Exhibition Description

This is the center’s eighth survey exhibition of work by contemporary South Carolina artists. Judges were Sade Ayorinde of Columbia, SC, Floyd Hall of College Park, GA and Deirdre Visser of San Francisco, CA. Selected artists are all current residents of South Carolina and represent a variety of media. Twelve artists are represented in each exhibition.

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday November 13, 6-8pm

Participating Artists

Emma Barnes McClure
Sonya Diimmler
Morgan East
Ada Goldfeld
Lori Isom
Patrick Mahoney
Donald Medley
Jay Owens
Nina Rastgart
Jeff Sumerel
George Wenzel
Nolan Wright

Exhibition Judges

Sade Ayorinde
Sadé serves as the curator at the Columbia Museum of Art. She has been at the museum for 10 months and her research is focused on contemporary black artists. Recently, she organized two shows: Sam Gilliam: Printmaker and Let’s Have a Talk: Black Artists from the CMA Collection.

Floyd Hall
Floyd Hall is an arts strategist and cultural producer who currently serves as the Executive Director of Atlanta Contemporary, a leading arts institution in the Southeastern United States. In this role, Hall is committed to expanding the influence of contemporary artists who intersect with the South, and positioning the Atlanta
Region as a significant arts ecosystem. With a background in mathematics and engineering, Hall brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to his work, blending analytical thinking with creative expression. His leadership at Atlanta Contemporary reflects his commitment to fostering a dynamic and inclusive arts community in Atlanta and beyond. Before his appointment at Atlanta Contemporary, Hall led Emory University’s Science Gallery Atlanta, where he curated large-scale exhibitions that merged art, science, design, and
technology, with an emphasis on engaging youth. In addition to his curatorial work, Hall is a co-founder of Canopy Atlanta, a journalism nonprofit that amplifies the voices of local communities through media platforms. His writing has been featured in Atlanta Magazine, ArtsATL, and Art Papers, and he has also produced over 800 podcast episodes covering various topics, including art, pop culture, fashion, sports, music, and technology. Hall holds a B.S. in Mathematics from Morehouse College, a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, and an MBA from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. His academic background, combined with his diverse professional experiences, informs his interdisciplinary approach to cultural production and community engagement. With a multifaceted career that bridges the arts, technology, and social justice, Hall has dedicated his work to amplifying broad community voices and fostering creative innovation.

Deirdre Visser
For more than two decades, Deirdre Visser—queer writer, artist, and curator based in San Francisco—has pursued opportunities to make visible unheard or too-long buried stories with the goals of nourishing discourse across difference, building community, and advancing civic participation. In her curatorial work she developed an exhibition and publication program amplifying the work of emerging and mid-career artists, focused particularly on underrepresented voices. Deirdre co-curated with Laura Mays the largest ever exhibition of women woodworkers, Making a Seat at the Table, which opened at the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia in late fall 2019. In 2022, with Craft Research Fund support, she published the first ever history of women and gender non-conforming makers in wood, Joinery, Joists and Gender: A History of Woodworking for the 21st Century. She continues to write at the intersection of labor history and wood.

Curatorial Essay

By Deirdre Visser

Contemporary punditry wrestles with our reliance on technology. From the classroom to self-driving cars to
even our most intimate confidences shared with robotic devices, it can seem a foregone conclusion that every
aspect of our future lives will be increasingly embedded in the reconstituted regurgitation of artificial
intelligence (AI). But the clarion call for community, for connection, to step away from our screens, to learn
to make so that we may shape our small universes, is seen in myriad ways and at as many scales. Featuring the work of 24 contemporary artists working across South Carolina today, 701CCA’s 8th South Carolina Biennial
arrives in the midst of—perhaps the most overused word of the last decade—unprecedented times. But the
challenges that overwhelm us today are not new.

