Archives for February 2018

The Remarkable Life of Theora Hamblett: Stories of Friendship and Art

TUESDAY, MARCH 6
noon
Faulkner Room, Archives & Special Collections, J.D. Williams Library

COST: FREE!

Dr. Ed Meek, Assistant Vice Chancellor Emeritus for Public Relations and Associate Professor Emeritus of Journalism, and Marti Funke, Collections Manager University Museum and Historic Houses, will speak about the life, legacy and artwork of Mississippi artist Theora Hamblett.

2015 Buie Bacchanalia

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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2015

Join the Friends of the Museum for food, wine, and revelry
at a pre-installation celebration in the Mary Buie wing.

The David M. Robinson Memorial Collection of Greek and Roman antiquities is among the nation’s finest. Of its 2,000 plus objects, only 133 have been on display. The recently renovated Mary Buie wing will house a redesigned and expanded exhibition of the Robinson Collection.

All proceeds from this event will help fund this reinstallation.

Cocktails at 6:30 p.m.
Dinner seating at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets $150 each

Wine pairings provided courtesy of Vino Wholesalers
Food provided by The Main Event/City Grocery Restaurant Group
Entertainment by Athenian Dance Troupe

RSVP by February 13, 2015 at 662.915.7073
or email museum@olemiss.edu.

Ruin is a Secret Oasis

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Somewhere South of Violet, 2008

 

March 13–July 7, 2018

Opening Reception: Thursday, April 19, 2018, 6–8:00 p.m.

It is precisely their fragmentary nature and lack of fixed meaning that render ruins deeply meaningful. They blur boundaries between rural and urban, past and present and are intimately tied to memory, desire and a sense of place.
—Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality

My studio in downtown Memphis is in an old medicine factory at the end of a dead-end street. Last in a row of empty warehouses, the building is an outpost of long-gone industry, surrounded by empty lots, crumbling edifices and thick copses of trees. The Mississippi River flows by less than a mile away, but leaves this area untouched by its progress.

I am drawn to the forgotten, to the mysterious traces of memory in our physical world. My work references objects and places that continue their slow transformation after someone turns away: rich, charged, vibrating places. Rooted on the edges of our world, these thin spaces are quietly pulsing with a kind of murmuring remembrance: the crumbling wall with flowering vines pushing through the cracks, the drape and sway of a fence that separates nothing from nothingness, the silhouette of folding and unfolding structures. Neglected and abandoned, these mysterious sites live on in an active collapse, their old stories settling into their foundations and becoming new ones as nature reclaims them for their own.

Starting with photographic documentation of these sites, I work through an intricate and laborious process of tracing, drawing and layering of gouache that puts the painting at a remove from the original photograph. Through this method, the image is abstracted and reduced to its essence, while the inherent ephemerality of the site is echoed in the material terrain of found paper. Out of decay and isolation a poetry of resilience and new growth is revealed. The works in Ruin is a Secret Oasis mine this liminal space—the region between the bloom and the decay—and pursue the sense of place these sites inspire. In them, beauty is resilience and an acknowledgement of the ravages of nature and time. Through this imagery I explore a landscape of change and the traces of experience that remain.

—Maysey Craddock

Exhibition made possible by support from the Jane Becker Heidelberg Endowment for the Arts.