In Front of Your Eyes
Hannah Cole, Jodi Hays & Celia Reisman
Presented by Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville 
October 4 – November 27, 2019
Opening Reception: Friday, October 4th 6-9pm

Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville (TSA GVL) and the Greenville Center for Creative Arts (GCCA) are excited to announce their October exhibition, In Front of Your Eyes, featuring the work of acclaimed painters Hannah Cole, Jodi Hays, and Celia Reisman. The exhibition, which will be TSA GVL’s inaugural project, was curated by Mark Brosseau and will take place in the main gallery space at GCCA’s Brandon Mill location. The show opens with a First Friday reception from 6 to 9 PM on Friday, October 4th and continues until November 27th. The exhibition will also be open during the November 1st First Friday. There will be an ARTTalk on Tuesday, November 12th from 6 to 7 PM as part of the exhibition. In Front of Your Eyes is generously sponsored by Coldwell Banker Caine.

The three artists featured in this exhibition all take the source for their respective works from common objects and places in their immediate environment. They paint the things that are often overlooked or not considered interesting or beautiful. They take the time to notice the anomalies in those common scenes around them and use those surprises as the foundation for intriguing bodies of work. Reisman paints the neighborhoods near her suburban Philadelphia home. She picks up on odd relationships and uses them to create dynamic and bizarre paintings of places that many would consider to be overwhelmingly normal. The focus of Cole’s work is not only things that are overlooked, but things that are also considered to be undesirable or detritus. Her nearly trompe l’oeil paintings of graffiti and weeds allows viewers to notice the beauty in the forms of these things that go unnoticed and unwanted when they are noticed. Hays’ works are extrapolations from the world around her. Objects in her neighbor’s backyard, things hanging from the front porches across the street, or patterns that she grew up with all undergo a transformation as she distills them down to basic visual elements and allows the paintings to grow lyrically from those foundations.

It is important to these three artists to find beauty in their everyday environments while avoiding making assumptions about what they see. Their painting subjects are the ones that they have spent the most amount of time in while raising children. They don’t allow the routine or domestic to become mundane; instead they view each encounter with it as an opportunity to notice something new and to reach a new understanding of their respective worlds. These are important lessons in a time when snap judgements are commonplace and little emphasis is placed on the nuance of a situation. 

Hannah Cole lives in Asheville, NC. She did her undergraduate study at Yale University received her MFA from Boston University. She has had fourteen solo exhibitions, including a large-scale show at the Turchin Center for Visual Art in Boone, NC in 2018. Her next solo show opens at Tracey Morgan Gallery in Asheville in September of 2019. She has been awarded fellowships to do residencies at the Ucross Foundation in Clearmont, WY and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, NM. Her business, Sunlight Tax, provides information and classes to artists about taxes. She is represented by Slag Gallery in Brooklyn, NY and Tracey Morgan Gallery. 

Jodi Hays is based in Nashville, TN. She is a member of the faculty at the Watkins College of Art in Nashville, TN. She received her BFA from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and her MFA from the Vermont College of Arts. Her nineteenth solo exhibition, Tend, just opened in August at the Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville. She was recently selected for the short list for the inaugural Hopper Prize and has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Tennessee Arts Commission. She has run Dadu – an alternative curatorial venture based in her detached adjacent dwelling unit – since 2015. She is represented by Red Arrow Gallery and Flat File Art in Montclair, NJ. 

Celia Reisman lives in Merion, PA, just outside of Philadelphia, and in Sharon, VT. She received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and her MFA from Yale University. She has had over thirty solo exhibitions in her illustrious career, including a survey of her work at the James A. Michener Museum in Doylestown, PA in 2000. Her work is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the James A. Michener Museum, and other public and corporate collections. She has received a purchase prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as awards from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Leeway Foundation. She is represented by Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, Paul Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco, and Big Town Gallery in Rochester, VT. 

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.

For more information please contact TSA GVL at greenville@tigerstrikesasteroid.com and GCCA at exhibitions@artcentergreenville.org