Surface Memory, a group exhibition concurrent with NCECA, features works by emerging and established artists working in ceramics. The artists include:
Samuel Monroe Brown, Sarah Heitmeyer, Linda Lopez, Bobby Silverman, Tzyy Yi Young (Amy).
Brown, Heitmeyer, Silverman, and Young’s works investigate and utilize the wall as a surface for display, while Lopez’s porcelain ombre dust furries take on painterly qualities that exist in the round.
Using objects as language, Linda Lopez creates playful forms using repetitive, dollop like shapes that are coated in ombre glazing. Growing up as the daughter of immigrant parents—her mother from Vietnam and her father from Mexico, her mother’s fragmented English in describing the world around her helped shape a place in which everyday objects became animated. Lopez has discovered in her own domestic surroundings a visual language that she translates into ceramic explorations.
Linda Nguyen Lopez (b. 1981, California) received a MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Lopez has exhibited her work in New Zealand, England and throughout the United States including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach; The Hole, New York; Fisher Parrish, Brooklyn; and the Jane Hartsook Gallery at Greenwich House Pottery, New York. She has been an artist in residence at The Clay Studio, Archie Bray Foundation and Greenwich House Pottery. In 2016, Lopez received the Lighton International Artist Exchange Program Grant to be an artist-in-residence at C.R.E.T.A. Rome Residency Program. She is represented by Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, FL.
Samuel Monroe Brown uses clay as a conduit. Mineral, dependent on water, soft, and eventually breaking down again, the material serves as a metaphor for the human body. Marks left in the clay display gestures of touch, care, and impressions of time. Brown’s work investigates the current western system of care and questions healing processes that often leave people with more psychological trauma than the illness itself. Drawing from his own personal and familial anecdote with cancer, he creates installations that question what it means to cope and to grieve, to empower people to know that they are vital to the system, even if their bodies or loved ones are in a fragile state.
Samuel Monroe Brown grew up in Duncan, North Carolina. He spent six years in Boone, North Carolina where he received his BFA at Appalachian State University focusing in Ceramics. Brown has had exhibitions at The Clay Studio, in Philadelphia, PA, The Blowing Rock Art and History Museum, Blowing Rock, NC, and The Smith Gallery in Boone, NC. He is currently an MFA candidate in Craft + Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA.
