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.

Participating Artists

Dylan Bannister
Jenny Bonner
Colleen Cannon-Karlos
Michael Cassidy
Brooks Harris Stevens
Kevin Kao
Morgan Kinne
Flavia Lovatelli
Kate Hooray Osmond
Drew Sisk
Keith Tolen
Nathalie Watson

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

Dylan Bannister (Rock Hill)
Dylan Bannister’s interdisciplinary works explore memory, nostalgia, and liminality. Aiming to highlight the serendipitous beauty of everyday life, Bannister photographs common spaces, objects, and fixtures.

The process-driven works in Bannister’s latest series, Luminal / Liminal, give prominence to derelict buildings, utilitarian fixtures, and natural light. Bannister applies his photographic imagery as pigment transfers on various substrates, which then become the genesis for mixed-media artworks progressed through painting, collage, and assemblage. 

Since 2018, Bannister has used 35mm film to photograph the remains of hundreds of public telephone fixtures across the United States. These images are presented on shaped panels, with the sides painted to match a significant color from each photo. The Payphones on Film series is equal parts scavenger hunt, creative process, and documentation. 

Across his entire body of work, Bannister’s attention to process and the “objectness” of each piece are intended to challenge traditional photographic presentation methods, and to instill thoughtful moments of reflection in each viewer.

Jenny Bonner (Spartanburg)
An avid trail runner and eager birder, Jenny Bonner’s work is influenced by her experiences in outdoor spaces, as well as the suspension of disbelief instilled by childhood games and escapist fantasy fiction. Running and hiking for hours at a time, sometimes through the night, daydreams weave into reality, and Bonner’s memories encompass her experience in landscape, rather than one specific view. Through abstraction, color play, and collage, she is able to explore the fluidity of landscape as we experience it through our own recollections, and the emotional gravity of place. Bonner received her BFA in Painting & Drawing from The Ohio State University, and her MFA in Painting & Sculpture from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is a lecturer at The University of South Carolina, Upstate.

Kate Hooray Osmond (Charleston)
I experience a world where definitions and foundations are increasingly dissolute. A world of complete energy: change, abundance, sorrow, creation and destruction. I am embracing everything in order to see the complete balance of existence and to learn peace in a climate when nothing lasts.

Colleen Cannon-Karlos (Columbia)
My new work consists of deconstructing recycled corrugated cardboard and transforming it into an alternative surface to create new imagery. Mixed media application includes cardboard, recycled plastic shopping bags and other packaging materials. The corrugated or fluted ridges contain their own design aspect of regularly spaced, machine engineered parallel lines. Removing and/or adding layers by distressing and manipulating the cardboard reveals amazing textural characteristics that are enhanced

with the application of other materials. Building and molding the cardboard creates a 3D manifestation. Following my deconstructing and layering processes I begin to paint the composition, using the paint to further enhance the original design and multiple textural elements that have been rendered. The resulting imagery has a tangibility evocative of intaglio, relief and other texture laden printmaking methods combined with the 3D quality of carved wood or etched metal. The artwork is mounted on wooden panels for professional display. I am particularly fascinated by the corrugated ridges that can be manipulated in various ways. It is reminiscent of indigenous African, Native American, Asian and Polynesian art forms that often contain repetitive lines and geometric shapes. Artistic influences include

Architect Frank Gehry and cardboard artist Ann Weber.

Brooks Harris Stevens (Pendleton)
Working as an interdisciplinary artist, I escape in the creation of work that is deeply rooted in the construction and use of textiles. The understanding and love of cloth is one that continually drives my artistic interpretation as my concepts evolve from mending textiles to the mending of land, the built environment and re-creating forms of textiles based on objects that are reflective of my personal histories. These meditative and ritualistic acts allow me to find solace through expressive handwork creating new work highlighting issues of cultural and political complexities. Responding to and crafting the domestic while subverting the political allows for a transformation of material and meaning achieved with a simple thread and needle to performance, photography and video. Manual and digital transformations express a distinct voice linked to personal experiences and concepts that connects to the collective use, understanding, and appreciation of how objects and materials serve significant roles through our human experiences. Taking non-traditional routes in my creative practice is the impetus in finding new ways of making and pushing social boundaries while using the familiar. The intersection of materials and techniques connect me to the history of textiles and an understanding of what a can be achieved. These simple bits and pieces lead me to find answers and determine new questions in a rapidly changing world.

Kevin Kao (Greenville)
My work is constructed through a lens of cultural hybridity: drawing from familial narratives, body, and multiplicity as avenues to examine assimilation. I’m fascinated by the interplay between individual and group, and create sculptural collections that trace and expand on notions of belonging, loss of individuality, and power of group dynamics. As an Asian-American artist, my work often references forms and silhouettes from ancient art histories as a way to re-present “ideal” through double entendre and humor. I try to find the funny in formal: creating suggestions of an Other through flesh, fruit, hair, and sex.