Artists are culture’s coalmine canaries, investigating, interrogating, and interpreting the world for a broader
audience that does not have the luxury to pay the same close attention. Our work is to listen with care. To
quote David Solnit, if corporations pay their marketing teams millions to sell us the fantasy that their
products will improve our lives, it is the job of artists to tell different stories, to make visible those too long
hidden, and to offer new narratives about who we really are and what we might actually become. Whether
making visible stories that provide insight into the past, using materials in ways that suggest more sustainable
futures, or inviting us into a conversation with strangers about how we interpret the work on the wall, art has
the power to impact the ways we respond to our world.

HOME

Few concepts are as evocative and potent as home, whether as a physical space or a metaphor of
family—biological or chosen—and community. Morgan Kinne explores the structure of the home as content—drawing on familiar architectural forms to invite us into this complex symbol, so often romanticized in the mainstream. Kinne’s sculptural forms—made from reclaimed scrap materials—bend and twist, hang suspended and emerge zigzagging from the gallery floor, apt metaphors for the mutable spaces they invoke. Ada Goldfeld’s paintings, too, invite us into unexpected, benignly sinister domestic moments: a cookbook left open to a family favorite is perched on a gas burner; a Pyrex quart of soup, ready to reheat, is placed in the microwave with a metal serving spoon. The floor is covered in eggshells…a familiar phrase, uneasy, dis-comfiting, threatening. Walking is hard these days, isn’t it? Emma Barnes-McClure’s work weaves painting and photography within the formal—if not material—language of quilting, an often-collective art and craft of repair and repurposing that conjures the warmth and comfort of the domestic space. We mend holes with stiches or plaster, which itself will age, the color fading and surfaces cracking as memories do. In each of these artists’ work, the viewer is asked to consider the nature and conditions of our collective home, of our shared sense of place and safety, and of the present-day challenges to its foundation.

Closely tied to the desire for and experience of home is belonging: in our bodies, our families, and in our
communities, called in rather than out, and included in all our richness and fallibility. These are narratives and
landscapes of experience, joy, and harm that artists demand we engage. The multifaceted experience of
belonging finds roots in family, chosen and biological. Michael Cassidy’s Can You See Her conjures isolation,
fear, and power, combining his love of the natural world with a poignant, poetic desire to make visible the
complex experience of being the parent of a transgender daughter in a moment when that community is
threatened with erasure. Portrait artist Lori Isom similarly draws on the intimacies of family history, mining
albums to create beautifully rendered portraits both contemporary, and, in the photographic pose and
framing, nostalgic.

THE BODY

Yet without agency over our bodies there is no belonging. Brooks Harris Stevens’ Porch Talk references the
process-based tradition of conceptual art through clay “pills” stamped with “To Prevent Pregnancy, Press
Between Your Knees.” Persons of child-bearing age are told to simply hold their legs
tightly—tighter!—together to prevent pregnancy, “wisdom” that both blames women for pregnancy and is
scientifically inaccurate. Harris Stevens’ other works combine the language of textiles—gold threads and
quilted silks—with the material languages of militarism and violence. A ragged tent is perched precariously
over a field of green toy soldiers strewn several soldiers deep in an expansive field too broad to be sheltered
by the rust-stained tent. Gold threads sewn to bullet casings ask us, “When will it be enough?”

Nina Rastgar’s work also explores the body as a site of contestation, using a language of craft with familial
roots in the artisanal traditions of Gilan in northern Iran. Integrating papermaking, wood, and metal work,
Rastgar creates tools for unknown tasks, but papers slide from the stack, a carved stick ripples unexpectedly,
and the bulbous phallus-like form pierces the homemade paper, together creating uneasy, bodily ruptures. By
contrast, Kevin Kao uses humor to explore similar questions of agency, the body, and thus the self. In
caution yellows and luminous silver finishes as well as earthy clay tones, Kao creates forms—often
repeated—that sit precariously between bodily desire and human waste, between allure and repulsion. The
smooth finishes invite us into the space between the familiarity of our own body, and the curious discomfort
of touching another.

