Blue Spiral 1 Hosts Five Exhibits Through October

Blue Spiral 1 presents five new exhibits opening Friday, September 2, and running through October 26. Cut and Paste: Collage Works, in the Main Gallery, includes a range of artists who utilize collage as one of their main modes of creative expression. They run the gamut from the traditional joining of papers to incorporating digital techniques to create and enhance the collage.

“The show includes some of my most recent work—owls—using wire and paper pulp, walnut dye and lots of natural found objects including rocks, acorn tops, twigs and seeds,” says Bryant Holsenbeck.

Exhibiting artists also include Janice Colbert, Vicki Essig, Luke Haynes, Kreh Mellick, Isaac Payne, Jon Sours, David Samuel Stern, Akiko Sugiyama and Katie Walker.

In the Small Format Gallery, Alain Mailland uses mainly precious roots and species from his native France to create sculptures representing a correspondence between animals, minerals and plants in this eponymous exhibition. He developed his own distinctive style and technique, particularly in hollowing, and developed specialized tools to turn wood into flowers and carve works evoking marine life or biological specimens.

The Showcase Gallery hosts A Gathering: Mary Engel and Charles Keiger. Engel and Keiger present a gathering of creatures both sentient and surreal and great and small. Engel’s trinket and gem-encrusted animal sculptures celebrate the beauty and nobility of animals, while also drawing attention to the threat to their existence. Keiger’s folk-inspired narrative paintings feature animals in protagonist roles, exercising dominion over their fantastical surroundings.

The Upper Level Gallery presents Asheville Oblique, a collaboration between Ken Carder and Steve Ward. This collaboration began with Ward creating interpretive paintings of Carder’s digitally altered screengrabs of Asheville locations.

“Ken was browsing familiar locations in Google Earth when he discovered that an accidental keystroke or two partially scrambled the image on the screen,” says Ward. “Translating these into oil paintings allowed for just enough of the flawed human hand to elevate the cold and digital into images skewed enough to approach beautiful.”

In response to the absence of figures in these urban paintings, Carder constructed kinetic wooden sculptures out of dying ash trees.

In the Lower Level Gallery, Step Into the Light: Alex Bernstein and Mitchell Lonas, the artists’ respective use of carved glass and incised aluminum creates intimate narratives. While Lonas etches his shimmering stylized trees, feathers, nests, waterfalls and animals from aluminum panels coated in matte black, Bernstein carves and polishes colorful, translucent cast glass to unveil abstract sculptures inspired by the natural world.

Learn more at BlueSpiral1.com.