Opening Reception - Carolyn Cowper: Pretender
Event Details
Event by The Bells Gallery
Bells Gallery has a new location! Join us for an exhibition opening and a gallery opening reception on Friday, May 3, 2024, from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Carolyn Cowper’s “Pretender” is on view at Bells Gallery from May 3 to June 1.
When: May 3; 5:30p-8p
Where: Bells Gallery at 1837-3 W Main St (cherokee+main)
What: Opening Reception (First Friday Art Crawl) with drinks and Greek Street Food Truck + live music
Carolyn Cowper’s “Pretender” is a body of work that utilizes means of painting, drawing, three-dimensional design, and installation to investigate human and non-objective relationships, perception, and experiegh means of abstraction, fluidity, and materiality. Pretender speaks to moments where sureness blurs with doubt, visually and conceptually.
In this body of work, artist Carolyn Cowper conveys the act of making, experimenting with, and piecing together work as a means of language—expressing both the familiar and the undetermined. She explores how things function independently to further investigate how they function and energize when interacting collectively.
The artist considers her artistic approach to be non-representational but familiar through visual elements, centering pleasure, joy, and vanity. Above all, Pretender celebrates the act of making and experiencing art.
This is Cowper’s second solo show at Bells Gallery.
Carolyn Cowper is a multidisciplinary artist who creates emotive work to explore abstract, disparate ideas and conceptual relatiand further investigate possibilities and relationships regarding color, form, patterns, layers, and space. Cowper earned her BFA from The University of Alabama (2021) and is currently based in the Wiregrass Region of Alabama.
My mixed-media art practice utilizes painting, drawing, dimensional design, and instalproach to consider abstract, disparate ideas and conceptual relationships. My work investigates human and non-objective relationships with color, forms, layers, patterns, and space and the influence this has on perception and experience. I am exploring how things function independently but further considering how things function and energize when interacting in groups, allowing the whole to be collectivelye terms.
I aim to convey the act of making, experimenting with, presenting, and piecing together art as a means of language. Through experimental means of communication, I intend to expreinherentmmanent (finding familarity), and the undetermined (considering unfamilarity) in a way that feels personal yetThe believe the fabric of my approach is non-representational, threading together familiar visual elements. Experimental elements derive from taking up space, embracing play, and imagining possibilities.
My use of color is reactionary and emotionally motivated. Lines are blurred between visits that are often associated with a more digital means of design and a more fure that is commonly associated with human tendencies, like the juxtaposition of hard edges and gestural marks. My creative process is often spent experimenting with and negotiating surfaces – putting down marks, rearranging, adjusting, layering – which becomes re process of presenting the work in a space. I have found this process, in its entirety, leads to a safe space for curiosity – guiding thoughtful dialogue, reaction, emotion, and experience.
