May 29th-30th
6-10pm
Multiple Artist

607 N 65th St.

PlaiderPillar got her BS at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in Textile and Apparel design. She designs inflatable mascot costumes by day, and spends her evenings fabricatin’ creatures in her studio at Hot Shops Art Center.

Oh! You say you wanted a giant bouncy octopus to be your friend? Then, my friend, PlaiderPillar’s for you!

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Paul’s belief is that steel sculpture doesn’t have to be geometrical or rigid. His vision is to explore the softer more malleable side of steel’s properties while still maintaining its visual presence and strength.

Paul’s love of steel sculpture has taking him around the world. He has spent time exhibiting and creating commissioned work in Massachusetts, New York and Japan.

He currently lives in Omaha, NE, where he has had the opportunity to work with many architects and developers creating custom interiors, as well as exhibiting in local art galleries.

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Artist Statement

Artist Bio
Michael T. Godek earned his BFA in Sculpture and Ceramics from Bellevue University in 1994. He currently has executed numerous commissions and his work resides in private and public collections in Nebraska. Michael has been a full-time artist for 12 years and works in his studio at the Hot Shops Art Center in downtown Omaha, Nebraska. Recently he has enjoyed creating large-scale contemporary constructivist stainless steel pieces for two new outdoor malls in the Omaha area

DNA is not just about science. DNA is also about society and culture.
At Metal-i-Genics Studio, Dr. Peter N. Gray combines both sides of DNA’s importance in our lives by creating sculptures and paintings that reflect concepts from genetics, microbiology, and physics. Formerly head of the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine among other impressive scientific achievements, Dr. Gray is now a full-time artist. He’s also a part-time educator currently teaching an arts and science class at Dixon Elementary School near Chicago where children learn about genetics by isolating DNA from vegetables, participating in the National Geographic Genographic Project, and making science-inspired art.

I have lived all over the world including many years in the Far East.  My works include the somewhat romantic idea that the exotic and mysterious places can be contained within painting–giving us all the taste of the unknown without having to make the journey ourselves.

In recent years I have made paintings that I hope contain the spirit of places as diverse as a private cemetery in Madagascar, the grand 19th century hotels and palaces of India and the Far East, a Mayan temple in the southern Yucatan, or the remote deserts of North Africa, to name just a few.  My most recent paintings are an attempt to deal with certain codes of ethics, aesthetics and spirituality that runs throughout the history of humanity.  This includes the warrior code of the Samurai, the tradition of Russian Orthodox Icon Painting, and finally homage to the sublime, ethereal portraits of Leonardo da Vinci.

For nearly three decades, Steve Joy has exhibited his exotically evocative art around the world.  His work is now represented in galleries and museums in Norway, Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, Japan and the United States, including New York, Omaha and Lincoln.  A retrospective of his work is slated with the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha.

Studied:
1975-1976, Attended Cardiff College of Art
1979, Graduated from Exeter College of Art, Devon, England, with Bachelor of Fine Arts
1980, Graduated from Chelsea College of Art with Master of Fine Arts in Painting
Museums:
British Council Arts, London, International, United Kingdom
Japan Foundation, Tokyo, International, Japan
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona , Barcelona, International, Spain
New York Public Library, New York, New York
Exhibition Record (Museums, Institutions and Awards):
2001, London Contemporary Arts (Paperworks)
2000, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska
1998, Sioux City Art Center, “Working Space,” Sioux City, Iowa
1997, Bergen City Art Museum, Norway
1997, Haugesand City Art Museum, Norway
1996, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst, Virginia
1993, Kunsthaus (Museum of Art), Zurich, Switzerland

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Born in Plymouth, England, in 1952, Joy served in the Royal Air Force from 1968 to 1975, visiting museums and cultural sights on his furloughs. In 1975, he enrolled in art school in London. His earliest works — oil paintings on canvas, some with three-dimensional projections — reflected his desire to escape from the mundane by continued travel. Later, inspired by American Abstract Expressionists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Joy sought to break away from the formal aspects of contemporary British painting. Realizing the inherent limitations of abstraction, however, Joy noted, “The only way abstract painting had any chance of survival was to take on the great issues of history.” By a combination of travel and painting, he has made a career of this personal journey. He is committed to the idea of spiritual abstraction and the development of painting and its history from the 15th century to today. Influences from the past include the art of Duccio, Giotto, Velasquez, and Matisse.

Joy has studied and worked on three continents, in Japan, Belgium, Italy, Norway, Greece, Spain, and now, more permanently, in Omaha, where he first arrived as the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts’ curator in 1998 and where he is one of a group of artists with international reputations working in Omaha.

Joy’s technique and his choice of media have evolved over the years. He creates using rich, saturated colors, squares of gold and silver leaf, and wax. His paintings also reflect a vivid sense of geometry and proportion. Several are punctuated with words as part of the composition. The totality reflects Joy’s fascination with exotic cultures, religions, and the great religious works of the history of art, in particular Orthodox icon painting and western European medieval works.

