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A Big "Wow" experience for me!

4/18/2018

Each 8x8 piece weaves textures in acrylic, shells, recycled plastic toys, glass and inks.

Urban Chaos Acrylic and recycled elements (50)-8x8 cradled panels ©2018 Color by Design Studio

CSA Grant Commission by the Arts & Science Council of Charlotte

Each box included a certificate of originality, a booklet with the story, a cotton bag and a small piece of wood taken from an area being urbanized

Urban Chaos, 50 - 8x8 Panels

Thank YOU ASC and Patrons who made this possible! Your support of the local arts and investment in artists like me, contribute to career advancement! Thanks in part to this commission award, I was able to secure a beautiful art studio in Mount Holly.

A bit about this project:
This commission was created in the vein of conceptual art; the idea and the process involved to create the work, took a level of precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns.

My initial idea was inspired by Charlotte’s treasured tree canopy. However, my work is often created in response to something happening in the moment, so this project quickly and relevantly evolved into capturing the urban chaos I was seeing and hearing about, day in and day out.

Some of my favorite experiences in life involve trees of all types, so when they are cut down in mass quantities like I have experienced with the recent expansion of I-77, burned by the hundreds of thousands like they recently did in California, or slowly disappear by the millions of acres throughout the world due to climate change and deforestation, it touches me on a deep level.

The 50 panels I created come together to represent urban chaos. Natural disasters occur often because of constant unsustainable behaviors caused by our need to expand urban living. Tonight, you will each receive a piece of a whole. Your piece is only complete when it’s with all the panels, so as it stands alone with each one of you, it will simply serve as a reminder of the concept that what we do as individuals affects the collective, and will hopefully have you thinking about how you are, or are not, part of solutions to the growing urban chaos.

The first layers of shapes using blue, green, lavender, magenta, gold and white colors represent life and ecosystems emerging. With glass I represent life’s fragilities and contrast with rough textures to depict life’s resilience. For the next layers, I went back to each panel and literally covered-up those first layers in an effort to capture some real emotion of sudden loss of life, like the trees that suddenly just got cut down or burned down out of nowhere. It was painful to go through this process, but I did this to extract live emotion. The aggressive motion of cutting and the heat and strength of fire, come through in this layer through the use hot colors and repetitive negative and positive slash-like shapes. The top and final layer holds the lasting fingerprints, the memories, the energy and the random chaos of what’s left in the end.