REPRESENTATION and RESISTANCE

Intrinsically bound up with belonging are histories and choices about representation and resistance. Nathalie
Watson’s cinematic stills are vivid, heroic, and stunning, drawing on the visual influence of filmmakers Julie
Dash and Ava DuVernay to evoke the Gullah Geechee people’s sacred relationship to the Southern coastal
landscape as one of liberation. Donald Medley challenges the dominant culture’s often corrosive and always
flattening representations of Black men to emerge with a strong sense of self and community. In the series “I
come from GREY AREA,” a single portrait of a young Black man, beautifully rendered, emerges from an
abstract urban landscape in which multiple figures move, each one indistinct from the next. Keith Tolen’s
figures also emerge—almost photographically rendered—from an abstract field. The artist’s emphasis on dots
can’t help but refer to late 19 th century pointillism or the dot matrix printer, but Tolen’s images don’t rely on
the dots to construct the image; instead, they become a dreamlike landscape from which his subjects emerge.
Morgan East’s floating subjects occupy a quietly different but similarly dreamlike landscape. While the artist
talks of water as a locus of comfort and healing, the duality of the symbol is poignant: for many viewers it is a
place of anxiety, a psychological landscape of isolation and risk.

Ceramic artist Jay Owen’s hand-built works defy the conventions of clay craft by amplifying the building
process and then allowing the work to be crushed under its own weight, with messy, painterly glazes
heightening the sense of the fallible body. Through knotting and coiling, Nolan Wright uses the language of
basketry at shifting scales to make the familiar strange and the grand intimate—a seed pod becomes a canyon. As viewers we seek to touch the undulating, geological, and tactile surfaces.

SHARED LANDSCAPES

Trail runner and explorer Jenny Bonner stacks loose yet structured brush strokes, alternately smooth and
jagged, broken by the insertion of almost kaleidoscopic photographic images. Bonner’s structures are at once
magical and chaotic, conjuring summer camp forts built from smooth branches with jagged ends, woven

together with lengths of bark. No matter the integrity of the structure, they promised safe haven within.
These abstract renderings of natural spaces share roots with Sonya Diimmler’s painterly tradition, but
Diimler’s are large-scale, visceral, gestural abstractions that read as landscapes of emotion and physicality, raw and intuitive. Scaled to our bodies, we are invited to enter them and rest there awhile, mapping the terrain of our interiority. George Wenzel’s abstractions, bridging the languages of painting and collage, resist easy
definition, but the eye travels paths through these works, finding alluringly graphic patterning within
unfamiliar landscapes equal parts alluring and anxious.

At the intersection of the natural world, consumerism, and the domestic, we are in a moment of existential
uncertainty, when crashing climate events make the perilous path ahead more visible and the need for new
paradigms more urgent. While some make visible the risks, others offer new ways to consider our relationship
to materiality. Colleen Cannon-Karlos’s work is a conjuring act; the artist reclaims corrugated cardboard,
transforming each ridge and recess into masks and monuments, spirits and treasures. Cannon-Karlos’s series
reference relief carvings, intaglio printing, and the knit or purled ridges of woven textiles, deconstructing a
familiar material—often discarded—to bridge expression, indigenous tradition, and environmental
consciousness. Flavia Lovatelli is also working entirely from reclaimed materials, mining the recycling bin to
create a wondrous palette of vessels covered in colonies of barnacles, mussels, and limpets at multiple scales.
By contrast Jeff Sumerel’s sculptural works reconstitute discarded materials but demand our attention by
pointing to our fallibility. Like set pieces for the absurdist theater from which he comes, Sumerel’s hammers
grow roots, are hollowed, or waste away, and his chaotic mountain of walkers invites us to wrestle with the
inevitable aging we’d rather not consider.

Technology has transformed our shared landscapes in ways both structural and relational. Dylan Bannister’s
images offer an urban archaeology of public spaces occupied by payphones where we once stopped to call
friends or let a loved one know we were running late, and Patrick Mahoney’s black and white drawings
suggest the story of humans’ fascination with building towers as monuments, whether to deities of various
religious faiths around the world, or that paragon of capitalism, technology itself. With a vivid color palette,
Kate Osmond explores contemporary urban geographies both familiar and not, climbing high to take the
photographic reference images that are the fuel for her painted works. And drawing these themes together in
a uniquely, uncomfortably timely manner, Drew Sisk dives into the intersections among media, technology,
and politics, when the once unimaginable becomes inevitable: “How are ideas and forms distorted politically
to fabricate new realities?”

