Chattanooga's premier arts festival celebrates new and upcoming talent
The Association for Visual Arts (AVA) presents the 18th annual 4 Bridges Arts Festival this weekend, April 20-22, at the First Tennessee Pavilion. The Emerging Artists Program, sponsored by First Tennessee, showcases the talents of artists who live within a 300-mile radius of Chattanooga and have a significant body of work but have never exhibited in a solo show.
The Pulse sat down with the nine emerging artists this year to find out more about their artistry.
Zachary Cross
(Photography)
The Pulse: Paint for me a portrait of yourself as an artist and how you got interested in your medium.
Zachary Cross: I got into photography while pursuing filmmaking in middle-school. I had purchased a camera for that purpose and just found myself over time taking more still photos than video.
At first I was just experimenting, learning how to use my camera, learning what makes a good picture. Then it was about finding better scenes to photograph, visiting the waterfront and bridges here in Chattanooga, going out late or getting up early.
For the first few years I didn’t really consider myself an artist at all; I thought of it as just high-quality documentation of pretty scenes. Over the last year or two I’ve come to understand what I do, as far more than documentation, and I’ve come to appreciate art as a much larger and more nuanced spectrum than I previously thought.
I’ve always been drawn to landscape scenes and very aware that they are often fleeting moments, which do not last, even in memory. So photography is, first, a way for me to hold onto beautiful moments in life, and second, a way to show that view of life to other people.
I got started learning and experimenting, but a big reason I continue is because of the response I’ve gotten from so many people, who find my photographs compelling.
TP: What direction do you see yourself headed in the future?
Cross: I see a lot of possibilities, and I won’t say I see a particular one rising above the rest. Right now I definitely want to continue what I’m doing with photography, as well as learn more about art history, and what it means to produce fine art. I’ll be in college this fall; undoubtedly I’ll pursue some level of education in art history and photography.
I have other projects underway, such as time-lapse photography, which could, in time, become my biggest focus. I see time-lapse as the perfect blend of landscape photography and filmmaking, which is still a really compelling area to me.
TP: What has the partnership with AVA been like so far?
Cross: Partnering with AVA is probably one of the best things that’s happened to me; the level to which they support artists is amazing. There have been so many opportunities already to get my name out and my work on display, as well as chances to meet other artists and get inspired.
Amber Droste
(Painting: Oil/Acrylic)
The Pulse: Paint for me a portrait of yourself as an artist and how you got interested in your medium.
Amber Droste: For me, art is just an excuse to make things with my hands. I attended the Art Institute of Florence, in Italy, where I studied painting and fresco restoration.
I received a degree in Fine Arts and Art History from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY and received my Master’s Degree in Painting from Washington University in St. Louis. I started showing my work right out of graduate school while I was teaching painting and art history at Bay State University in Boston.
As a young painter right out of school, I had enough education and knowledge about good art to know that I was falling short of my ambition. I abandoned painting for several years and concentrated on the craft of stained glass.
I worked in studios in Boston and Colorado before opening my own stained glass studio, Soda Ash & Sand, four years ago. I love making stained glass and it satisfies my need to make things with my hands, but I recently found myself missing the creative and conceptual aspects of fine arts.
TP: Where does your art fit in the current cultural landscape?
Droste: This current body of work began in 2016, amidst what I viewed as a societal shift in America. Feeling disappointed and confused by the beliefs of so many in my own country, I began painting for pleasure, as a meditation or a respite from the ugly words and actions I was reading in the news every day.
I was searching for beauty and order in the world around me. In my work I wanted to make images of chaos and confusion and then withdraw from those visuals some semblance of beauty and, hopefully, a quiet sense of harmony and stability—I suppose just to prove to myself that the task is not insurmountable.
My paintings are detailed, densely layered abstract works. I work from multiple perspectives and vanishing points, creating a tornado of visual incident—reminiscent of layers of graffiti. They are distinctly modern images with modern narratives, executed in the traditional materials of pencil and paint. The notion of craft is always present in my work. However, I don’t treat the canvas as a precious object. I make mistakes. I welcome them and embrace them.
The acceptance of mistakes, baggage and physical and mental imperfections, is a theme often addressed throughout my work. While this body of work is very simple and perhaps sparse conceptually, I hope above all else that these paintings convey a sense of optimism. Solutions and beauty can come from disharmony.
Susan Fox
(2D and 3D Mixed Media)
The Pulse: Paint for me a portrait of yourself as an artist and how you got interested in your medium.
