Group Exhibition “Frontyard, Backyard, Street” Opens at Redux on September 11th

From September 11th to October 24th, 2020, Redux Contemporary Art Center will present Frontyard, Backyard, Street, a group show featuring the work of Christian Birk, Susan Gregory, Dontré Major, Hirona Matsuda, and Alex Waggoner.

Redux describes the presentation as follows”

Frontyard, Backyard, Street, a group exhibition offering reflection on urban Charleston, invites the neighborhood to share five artist’s sense of place in their city landscapes. The artists use a variety of media to depict their interpretation of a watermark in time. The surrounding street blocks team with energy and layers of stories as the hustle of the day transpires. Works use this visual language as theme, celebrating the vibrancy, while, also, considering the inevitable change of our city landscape. The artists consider: What is the character of Charleston? What is it that is precious and what history is necessary to protect and tell?

Christian Birk is a painter currently based in Columbia, SC. They earned BAs in Studio Art and Art History from the College of Charleston (2016). They’ve shown work in the Halsey Institute’s juried exhibition Young Contemporaries (Charleston), with GHOST Art Project (Omaha, NE), and at Redux Contemporary Art Center (Charleston).

Susan Gregory Susan Gregory is a multidisciplinary artist who paints in mixed media and encaustic, designs and makes functional pottery under the line ceramic scg and occasionally creates public art installations. She earned a B.F.A in Painting and Ceramics at Western Carolina University (2000), where she has a piece in their permanent collection. In 2009, Gregory furthered her art education with Encaustics at Penland School (NC).  After years in Denver, CO, and San Francisco, CA, she returned to her native state in 2016. The artist has shown locally and nationally with recent exhibitions including ArtFields 2019 and the street sign instrumental public art piece, XYLO-PLAY, on Upper King Street, Charleston, SC. She is currently developing Studio Union, a collective professional art space for ceramics and mixed media in the Neck of the Charleston peninsula.

Dontré Major, originally from Oklahoma, moved to Charleston in 2015 where he attended and received a B.A. from the College of Charleston’s Studio Art program with a concentration in photography. While attending C of C he was accepted to show in the juried Young Contemporaries Exhibitions in 2016, 2017, 2018; in the 2018 show he won two awards the Norton M. Seltzer Prize and The Laura M. Bragg Memorial Award as well as receiving the title Best in Show. After graduation, in 2018, Major was also a part of the Charleston Gaillard Center “Prints in Clay” exhibition which focused on the history of enslaved Africans and the fingerprints they left behind. In 2019 he also showed work in the “Enhancing African Descendant Identity through Community Engagement and DNA Analysis,” which was a project in collaboration between The Gullah Society and Redux Contemporary Art Center. In the winter of 2019 he finally had his first solo exhibition at Redux.

Hirona Matsuda creates immersive environments that evoke her felt experience of a specific time or place. She has kept a studio in downtown Charleston since 2006 and has collaborated with a number of local artists and arts organizations in those years. As the city has changed, so has the way Matsuda relates to different parts of town and the creative community. The fluctuation of the inhabitants and the cycle of decay and development is a constant source of subject matter as well as the actual material to use in the work. By often repurposing natural and manufactured materials found on site, she brings actual pieces of the environment into the work. Because of our shared human experience, people can often relate to the work on a common emotional or nostalgic level.

Alex Wagonner graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design with a BFA in Painting and Printmaking in 2012. In 2014, she was one of the Regional Emerging Artist in Residence at Artspace in Raleigh, North Carolina. She was included in New American Paintings No. 118 in 2015 and was awarded Best In Show at the 2017 Piccolo Spoleto Juried Art Exhibition. During the summer of 2018 she was the Artist in Residence at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina.  She moved to Atlanta, Georgia in September of 2019.  She is currently a studio artist at MINT in Atlanta.

This exhibition will be free and open to the public, but with limited hours and strict guidelines in place to ensure visitors and artists are adhering to suggested protocol from the CDC. This will include mandatory face coverings, limited access to the entire Redux building, and occupancy restrictions.

EXHIBITION HOURS: Monday & Wednesday 11 am – 4 pm and Friday 11 am – 3 pm, and by appointment. For appointments outside of the gallery hours, contact Cara Leepson via cara@reduxstudios.org or via 843-722-0697.

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