Arts and Science Council Artist Support Grant and is an alumni artist-in-residence of Goodyear Arts. She has exhibited work at Bedford Gallery (CA), Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (MA), Max I. Jackson Gallery at Queens University of Charlotte and Gallery C3 (NC).
Madison Creech was the 2018-19 Fountainhead Fellow in the Department of Craft and Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. She holds an MFA in fibers from Arizona State University and a BFA and BS in textile, merchandising, and fashion design from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has served as faculty associate at Arizona State University, instructing surface design and served as the 2016-18 Brown Visiting Teacher-Scholar at Stetson University teaching digital art and textile art courses.
Creech has held residencies at Metro Community College Prototype Lab in Omaha, Nebraska, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in Texas, and Techshop in Chandler, Arizona. Her work has been widely exhibited across the country, and she has been the recipient of a number of distinguished awards, including the Juror’s Award from the Surface Design Association’s Explorations exhibition, the Rudy Turk Award for History in American Craft from ASU, and the Mary Beason Bishop and Francis Sumner Merit Scholarship from the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. She is currently a co-director of Fresh As Fruit Gallery in DeLand.
Matthew Creech received his Associate of Arts Degree from Cape Fear Community College in 2006. Creech has been included in a range of various exhibitions including, “This Must Be the Place” at Robert Hillestad Textile Gallery in Lincoln, NE and “Now or Neverland Urban Uproar” at the Miami Urban Contemporary Experience in Miami, FL. Alongside this body of work, Creech will be releasing a book, working within the same genre of off the wall humor and topics dealing with death and behind closed door secrets. Creech currently resides and works in Wilmington, NC.
Mindy Sue Wittock is an artist and mother who works out of her home studio in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. She makes soft sculpture that explores the intersection of childhood memory and experiences in motherhood. Wittock has an MFA from Arizona State University with a concentration in fibers. She has previously worked as an associate lecturer of art at the University of Wisconsin Fond du Lac and the University of Wisconsin Green Bay. Wittock has an extensive exhibition record and has taught many textile-based workshops. She survives on coffee and enjoys watching vintage television shows, listening to 80’s music, and going on adventures with her husband, daughter, and pup. Mindy Sue Wittock is also a co-founder of The Wondermakers Collective with the incredible illustrator and coffee drinker Jenna Freimuth. They work together to build beautiful, layered embroideries, pen palling them back and forth from Wisconsin to Minnesota.
Natalie Baxter (b. 1985, Lexington, Kentucky) explores concepts of place-identity, nostalgic americana, and gender stereotypes through sculptures that playfully push controversial issues. Natalie received her MFA from the University of Kentucky in 2012 and a BA in Fine Art from the University of the South in Sewanee, TN in 2007. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally with recent shows at Intersect SOFA Chicago with Elijah Wheat Showroom (Newburgh, NY), Birmingham Museum of Art (Birmingham, AL), Spring/Break Art Show with Gloria’s (New York, NY), Material Art Fair with Beverly’s (Mexico City, MX), Institute 193 (Lexington, KY), Yale University (New Haven, CT), and Brandeis University (Waltham, MA). She has been an artist in residency at the Wassaic Project, a fellowship recipient at the Vermont Studio Center, and twice awarded the Queens Art Fund Grant. Press for Baxter’s work includes, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Hyperallergic, The Guardian, and Bomb Magazine. She is currently a resident at The Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY.
Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville is the newest part of the Tiger Strikes Asteroid network of artist-run spaces and joins locations Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. They are a platform for artists that is curated and organized by a group of artist-volunteers. Their mission is to create the physical, mental, and emotional space for artists to show their work, meet, and exchange ideas on their own terms. TSA GVL will specifically focus on connecting the art communities in Greenville and the greater Southeast to the global art world. TSA was founded in 2009 in Philadelphia and is a 501c3 non-profit organization.
The Fine Arts Center (FAC) of Greenville County School District was established in August of 1974 as the first pre-professional arts school in the state of South Carolina for gifted and talented high school students in the Fine, Visual, and Performing Arts. Since its opening, thousands of students have chosen to become members of this unique community in which individual talent and expression are nourished in a supportive environment and stimulated by instructors who are themselves highly regarded professionals in their fields. The Fine Arts Center offers the highest level of instruction in Architecture, Creative Writing, Dance (Ballet and Modern), Digital Filmmaking, Music (Chamber Strings, Jazz, Voice, Winds/Brass/Percussion), Theatre (Performance and Design/Production), and Visual Arts.
For more information please contact TSA GVL at greenville@tigerstrikesasteroid.com and FAC at adauschaupart@greenvilleschools.us
By Appointment Only
Gallery Hours:
June 7th - September 10th
Monday - Thursday
10am - 4pm
FINE ART CENTER
Sheffield Wood Gallery
102 Pine Knoll Drive
Greenville, SC 29609
