Art galleries to host new exhibits

MURRAY, Ky. – The Murray State University art galleries are beginning the spring semester with three exhibits:

1. The Mary Ed Mecoy Hall Gallery will host “Vivid Terrain,” an exhibit featuring recent works by Jessica Fife and Katie Knoeringer, from Jan. 16-Feb. 14.

Knoeringer’s work, “Creature of Habit 3,” is a painted paper collage from 2023. Fife’s work, “Portrait of Lakesha,” is a 30-inch by 24-inch oil on canvas from 2021.

2. The Eagle Upper Gallery will host “Bounding Box: recent work by Martin Lang and Thomas Wharton” from Jan. 16-Feb. 15.

Lang and Wharton investigate material, space and symbol through a restrained aesthetic language. Lang creates wall-mounted, anodized aluminum panel structures, some installed with monitors and speakers, some with objects and artifacts that investigate the artist as persona, contemporary product fads, design and branding, text, language and ego and identity. Through a pared-down vocabulary of rectangles and circles, Wharton creates drawings, photographs, paintings and sculptures to explore how light and shadow define physical space and create illusions, reflections and moods.

Lang is an artist living and working in Columbia, South Carolina, where he is an assistant professor of studio art and chair of the Studio Art Program at Columbia College. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography with honors from Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was born and raised. He received his Master of Fine Arts in transmedia design from the University of Tennessee. Lang has been a visiting artist at various institutions and at artist residencies across the country. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with works held in many private and public collections.

Wharton – born in 1987 in Plainview, New York – received his BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design and his MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Tennessee. He has been the subject of several solo exhibitions in galleries throughout the South and Midwest. His work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including the University of Tennessee, Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Savannah College of Art and Design. Wharton has exhibited nationally in group exhibitions at First Street Gallery in New York; Granite City Art and Design District in Granite City, Illinois; Satellite Contemporary in Las Vegas, Nevada; and the University of Dallas, among others. He has been published in New American Paintings, Burnaway Magazine and Numbers Inc.

Wharton has received numerous awards, including a full fellowship as artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center, as well as the Sylvia Smith ‘73 artist-in-residence program at Dickinson College. His practice is currently based in Sioux City, Iowa, where he is also the assistant professor of art at Briar Cliff University.

3. The Clara M. Eagle Gallery will host two exhibits by Danielle Felice Reide from Jan. 16-Feb. 22: “Venus Walks on Pearls,” a site specific installation, and “Ocean Womb,” an exhibit of recent paintings.

Reide’s work treads between looking toward nature and being in the moment and seeing what arises in that immediacy, so nothing is planned.

She said, “I’m not looking at physical objects, like rocks or rivers or oceans, but somehow, with each moment, and in each painting, a different feeling and connection to nature and to my own physical being emerges.”

The focus of Reide’s artistic inquiry is the deconstruction and reimagining of the painting tradition. The bulk of this study is manifest in site-specific installations composed of the detritus of artists and artisans from the collected leftovers and discards from their unique creative endeavors. Collecting, categorizing and displaying found materials, and examining the relationship of these displays to painting, drive her practice as an artist. Reide considers herself part of a generation of artists who are reinvigorating painting for the 21st century by expanding the materials and vocabulary of painting. She regularly works with recycled non-traditional materials that are repurposed and integrated into painting, which are installed on architectural structures such as walls.

Reide grew up in the United States and Iceland. She received her BFA in art from the University of Virginia, her MFA in painting from Virginia Commonwealth University and also studied with Daniel Buren at the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf.

Her international exhibition record includes galleries and museums in Mexico City, Athens, Berlin, New York and many other cities. Her work is also included in museum collections internationally.

Reide is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, the Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship in sculpture and a New Frontiers Grant from Indiana University. She is currently the Randolph H. Deer Professor of Painting at the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis.