Pinch: Amelia Biewald & Terrence Payne

Pinch, features new work from artists Amelia Biewald and Terrence Payne. Pinch will explore how cultural and personal  identities are romanticized, manipulated, and influenced through Amelia’s antiquated reflections on assumed cultural roots and Terrence’s discerning and vibrant drawings of individual actions.

Amelia Biewald’s intimate and haunting watercolor paintings are derived from photographs taken on her recent Grand Tour of Northern Italy.  Harking back to a desire to find a connection with a legacy of classical antiquity once shared by many 18th century Europeans, Biewald examines the tradition of the search for an assumed cultural heritage in order to break free of cultural hegemony at home.  The Wedgewood inspired impressions Biewald has created for Pinch revisit the obsessive nature of seizing on past legacies and relate to a modern desire to appropriate the exotic into the increasingly banal of a shrinking world.

Terrence Payne’s archetypical portraits illustrate behavior at the fringes of acceptability in everyday life that are bent on directing the actions and ideals of the communities they inhabit.  Payne examines the subtle and overt ways in which individuals can try to influence those around them for self preservation or personal gain which reveal their own fears and needs in the process.  Payne uses the wit, words, and iconography familiar in his work to challenge the viewer into redefining their own place in the world and to ponder how they might influence the perceptions of those around them.

Image Credit: "If Smarts Were Bullets Then No One Would Ever Get Shot" 2015, oil pastel on paper, 48” x 57” Terrence Payne

See the writeup on the exhibit by Russ White.