The future isn’t inevitable. As these artists tell us, it’s precarious, but nonetheless our own to build as we
stretch the limits of our imagination, reconsidering our relationships to each other and to the structures we
create.

Artist Statements

Emma Barnes McClure (Beaufort)
Home is both a foundation and a contradiction, an anchor of belonging and a space of complexity. Plaster’s connection to home and construction resonates with my exploration of longing and memory. Its ability to absorb, hold, and erode over time mirrors the tension between permanence and loss, while its fragility mimics the ephemerality of nature and time. The plaster warps and distorts photographs. The colors become aged and fade or turn pastel as it dries. By embedding family photographs, plaster textures, quilt patterns, window frames, screen doors and silhouettes of Spanish moss trees I engage with and expand on classic southern motifs. It offers a visual metaphor for the ways we patch holes in our homes or mend our memories, like stitching together pieces of a quilt. Paint becomes a vessel for “filling” in what has been lost. Layering of material and imagery echoes the buildup of time, much like the stratification of rocks. Through my exploration of materials, family, and place, I seek to build connections that deepen our understanding of home, not as a fixed location, but an ever-changing horizon of memory, place, and transformation.

Sonya Diimmler (Prosperity)
Painting, for me, is an act of both revelation and release—a visceral and emotional response to the world that transcends subject matter. Rooted in the immediacy of alla prima technique, my process is a raw, intuitive outpouring of paint and emotion. What emerges on the canvas is not only a visual composition, but a record of the body in motion and the spirit in dialogue with the moment. 

My work lives at the intersection of gesture and intuition—whether I’m creating emotionally resonant landscapes or gestural abstractions. Each mark is a conduit for energy, a physical embodiment of thought, memory, and feeling. The act of painting becomes a kind of choreography, a dance between intention and instinct, yielding a visual language that is deeply personal yet universally felt. 

The commitment to gesture and expressive mark-making drives me towards increasingly ambitious scales. The canvas becomes a refuge where movement and meaning collide-where emotion is not only expressed but embodied. In every work I seek to create that meeting of personal and cosmic an immersive act that blurs the boundaries between the self and something far more infinite. It is, in every sense, an existential balm.

Morgan East (North Charleston)
Humans continually seek comfort and healing in nature, finding refuge in its simplicity and beauty. Whether floating down rivers, swimming in the ocean, or hiking through the wilderness, these natural interactions form the core of our mental well-being, offering a primal form of therapy that restores balance. Studies have shown that exposure to nature enhances focus, lowers stress, elevates mood, and fosters empathy. As our dependence on technology grows, our connection to the natural world fades, making this interaction more essential than ever.

Water has consistently served as a central theme in my artistic process, embodying my deep appreciation for this element that is both gentle and powerful. The organic lines of the female form, echoing the fluidity and movement found in water, inspire much of my latest work. My paintings often depict moments of tranquility in natural settings, creating a visual narrative that explores how these encounters help us overcome the obstacles, insecurities, and daily struggles of human existence.

Through my work, I capture the delicate balance between the familiar and the unexplored, blending realism with expressive mark-making. I utilize multiple tools, silicon brushes, brayer rollers, and spray bottles on a variety of surfaces to achieve this effect.

Ada Goldfeld (Charleston)
I think of my paintings like vignettes, each capturing a quiet, everyday moment that holds deeper significance. In my recent work, I have turned my attention to domestic spaces—a cookbook splayed on a stove, a box of crayons threatening to fall off of a table. I am interested in how these spaces teeter between very di?erent emotional states. They can at once feel ordered and unkempt, spacious and cramped, warm and cold, secure and on edge. I am concerned by how women find themselves relegated to these spaces, perhaps as comfortable here as they are burdened or trapped. I hope for my paintings to reveal these complicated feelings.