Susan Fox: Since a small child, I have created art, but my career began professionally in 1997 when I enrolled at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1999, I started to suffer severe neuro-dysfunction (the result of a traumatic brain injury-inflicted two years prior). My life would be put on hold, as I became house-bound for a year. Slowly I got my life back, finished my studies, and delved into being a professional artist.
I showed in many galleries throughout the country and in Taiwan where I lived in 2004. In 2008, exhausted from the multiple jobs of a working artist, I started a new path to become a Chinese Medicine Practitioner because it was the medical form that most changed my road to recovery. As you can imagine, my art making and art career had to take a back seat for several years as medicine became the main focus of my life during this time.
At the end of 2016, I began making art for my new series, giving myself a year to complete enough new work to show. This show is a sort of personal art Renaissance for me, and I am ready to leap back into the art world.
As far as medium is concerned, I have always been interested in the colorful and the tactile. It is not a surprise that foraging and collaging small vivid pieces of paper has come into my art making process.
TP: How do you bring your art to life?
Fox: When I am making these pieces, I only focus on the present moment; I do not anticipate or plan my piece. I let my color samples dictate the color and movement changes. It is meditation; that is why I have named this series “Color Meditations.” The pieces are the physical ramification of personal reflection.TP: Do you have any mentors you wish to thank?
Fox: I could fill a 400 page book of mentors, teachers, and other artists that have affected me over the years, but my greatest mentors are Eugene Avergon, my high school art teacher, my stained glass artist mother, and my amazing illustrator husband Rylan Thompson.
TP: Where does your art fit in the current cultural landscape?
Fox: I think media and politics will focus on dividing us but culture and art has always served to unite us. We can all come together in the beauty of this world.
Mark Gates
(Painting: Oil/Acrylic)
The Pulse: Paint for me a portrait of yourself as an artist and how you got interested in your medium.
Mark Gates: Teachers are the reason I paint, but, oddly enough, not art teachers. I had early exposure to some serious art in high school thanks to an AP English and a French teacher. J. J. Lukasko taught my AP English class and had the wisdom to throw in a heavy dose of art history.
When we got to the abstract expressionists, my eyes started popping out of my head. I got it instantly. I had imprinted—mostly on Willem de Kooning. I still picture his works in my head when I’m mixing my paints.
Another teacher, Susan Saunders, changed my life when she took our class to France. That first trip abroad was my first exposure to the treasures contained in museums. It also instilled in me the wanderlust that tempted me out of my day job and, in a round-about way, led me to Chattanooga and art.
I’m particularly proud of the collection I’m working on for 4 Bridges. The folks who respond to my work at markets are responding in the way that I did when I first saw those de Koonings. They get it. Instantly. You don’t have to explain it to them and they don’t ask what it’s supposed to be. They just can’t take their eyes off of it. Those are my people.
TP: What has the partnership with AVA been like so far?
Gates: My wife, Melissa, is another of the emerging artists this year. We both started painting for real at about the same time, maybe three or four years ago. At the beginning of 2017, we each had several paintings.
We had been in Chattanooga for about two years but hadn’t met many people. We didn’t work day jobs or go to school or to a gym or any place where you’re just naturally around people and get to know them.
So, we decided we were going to use our art to bust in to the local art scene. Our first stop was AVA and that was paydirt right away. We joined and submitted for an artist call. Curator Krenesia Whiteside selected three paintings from each of us to be in her “For Your Eyes Only” exhibit and doors started to open.
We started meeting people from Makers Off Main, Chattanooga Workspace, the Hunter, and many other art lovers and makers. That exhibit gave us the confidence in our work to put together a booth for the Chattanooga Market, where we set up most Sundays of the season.
I really just can’t say enough about what AVA has done for our careers...and our social lives.
Melissa Gates
(Painting: Oil/Acrylic)
The Pulse: Paint for me a portrait of yourself as an artist and how you got interested in your medium.
Melissa Gates: I began painting as a new hobby in 2015. As an accountant by trade, it was assumed by everybody, including myself, that I didn’t have much of an artistic side. When I decided to try my hand at painting, I was surprised at the result! I am in love with all things nature, and I have found great joy painting trees and animals.
As a self-taught painter, acrylic was accessible and easy to work with. It is the medium I learned to paint with, and it is what I prefer to get my desired effect.
TP: How do you bring your art to life?
Gates: My slightly impressionistic style is created with many layers using stippling and sweeping techniques. I often use no more than two color families in a painting and usually leave some aspect of the composition in greyscale. The result is an interesting juxtaposition of colors that coax the images off the canvas. TP: What is unique about your art? What will festival-goers be drawn to?
