Galleries Visual Arts

Hoss Haley at Penland

 Tangent. Hoss Haley, artist. Photo by Eleanor Annand

Tangent. Hoss Haley, artist. Photo by Eleanor Annand

Through September 15, the Penland Gallery presents Hoss Haley | Correction Line, a solo exhibition of the well-regarded North Carolina sculptor. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, August 3, from 4:30–6:30 p.m. The exhibition will include new monumental sculptural works as well as paintings on steel. “The artist’s concept for the exhibition is centered on balance, weight and activation,” says Kathryn Gremley, director of the Penland Gallery & Visitors Center. “Intentionally, he is utilizing scale and form to impose those ideas and affect the viewer. While more likely to be permanently installed in an outdoor space, the presentation as an interior installation of large scale works will be extraordinary.”

The name for the exhibition speaks to Haley’s inspiration for these works. “When they originally surveyed the Heartland, they decided that they would just lay it out in one-mile-square grids,” says Haley. “They quickly discovered that squares don’t fit on round things. So, every 20 miles as you travel north, they had to make a correction to the grid.” Haley grew up on Correction Line Road in Kansas. “I’ve always been sort of intrigued by man’s attempt to reconcile or describe or map things in this kind of graphic grid, and the way the earth doesn’t really accommodate that.”

Much of the work in Correction Line explores what happens when round objects intersect square ones. Haley also focused on how the pieces would fit within the gallery space, even making a scale model of the gallery exhibition space in his studio. “I purposefully thought a lot of about the space at the Penland Gallery,” he says. “More than any show I’ve ever done, I felt the importance of how the object existed in that particular space. Penland is a craft school and I think people have a certain expectation of scale and what they’re going to find there. I’m hoping to shake that a little.”

The Penland Gallery & Visitors Center is located at 3135 Conley Ridge Road in Penland. For more information, visit Penland.org.

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