Lori Isom (Columbia)
I make portraits using acrylic paint, charcoal and collage. I’m a storyteller, interested in the narrative possibilities of portraiture. I spent my twenties telling stories on stage through theater, and now I tell the stories of my subjects through my artwork. I want to capture the briefest moment in time and make it relatable to the viewer. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, but spent many summers alternating between Knights Hill, SC, my mother’s home, and my father’s home in Gastonia, NC. I feel drawn to depict the people that were part of my family, and I am deeply interested in telling Black stories of a bygone era. I inherited a treasure trove in photos from my parents as well as a favorite aunt. These have become the source material for my work.

Patrick Mahoney (Columbia)
My recent Tower series was produced during the pandemic years, 2023-25. When I was young, I first saw Bruegel’s wonderful painting of the Tower of Babel and have since held a fascination with the tower. Not the biblical concept, but rather the ziggurats of the ancient near east. 

This series of about 30 pictures was produced during the pandemic years along with a Tiny Insects series and an Ancient Artifacts series, in all, close to 100 pictures, mostly in the 4″ x 5″ range with a few notable exceptions. The Tower pictures are predominantly black and white. 

My original intent was to draw each of the towers exactly the same way only with various colors and materials and place them in a desert landscape with distant mountains and foregrounds of varying designs. Well, one day I started work on what was to be a gigantic stone tower firmly anchored to the earth but at some point, I decided to make it float above the desert floor, and the effect was dramatic. The image of something so heavy floating like a feather reminded me of certain Surrealist painters I admire, and so I added a banner in the sky with the word Surrealism in French. One thing I have learned in more than 50 years as a painter is that sometimes I need to just let a picture go where it wants and to follow. 

From then on, the pictures began to morph in some fantastic and beautiful ways, which stimulated my creative urge and led me to explore more uncharted waters.

Donald Medley (Rock Hill)
Donald Medley’s work focuses on representing African Americans; figurative subjects that render themselves through an abstract space. Medley explores the ways that a space can inform and simultaneously hide how someone is seen. The environment that the subjects exist in overlap in certain places within the composition conveying the influence or imposing nature of a space. His work speaks to the larger context of Black identity. This is in regards to how one expresses themselves considering the different spaces they have to enter and engage with. The work highlights the monolith in which Black individuals are often contextualized, and depicts a surreal experience around their identity.

Jay Owens (Travelers Rest)
I construct surreal scenes of everyday life in clay. Buildings, nature, and our built environment inspire ideas for forms. Drawing on paper is a place to record things and places I see. I actively manipulate shapes by tracing, flipping, and combining in 2 dimensions. I then use the working drawings to build 3-dimensional forms. My work challenges the viewer to consider how we navigate nature, consumerism, and domestic life in a constantly changing world. I make glazes using diCerent clays, glasses, and stains. Having a deep understanding of how glaze works gives me the freedom to develop a palette

of colors and surfaces unique to each piece. Ceramics has a long tradition of ancient techniques, but is also an expansive medium I use to create work that challenges traditional norms of painting and sculpture.

Nina Rastgart (Columbia)
Creating is a way of thinking in a language that bridges my inner world with the environment around me. It helps me understand cause and effect and allows me to think through material. Through objects drawn from daily life, I translate thoughts into visible forms. These materials carry weight: social, cultural, and political. They speak not only of what I see but of what I’ve lived. Over time, I’ve come to understand that the personal is political. Every choice, gesture, and form reflects systems of power, survival, and identity. I am drawn to materials that allow me to craft a language of poetic action, like paper, metal, or earth. My forms live in the tension between resistance and care, between the weight of memory and the urgency of the present. Growing up among farmers and artisans, I became deeply aware of how intimately human life is tied to the health of the environment. My art practice often responds to ecological destruction and the ethics of material use. I believe that artistic research rooted in lived experience, material sensitivity, and collective culture can contribute to broader conversations about sustainability and social and ecological justice. Art, for me, is not a reflection of life; it is a response to it as an individual. My philosophy of making is rooted in critique, not just resisting power, but engaging it through action, presence, and poetry. I focus on activating the space between object, body, and site to create works that generate connection, evoke presence, and invite empathy, interaction, and awareness. My experience of living between Iran and the United States has shaped a complex understanding of identity, one marked by the tension between imposed roles and reclaimed selfhood. This dual existence brings with it the constant pressure to explain, advocate for, and prove my identity and agency within systems that seek to regulate and suppress them. I’ve lived through a continuous cycle of control under unjust

