COLUMBIA — The 701 Center for Contemporary Art is on a quest to survey the best that our state has to offer in visual creativity. Every two years, the nonprofit arts organization invites submissions from artists across South Carolina to select 24 of the most exciting practitioners, whose work is displayed in two special exhibitions.
Now on view until Oct. 5 is Part One of the survey exhibition, representing half of the artists selected by a three-juror panel.
The current biennial is the eighth such overview conducted by 701 CCA, and as with its predecessors, this particular iteration offers viewers a chance to sample what is happening right now in artist studios in all corners of the Palmetto State.
How do visitors try to make sense of the wide variety of works on display?
One could look for patterns.
Cardboard and sustainability
For example, the use of sustainable materials is evident throughout the exhibition; and, in this regard, recycled cardboard is now a very popular support.
Lowcountry artist Morgan Kinne, a 2020 Biennial finalist, has constructed an 8-foot-tall tower of carved cardboard embellished with paint and ink images of weathered wooden buildings. This tower, just like its three small, white-painted counterparts, serves as a testament to the narratives inherent in the built environment.
Columbia-based Colleen Cannon-Karlos also reworks cardboard. Her Afrocentric works, like the triptych “Sapien 2” with its central masklike figure and its abstract-patterned side panels, read like low-relief sculptures by means of her manipulation of the corrugated cardboard surface, the adding and removing of layers.
Recycled paper is the medium of choice for Flavia Lovatelli, a Biennial veteran who participated in 2019 and 2021. From junk mail and the pages of old books and magazines, she fashions the component parts of her intricate paper sculptures, transforming, in the case of this year’s exhibition, her manipulated paper into exotic variations of organic life forms.