Gates: I am inspired by up close perspectives and my compositions reflect that. I want the viewer to feel the environment as well as the tactile nature of the subject. When people view my work, they are drawn to the intimacy of the moment that has been captured.
TP: How do you feel your art affects people?
Gates: My work makes people want to paint! I am humbled by the hidden gift I stumbled upon, and I encourage everyone to search out their own creative gift, and by all means try new things.
TP: Do you have any mentors you wish to thank?
Gates: Bob Ross is who made me want to “paint someday” ever since I was a little girl. The techniques he patiently described, combined with his peaceful nature, made me feel even I could paint if I tried.
TP: Where does your art fit in the current cultural landscape?
Gates: I create images that represent intense beauty that made me stop in wonder and awe. Our current culture does not encourage us to stop and look at the beauty around us. My work is a reminder of what we are missing.
Kris Grenier
(Fiber/Leather)
The Pulse: Paint for me a portrait of yourself as an artist and how you got interested in your medium.
Kris Grenier: My art is an extension of my being a long-distance backpacker, an expression of the joy and beauty I have found while walking in the woods. I’ve thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and Colorado Trail, hiked the Pacific Crest Trail for charity, walked across Spain on the Camino de Santiago, and climbed the high peaks of New York and New England.
In well over 5,500 miles, I’ve seen incredible places, nurtured my faith in humanity, and made memories to last a lifetime. My art begins where my travels end: back at my family’s farm in Kentucky. There, while I spend the winters caring for our critters, including our pet sheep, I turn to photographs, sketches, and journal entries from my adventures.
Onto a “canvas” of wool from our sheep, I “paint” a woolen landscape comprised of dyed wool, applying just a few strands of colored fiber at a time as I reimagine a scene from the backcountry. It’s a special way to remember my journeys.
I didn’t expect to become an artist; I was a science major in college. Then, I contracted relapsing Lyme disease from a tick bite in Pennsylvania days after I graduated. In the aftermath, I spent years in bed, had a couple of surgeries, and moved back in with my family.
There, with a surplus of wool from our sheep, thousands of photos from my hikes, and time free of obligations besides getting well, I began felting. Wanderstruck Studio grew out of that time.
TP: How do you bring your art to life?
Grenier: The actual work of creating each felting begins on shearing week at our farm, when my sister and I hand-shear our ten sheep. Their wool is then skirted, picked, washed, carded, and felted—an arduous process that transforms the raw fleece into a wool fabric.
I cut this fabric down to a wool painting’s desired size, gather dyed wools, and set upon the task of felting a scene. Needle-felting requires a specialized needle, which uses the barbs on each strand of wool to tangle the lofty fibers into a dense fabric.
When I begin needle-felting, the process of creating a wool painting looks very similar to that involved in creating an oil painting: I blend my colors and work in layers, adding just a bit of wool to change a line or quality of light.
TP: How do you feel your art affects people?
Grenier: My favorite thing to hear from people who view my art is that the scenes I depict feel somehow like dreams or reminiscences.
All of the scenes I needle-felt are memories for me, and I think wool enables other people to feel my nostalgia, my longing to revisit the places I’ve been. It is also my hope that my art engenders a love for and appreciation of the world’s wild places.
Mercedes Llanos
(Painting: Oil/Acrylic)
The Pulse: Paint for me a portrait of yourself as an artist and how you got interested in your medium. Mercedes Llanos: I am a very energetic person, which is reflected in my art. I never get bored and see potential in about everything I encounter. At the moment, I’m focusing on oil painting, figurative art in dreamy/eerie landscapes. I also paint large scale murals which allows me to exert energy.
TP: How do you bring your art to life?
Llanos: I use color and line as a way to show expression, bringing paintings to life. I allow myself to work intuitively resulting in perplexing instances throughout the paintings. I try to paint the feelings of a moment, not the moment itself. In that way, I’m always more interested in painting life, rather than the illusion of such.
TP: How do you feel your art affects people?
Llanos: I am a humanist, and my paintings are part of such movement. My aim is to bring the human aspect of people back to life through my work. Especially in today’s society, so caught up in technology, we gotta remember that our essence is human. We are raw and primitive, driven by emotions.
I guess I want to make people aware of others as much as themselves too. Feelings are also universal—are we as alone as we think we are? How do we transcend our physical boundaries and become one with another being? Those are all questions I’d like for people to confront, or finally understand, through paintings. I guess I just want people to feel things!
TP: Do you have any mentors you wish to thank?
Llanos: Yes, I have worked in undergraduate school with Christina Renfer Vogel and Ron Buffington who have helped me open my mind and follow my intuition. They are great!
