At Blue Spiral 1 Gallery, a new slate of exhibitions opens with a reception on Friday, May 1, from 5–7 p.m. and runs through June 24.
Into the Wild, a two-person exhibition featuring sculptor Christine Kosiba and landscape painter Peggy Root, will be on display in the Showcase Gallery. Root approaches her work through immersion in place, often painting outdoors over extended periods of time. “I paint large canvases outside—actually on location,” says Root. “This show features paintings done in both high and low altitudes, on mountaintops where sky and hills are in dramatic dialogue and in rocky creek beds and spruce-fir forest interiors where the atmosphere is quiet and contemplative. My personal working phrase for this upcoming exhibit has been ‘wild places.’ My favorite kind of places to paint are wild places, and when I learned that I would be showing alongside sculptor Christine Kosiba, this seemed perfectly complementary to her work.”
North Beach. Charles Ladson, artist
Kosiba works in clay slabs and coils to create animal sculptures. “In this body of work, I chose animals not for their literal presence in nature but for the symbolic weight they carry across myth, folklore and collective memory,” she says. “The selection is intuitive but deliberate. I am drawn to creatures that already exist as archetypes within us, vessels for conflict, perception, vulnerability and transformation. Peggy’s work translates the feeling of a place—its light, its temporality and its presence, while I am translating its emotional and psychological terrain we carry within us.”
In the gallery’s Small Format space, Tamie Beldue displays her solo exhibition Light Shadows that was canceled after Hurricane Helene. Beldue, professor and department chair at UNC Asheville, built this collection of mixed media drawings work around the shifting relationship between illumination and obscurity. “A series of 22 works titled Light Shadows was the impetus for this exhibition title,” she says. “The movement of daylight constantly generates its opposite, shadow, leading to a reconciliation of the observed. In raising the visual awareness of perceptual consciousness through found compositions, the validity of the subject doesn’t need to be questioned in the same way as if it were orchestrated. This allowed me to think more about making a drawing before depicting a subject.”
Her process embraces experimentation across materials including watercolor, graphite, charcoal and wax. “I like drawing this way because it isn’t as steeped in traditional ‘rules’ that I must follow,” she says. “In other words, I don’t have a prescribed methodology for making a drawing; rather I make the work however it asks to be made.”
Also in May, the group exhibition Off Script opens in the Lower Level Gallery, featuring the work of five artists whose imagery implies a cinematic lens.
Blue Spiral 1 is located at 38 Biltmore Avenue, Asheville. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit BlueSpiral1.com or call 828.251.0202.