Oil paints and watercolor in the hands of artist John Thein are seductively fluid media which allow him to create expressive, figurative compositions. A faculty member at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, Thein has researched the culture of the American Indian for over a decade and focused on interpreting its historical context in his work. A monumental suite of paintings, “Wounded Knee- The Painted Spirit”, that he exhibited in a solo show at Creighton University serves as his personal, visual document of the horrors of that event. In it, larger-than life forms confront the viewer with an unthinkable description of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.

Thein has traveled widely in his teaching career, conducting classes in Xian, China, Leister, England and the Dominican Republic. Many of the techniques which he uses in his watercolors were refined from his knowledge of traditional Asian sumi-e painting. The artist states that the sumi-e brushstrokes allow him to bridge distinct cultures: “The sumi-e brush moves across the paper in a fleeting second, allowing its washes to mingle together… after drying, the human figure is created with a slow layering of small washes… bringing together east and west in a coherent whole.”

Thein lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska where his three dimensional work has been recently installed on the riverfront at Miller’s Landing. His work has been exhibited and won prizes internationally. It is also included in many museum, private and corporate collections throughout the world.

John Thein is a multi-media artist, who has studied at Atlelier 17 in Paris, the Layton School of Art in Wisconsin as well as the University of Iowa and the University of Wisconsin. He received his Master of Fine Arts and a Master of Art at the University of Iowa and a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Layton School of Art. He has taught art at Creighton University and the University of Iowa. And his illustrated art can be seen in such books as, Capital of Pain by Paul Elward and Games of Chance by Thom Gunn. With one-man exhibitions and multi-person shows spanning from Nebraska to Guatemala, John Thein’s work is well known nationally and internationally. Thein has also received such awards as the Award of Excellence from an International Juried Art Competition in New York, New York. Thein’s work is in many private collections but one can see his work in the public collections of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE and the Cincinnati Art Museum among others.

Rogers has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally including one person exhibitions at major galleries and museums in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Scottsdale, Germany, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates. Her work is in major public and private collections including The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, The Oakland Museum of Art, and The San Jose Museum of Art.

She was born and grew up in a small town in Northern Ohio and graduated with a B.SC. degree in Art Education from Ohio State University.  In California she studied painting at The San Francisco Art Institute with Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff and Frank Lobdell. She studied life drawing with Nathan Oliviera at California College of Arts and Crafts.  She received the Eisner Prize and her MA in Painting from the University of California at Berkeley. At UC Berkeley she studied with NY painters Michael Goldberg and Angelo Ippolito.  Her major professor was the Chicago painter, Felix Ruvolo.

Rogers has been a faculty member or visiting artist at the University of California, Berkeley, CA, University of Chicago, San Jose State University, The San Francisco Art Institute, Cooper Union, New York City, NY,  University of Washington, Seattle, WA, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. Pusan National University, Pusan, South Korea and Zayed university in Adu Dhabi.  In 2007, after numerous mentoring and teaching awards, Rogers retired from the University of Arizona in 2007, and is now Professor Emeritus of Painting and Drawing in The School of Art at The University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ.

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Artist Statement

Transcending the Ordinary
Every day, as we try to stay informed, we read or watch the news.  Occasionally there are reports of the contributions, achievements, and courageous acts by people that make us feel pride in being human. More often though, we are bombarded with images of misery, cruelty, devastation, deception, and greed.  These presentations of moderated truth are ubiquitous reminders of the ugliness that can be created by humans.  I make paintings to transcend daily life and the six o’clock news, to evoke the sublime, to reaffirm the existence of beauty and the critical importance of cherishing the earth.

I paint because the act of painting is direct; it is another truth—you make a mark and there it is, just you and this act of creation.  When I paint, I am an explorer in the terrain of my own psyche, discovering what relationships will emerge as the work develops. I depart from representational accuracy to select and then exaggerate or simplify the stunning botanical forms that are present in the world around me.

If your artwork is not readily identified as art that challenges the status quo or in support of social change then you run the risk of being labeled the maker of beautiful and harmonious paintings.  Some call beautiful, abstract painting mere decoration, as if decorative is a pejorative. Yet, every person, every culture beautifies in its own way; even in the most modest settings, people look for ways to bring beauty to their surroundings, to create a sanctuary.  Making something beautiful is a necessary act of ritual for many people in the world.   This act, in and of itself, has function and meaning. Through my paintings, I am reclaiming a space for beauty in the midst of everyday life;  I seek to create a place of respite, reflection, and contemplation.

My most recent works continue my exploration of those emblems of the microcosm that I invent or discover.  I try to investigate various systems of order and harmony in what at first appears to be nature’s chaos. I like the opportunity to look at things I cannot identify, which happens in nature more than any other place. It is a privilege to observe phenomenon that are incomprehensible at first.  Because they are from nature, not human, you know they have a practical purpose.

Every painting I begin makes its own demands.  The wonder of this dialogue with paint, color, form, light and space is what keeps me excited about working.  Work comes out of work!  My ideas come as much from the art I have already made, travel, and studying diverse cultures as from nature. Travel and working in my own garden in Tucson, AZ, are a constant source of new ideas.  All the colors, shapes, and forms I have experienced are stored in my memories, and ready to be drawn upon when I am working.  My working process involves continual changes in texture, form, and color that develop during each studio work session until the piece is realized, insisting on its own eccentric presence in the world.