Current Exhibitions

 

April 20 through June 30, 2013

    

The Art Museum of Southeast Texas (AMSET) is pleased to announce its spring exhibitions showcasing artwork by two prominent Texas artists.  Sally Chandler: The Lost World and David Everett: The Ties That Bind will be on view April 20 through June 30, 2013.

An opening reception for both exhibitions will be held from 6-8 p.m. on Friday, April 19 at AMSET.  Sally Chandler and David Everett will both be present to conduct discussions about their work.

 Sally Chandler: The Lost World

Sally Chandler: The Lost World explores a time with 18th – 19th century French sensibilities: horse drawn carriages, decorated walls, and sumptuous colors. Chandler’s work has a gestural quality and playfulness emphasized by her delicate colored palette. The loose application of paint and palette are juxtaposed with the content of Chandler’s work. She illustrates a world that she believes to have been lost; the slower pace of the past, the style and ornaments, as well as the animals that have since disappeared.

Illustrating a whimsical world where libraries and parlors are decorated in lavish colors and loaded from head to toe with books and decoration, Chandler surveys a slower paced time in reality when it took more than a few hours to travel great distances; these journeys included horse buggies rather than automobiles. She portrays the gamut of people, places, objects, and animals that punctuate such an existence including: Marie Antoinette’s birthday cake, a European library, a decadent salon and even wallpaper designs and snowflakes. Each artwork examines a facet of this time the artist holds dear.

Born in Pecos, Texas in 1951, Chandler studied history at Rutgers and Oxford Universities and earned a Bachelor of Arts from Rutgers University in 1973 in history. As a postgraduate, Chandler also attended the London School of Economics with a focus on international relations. She studied drawing, painting, and printmaking at Belles Arts in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and continued her studies in printmaking at the Instituto Allende also in Mexico. Chandler currently lives and works in Houston, Texas.

Sally Chandler: The Lost World is organized by AMSET and funded, in part, by the City of Beaumont, the Wesley W. Washburn, M.D. and Lulu L. Smith, M.D. Endowment Fund, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the late Dorothy Anne Conn, Helen Caldwell Locke and Curtis Blakey Locke Charitable Foundation, C. Homer and Edith Fuller Chambers Charitable Foundation.  Antiques and memorabilia courtesy of Dexter Augier of Finder’s Fayre.

David Everett: The Ties That Bind

Also on view is David Everett: The Ties That Bind, which depicts the familiar creatures that inhabit the Texas landscape in sculpture, drawing, and woodcuts.  Using rich hues in his drawings and sculpture, Everett’s animals exhibit a lively personality and emphasize a playfulness and quirkiness. Each sculpture begins with a sketch and laminated hardwood as the material. Using a traditional mallet and wood gouges, Everett removes material slowly revealing the rough forms of animals. As the process progresses, he draws directly on the wood to assist in visualizing the form he wants to achieve. Once the carving is complete, he paints the wood forms with oils with his unmistakable palette of vibrant hues.

Everett works in several media: painted wood sculptures, small bronzes, colored pencil drawings, and woodcuts. He creates both sea and land animals often incorporating multiple animals together that inhabit the same environment. The sculptures must be seen from all sides in order to take in all the wildlife and how they are intertwined.

David Everett: The Ties That Bind is organized by AMSET and funded, in part, by the City of Beaumont, the Wesley W. Washburn, M.D. and Lulu L. Smith, M.D. Endowment Fund, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the late Dorothy Anne Conn, Helen Caldwell Locke and Curtis Blakey Locke Charitable Trust, and the C. Homer and Edith Fuller Chambers Charitable Foundation.

 

Above artwork (top to bottom):  Sally Chandler, The Spanish Family, 2010, prismacolor on paper, 19.75 x 25.5 inches, collection of the artist 

 

David Everett, Sentry, 1993, polychromed mahogany, loan courtesy of artist