Batesville Area Arts Council Gallery to offer Fleeting Gardens exhibition through April 24
BATESVILLE — On view at the Batesville Area Arts Council Gallery on Main during March and April is an exhibition titled Fleeting Gardens, by Melissa Cowper-Smith. The show comprises digital prints on paper handmade from cotton that Cowper-Smith grew on her farm, Wildland Gardens. In addition to the prints, the show features two projected video animations.
For this work, Cowper-Smith photographed small Arkansas farms, rural interiors and other objects. She then created a series of paintings based on the photographs. She used digital tools to blend and juxtapose the paintings and photography to create the prints and video animations.
A gallery reception for Cowper-Smith will be held from 5-7 p.m. Friday, and she will give an artist’s talk at 6 p.m. The BAAC Gallery on Main is at 226 E. Main St.
Cowper-Smith’s work is about grasping fragments of time — both in the landscape and in her memory. She said she can return to places in her mind, but when she thinks about a place in detail, she is aware that her memory is made from more than a single moment. Furthermore, Cowper-Smith said she is aware that no place is still — the landscape is constantly shifting, a concept revealed more than ever through suburban sprawl, industrial agriculture and dramatic weather events caused by climate change.
Cowper-Smith said her work expresses contemporary environmental anxiety — trying to hold on to remembered landscapes even as they vanish. In these works, she blends transitional points of view, illustrating how memories are composites of many experiences with no single perspective. She uses gestural and dripping paint marks to represent time passing and the obscurity of moments past. By blending many forms of representation in a digital print, or digital video, Cowper-Smith juxtaposes media originating in multiple eras, held together in a single work.
Melissa Cowper-Smith was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the University of Victoria in British Columbia before moving to New York City to complete a Master of Fine Arts degree at Hunter College.
In 2001, she received the Helen Pitt Award (Vancouver Foundation). In 2005, she was awarded the Carolyn David Horowitz Fund (Hunter College). She is a founding member of tART, an all female art-collective based in New York City. From 2006 to 2011, she exhibited her work with tART, and in 2010, she edited tART zine vol.
2. In 2013, she founded a second all-female collective, Show & Tell, based in Arkansas.
She has exhibited in several New York City galleries, including A.I.R., The Rabbit Hole Gallery, Ernest Rubenstein Gallery, Work Gallery, Sweet Lorraine Gallery and the Bronx Art Exchange. Her outdoor public works have been exhibited through Art-Bridge and The Billboard Art Project. Cowper-Smith is currently creating art focused on agricultural landscapes, teaching art and developing farm shares to feed local families through Wildland Gardens.