TP: What direction do you see yourself headed in the future? Llanos: I’m thinking of going larger with my paintings. I’m excited to go to a month long artist residency at Vermont Studio Center in June, and will be starting my MFA degree in Painting at Hunter College in NYC in January 2019.
I’m eager to see what these new intensive and challenging environments will push in my work. I’m always open to experiment with my work, so setting expectations or being rigid with my process are things which I’m absolutely against. It takes away the magic.
Carlin McRae
(Ceramics)
The Pulse: Paint for me a portrait of yourself as an artist and how you became interested in your medium.
Carlin McRae: I became interested in ceramics while I was in college. I have always been creative but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to explore art as a career. Making ceramics is a therapeutic process for me. It’s through this process that I was able to gain introspection as well as begin to study the people around me. I am deeply fascinated with the way that life shapes people; not physically, but mentally.
While at UTC, I took a tour guiding job at Ruby Falls and spent time studying the intricacies of erosion. It occurred to me that the process of erosion, or water altering stone over time, could be used as an analogy for the way that life alters our inner selves; from that, my current body of work was born.
TP: How do you bring your art to life?
McRae: For me, my art comes to life in stages. I have to decide what kind of form I want to start with, then refine the shape and carve and finally glaze. Each step of my process tells a bit of the story and while that story is not part of the process that everyone will see, it is dear to me. It’s the part that I get to cherish.
TP: How do you feel your art affects people?
McRae: My art is about how life affects us—joy, tragedy, etc. I want admirers of my work to pick it up, feel its weight; run their fingers over the ridges and carvings. I hope that, at the least, they will enjoy spending time with my work.
TP: Do you have any mentors you wish to thank?
McRae: Yes, Maggie McMahon. Maggie was my Ceramics professor at UTC. She was the one that encouraged me to pursue ceramics. I’d also like to thank the local community of potters and makers. I have some close friends who have been great support for me and put up with my massive anxiety.
TP: What has the partnership w/ AVA been like so far?
McRae: The partnership with AVA has been wonderful! We were invited to a workshop that was insightful and helpful. It covered everything from taxes to social media. I am so grateful for being nominated as an Emerging Artist. I am looking forward to the festival!
Jaime Peterson
(Ceramics)
The Pulse: Paint for me a portrait of yourself as an artist and how you got interested in your medium.
Jaime Peterson: Among other things I am a 3D artist. As far as medium, I chose to create with clay. There is something very beautiful and special in the maker type arts, which is the element of interaction.
A piece of dirt when formed and fired can be one’s companion for years. If I put a piece of myself into every work I make, then I have such a real connection with the people who choose my work. That is a connection that I cannot get from other art forms; it is a connection that is truly lovely.
TP: How do you bring your art to life?
Peterson: Ceramics is an ancient and established art form, which makes pushing the medium exciting. I’m always striving to combine the old techniques with modern ideas in order to make pieces that have a feeling of something that is not quite ceramics but also not quite something else.
I combine rustic and raw aesthetics with whimsical elements, creating pieces that are a combination of rustic industrial and steampunk.
TP: Do you have any mentors you wish to thank?
Peterson: Barron Hall of Mighty Mud Ceramics taught my first throwing class. He has also been a priceless pillar of grace and honesty in my life for many years.
Whitney Kearny Avritt taught me all the things about precision work and glaze chemistry. Jonathan Clardy and Reiko Rymer of 423 Pottery are constantly challenging and pushing me.
TP: Where does your art fit in the current cultural landscape?
Peterson: My art is a throw to the old, worn, and sometimes forgotten industrial towns of the Southern states. I am inspired by the aesthetics of wood, rust, metal, and mechanics. But it is the whispers from these towns that drive me to create, the ghosts of the past that linger and sway and challenge me.
That challenge is to accept my love of the south and the Appalachia, and also acknowledge and own with the horrors created and prolonged in these cities.
My art represents my own evolution within that struggle. I strive not to create only a piece of art, but a layered link to the past. In this way a simple cup can hold your past, but it dares you to hold the entire past. You have to hold the good of the south combined with the reality: slavery and child labor, poverty, racism, sexual abuse, repression, ignorance.
Through my art I seek to come to terms with the whole south, with all its light and dark, so that I can look at it in the eye. In that freedom, we begin to create a better narrative than the one we’ve been given. We can breathe new life into these industrial skeletons.
Stephanie Smith is a Renaissance woman who has written stories, educated children, acted characters, sung songs, danced swing, cooked original culinary creations, and made people laugh with her ability to put her foot in her mouth.