power structures, where identity is not just lived but monitored, questioned, and confined.

Jeff Sumerel (Greenville)
Jeff Sumerel’s artistic trajectory began unconventionally—following eight years as a nationally touring stand-up comedian, he revived his passion and experiences while studying at the San Francisco Art Institute. As a result, in 1992 he transitioned into a prolific multimedia artist that has since defied categorization. This grounding in absurdist theater, avant garde filmmaking, and audience engagement profoundly informs his public installations and site-specific works, which blend conceptual premises with an irreverent, often satirical sensibility. Drawing on natural environments, discarded materials, and

overlooked objects, Sumerel constructs works that are as philosophically probing as they are visually disarming.

Since 2015, Sumerel has collaborated closely with Lithuanian multimedia artist Goda Rupeikaite, whose refined visual language and immersive audio compositions have expanded the duo’s approach to spatial storytelling. Rupeikaite’s sensitivity to sonic atmosphere and narrative layering lends their joint work a multidimensional resonance—where sound is not an accompaniment, but a spatial and emotional architecture in its own right. Together, they have developed a willingness to test the boundaries of audience expectation. Their projects often emerge from the speculative question—what if—and unfold through the activation of context: whether urban, rural, or institutional. These engagements, both subtle and bold, consistently challenge assumptions about what constitutes artistic material, form, or site.

Recognized as significant voices in contemporary Southern U.S. art, Sumerel and Rupeikaite’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Vilnius Museum of Tolerance in Lithuania. Their collaborative practice invites curators to engage with themes of transience, humor, and embodied experience—where the familiar becomes strange, and the strange becomes essential.

George Wenzel (Columbia)
My work explores emotional states that resist easy definition-tension, disorientation, attraction, dread. I use abstraction, symbolic forms, and layered imagery to evoke inner conflict and shifting psychological landscapes.

Rather than illustrating specific narratives, the paintings create spaces where emotion and meaning collide-where beauty and danger coexist, and where the viewer is asked to confront the pull of the unknown.

Each painting begins intuitively, evolving through addition, erasure and distortion until something essential surfaces. I’m drawn to contrasts: control and chaos, clarity and confusion, surface and depth. The result is work that reflects not some fixed idea but a process of becoming-open to interpretation, and emotional resonance. The paintings do not offer clear answers but they ask you to stay with them, to feel rather than resolve.

Nolan Wright (Columbia)
I use basketry techniques to create unconventional forms, most inspired by shapes and textures in nature that excite me. Wind twisted trees, interesting bark, tide pools, tree fungi, seed pods, canyons, rock formations, and such. Especially dense, undulating, weathered shapes and surfaces. Echoes of the landscape I grew up with in Arizona, and time spent in other rugged areas. Working slowly, stitch by stitch, knot by knot, I try to create objects that evoke a feeling of encountering something unexpected, not necessarily beautiful or elegant. The repetition, care, skill, and time required calms and is important to me, resulting in a sort of rhythm. Each piece both creates and grows from that rhythm, organically, often with nothing more than a general idea of shape and a color palette at the start. Increasingly, given the state of our world, conceptual threads related to fragmentation and adaptation have begun finding their way into my artistic intentions as well, still tied to exploration of material and technique. With each piece, I hope to surprise the viewer, plant a seed to view things differently – perhaps ask and act on their own “what if I tried that” questions.