Great show and awesome attendance, thanks to everyone who came! Congratulations to Jake Weigel for “Best of Show.” Look for his upcoming solo exhibition in Spring/Summer 2014.

Conditionally Human

Warning by Mary Robinson

Join us for the artists’ reception of Conditionally Human from 6-9p tonight during the Arts & Music @ Wedgewood Houston crawl.

Elapsed by Ryan Hoevenaar

Object Lust by Liz Heller

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Da! by Ross Turner

Help me congratulate the following artists for being selected by

Libby Rowe, Assistant Professor and Area Head of Photography at University of Texas @ San Antonio, for Ground Floor Galleries upcoming juried exhibition

Conditionally Human 

Artist Reception October 5th, 6-9pm

During Arts & Music @ Wedgewood/Houston

October 1st-25th, MWF 4-6pm

Ground Floor Gallery + Studios

427 Chestnut Street

Ground Floor Gallery is delighted to have a solo exhibition by one of its original studio mates, Amanda Joy Brown. When I recently found Amanda pounding nails into the frames she had made to stretch her finished canvases to, there was a rhythm to the sound I wish I had recorded. It sounded much like her paintings: skilled, purposefully repetitive lines breaking free of their “constructed boundaries.”

In this series of paintings, a foundation of flat shapes and colors provides structure for dense, free-flowing lines. Values and colors create context for the line work, hiding and revealing figures as well as creating groupings, hierarchy and homogeny.

Originally from Fort Worth, TX, via Essexville, MI, Amanda Joy Brown is a contemporary painter/installation artist who works out of her studio in Nashville, TN. Studying for a BFA in Graphic Design at Harding University, Brown became interested in painting her sophomore year. She graduated with a Bachelor’s in 2006, and went on to earn her MFA in the painting program at the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Brown’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally with various shows in Michigan, North Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia, Switzerland and France. She has been published by Carnegie Hall. Amanda Joy Brown currently shows at Parker Art Gallery on Saint Simons Island, GA, and Galerie Ortus in Bonnieux, France.

Looking forward to sharing E(labor)ated Surfaces with Lesley Patterson-Marx’s University School students. For some reason, I think Briena Harmening’s embroidered slang that she overheard from her students might a big hit!

Send in your submissions to Ground Floor Gallery (GFG) for their next juried exhibition November 2nd-29th. Finalist gets a solo show-with work chosen by GFG-in Spring 2014!

Give us your best, don’t worry about a theme, our creative juror and artist Libby Rowe, Assistant Professor and Area Head of Photography at University of Texas @ San Antonio, will develop one from the work she chooses. Drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, fiber, glass, encaustic, ceramics, mixed media, wood, digital art, video, and installation are accepted. All work must have been completed within the last two years.

Click here to apply.

E(labor)ated Surfaces

The juncture of painting and fabric…

Curatorial Statement by Herb Rieth

The southeast has long been associated with folkways and crafts. Perhaps it is the association with recalcitrant tradition and the preservation of the “old ways” that lends itself to this view or a hoakum perpetrated in the name of identity, but the myth remains. The reuse of old fabric and the embellishment of the old to make new are large within the craft traditions of the south. It seems fitting that these methods would be a jumping off place for exploring or challenging established notions of artifact.

The members of this exhibition all nod in some way to the tactility of fabric, the laborious act of sewing or crocheting, the sculptural manipulation of material to achieve a surficial end. Instead of blindly perpetrating some of the clichés in these forms however, the artists chosen use the monolith of tradition as place for jumping into the unknown. The work crosses boundaries from Carri Jobe’s painterly moves to Nick DeFord’s exquisitely crafted barbs. It imbues tension into the materials from Jim Arendt’s and Briena Harmening’s laborious recreation of instantaneous moments to Charlotte Wegryznowski’s lovingly paginated cenotaph’s for ideas and gardens of the past. Jessie Van der Laan uses fabric to bottle the smoke of notions that float like ghosts above the fray of Herb Rieth’s work, a chopped and channeled costume ball for the X generation.

The works speak to tradition in reverently rebellious tones and visit with each other, all adding their voices to the embodiment of E(labor)ated Surfaces.

We’ll be doing a closing reception for Amy’s solo exhibition on August 3rd 6-9p. Please come out to see the show, and grab a bite to eat, the food trucks will be out!! I think there’s even talk of a pop-up musical venue in the neighborhood…Fort Houston, Ovvio and Zeitgeist will also be opened.

Pandora’s Box Unhinged-a variation on the ancient myth, one that still involves hope.

Just suppose Pandora didn’t open the box at all, but the contents inside did so, forcibly, unhinging it all at once. What would we find-the traditional hate, crime, poverty and disease, or a Ukranian stamp belonging to an alligator? In this solo exhibition by emerging Memphis artist Amy Hutcheson, we’ll discover large-scale, painted fragmentations of both the mind and spirit of someone who uses humor (read: hope), to survive the constant battle between negativity and optimism, in a world already affected by the fact that Pandora’s Box was actually opened long ago. In addition to Amy’s paintings, some of her small studies on raw canvas will be exhibited, plus an installation of her “Box,” an ever-changing and growing still life.

Solo exhibition of Amy Hutcheson, Finalist-From the Ground Up, Ground Floor Gallery’s 1st juried exhibition.