Friday November 6 - Saturday December 24
Flat File Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of our first mixed media show: Low Yards, new works by Jacksonville artist Anna McClellan. For this series she warmly renders natural objects found along her footpath, objects low to the ground and often overlooked in the broad vista of traditional landscape imagery.
McClellan's approach as a landscape painter aims to make the uniqueness of a site her own through a feeling of closeness to the subject. She approaches these works through an intense process of manipulating the surface of the media by combining paint, ink, graphite, colored pencil, and charcoal creating peculiar grounds onto which she depicts her terrain. The manipulation is so thorough that in some instances the positive and negative space blur together and distinctions between the subject and its environment begin to fade. McClellan’s affinity and familiarity with her landscape is the dominant element of the show.
McClellan received her BFA in painting from the University of North Florida and her MFA in painting/drawing from Florida State University. She was Artist-in-Residence for Duval County Schools, has taught for both Florida Community College at Jacksonville and The Cummer Museum of Arts & Gardens, and is the 2008-09 recipient of an Art Ventures Grant funded by the Community Foundation Inc. of Jacksonville. McClellan currently resides in Jacksonville, Florida and teaches studio art for the University of North Florida as an Adjunct Instructor.
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Show OFF
Friday September 4 - Saturday October 31
Flat File Gallery presents Show OFF, photographs by Bill Yates and the late Loyd Sandgren. The exhibition pairs Sandgren’s images of Jacksonville, Florida wrestling events from the early 1960s with Yates’ images taken in 1972 and 1973 of the Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink located in rural Hillsborough County, Florida.
Both photographers documented graphic, physical performances where the actors paraded their bodies and physically confronted one another for an audience. Sandgren records the melodrama of the wrestling events. With wrestlers twisting each other’s limbs and choking one another with chains, the scenes are unapologetically theatrical. Though the roller skaters may not have thought of themselves on a stage, they are no less explicit and physical in their stagecraft. Young men aggressively wrap arms around their girlfriends’ necks and uncomfortably gesture for the camera.
Part-scripted, part-documentary, Show OFF focuses on these various characters’ exaggerated exhibitionism, all of whom show off in particularly unsubtle and graphic ways. The physicality of the roller skaters’ sexual come-ons eerily resembles the wrestlers’ machismo inside the ring. The uncensored performances by each group are the dominant element throughout Show OFF.
Flat File Gallery provides easy access to provocative, quality, and truly affordable works of art focusing on photography and works on paper by local and emerging Jacksonville artists.