Much of my figurative work incorporates conception of the self-image. I’m interested in the constructs of identity through unlimited possibilities associated with the material properties of clay. I contour, fold, flop, and bend clay to mimic flesh: often as suggestions of combined biomorphic hybrids, a stand-in for selves. Gaze and desire are elicited through the combination of seductive form and finish.

In the larger context of my work, I’m interested in the perception of value and its relationship to history, craft, and authorship. I continually question these ideas through a uniquely sculptural perspective: examining how the material has been handled historically, and how I can use it to address body, taste, and objectification.

Drew Sisk (Clemson)
My research blurs the lines between fine art and graphic design, using live web-based work, installation, and print media as ways to critically explore the conjunction of media, politics, and technology. I examine the crafting of reality and ideology through mass media and the internet. How are ideas and forms distorted politically to fabricate new realities or new truths that were unimaginable before but seem inevitable once they come into existence? My work subverts images, gestures, and language from mass media, social media, and politics. I use bots, algorithms, and artificial intelligence as tools for generating automated, recursive systems that distort, exaggerate, and fragment graphic form. I am interested in fluid structure over fixed surface, and on dynamic rather than static content.

My latest work is an exploration of artificial intelligence and its impact on language, images, and physical embodiment. As a graphic designer, I am interested in the ways that technological advancements have historically disrupted not only the ways we make creative work, but more importantly, how these shifts fundamentally alter our understanding of form and content. In my work I contemplate the following questions: How do we contend with AI when language falls short for describing our emerging entanglement with it? How does AI aFirm or cause us to question the connection between sentience and physical embodiment? What is the archive in the age of AI, and what might this mean in terms of culture, politics, and economics?

Morgan Kinne (North Charleston)
Sculptor Morgan Kinne cobbles together a story. We leave traces of ourselves everyday, in everything we encounter. And these traces offer clues to our identity. Even the smallest impression holds within it the creation of place, memory and history. Picking apart the culture and meaning of a place, the work tells a story. Or several stories if you like. Stories lie in the history, labor and structural intelligence of the built environment. And in the end, life really is about stories. Kinne constructs an ambient narrative through

installation, sculpture and mixed media works using the building as a mode of communication. The work is an invitation to enter the narrative. Or alter it. Or construct your own..

Flavia Lovatelli (Columbia)
I am an environmental artist creating sculptures inspired by nature out of recycled paper and wood. I strive to enrich public dialogue and simulate culture shift with my work, and explore new ways to approach environmental issues. 

There is no precise beginning to my story. I remember being creative my whole life; my earliest memories are of me are creating and I was attracted to paper at a cellular level, gravitating to it constantly using it for everything. Coiling became my thing about 15 years ago and it has become an extension of me. I don’t have to think what am I going to do next, the ideas are already there, waiting quietly in my subconscious for me to be done with what I am doing at present, and show up as I am wrapping up things. My problem is keeping up with the ideas that are piling up waiting for their turn. My key achievements were getting into the Smithsonian and Philly Craft Shows twice and getting into NaWA and the 135th anniversary year of NAWA show at Hollis Taggart.

Nathalie Watson (Summerville)
I have worked as an environmental photographer and documentarian, using my lens to create a visual narrative of culture, nature, and identity. Rooted in immersive practices, my creative process is guided by deep attentiveness to the land such as the coastal waters, grassy fields, and marshes that mirror the ancestral landscapes of my Gullah Geechee and Caribbean heritage. Through documentary portraiture, I highlight my intimate relationship with the land. By elevating melanin-rich skin tones and celebrating the beauty of Black bodies in sacred communion with the earth’s elements. These natural spaces become

sites of remembrance, resistance, and reverence, where the visual language is shaped by both ancestral memory and lived experience. My photography is a form of cultural preservation. It honors the stories, rituals, and spiritual traditions of Gullah Geechee and Caribbean communities while exploring broader themes of history, education, and wellness across the African diaspora. My work invites viewers to witness our legacy with authenticity and reverence, while honoring the ecosystems that hold our memories..

Michael Cassidy (West Columbia)
This body of work represents my experience as the parent of a trans daughter. She came out to us after living as a boy for 17 years. As she began trying to know herself, we began trying to know her. Her mother and I have done our best to create an open, accepting, and supportive household, though we often feel at a loss when it comes to helping her. As an artist painting is the way I navigate difficulties. This body of work is my way of trying to learn, understand, process fear, and bear witness to her transition. The paintings depict animals isolated in the middle of the picture plane. Some pieces express loneliness and vulnerability, while others exhibit confidence and determination. Our natural inclination as

parents is to protect our children. Trans children and adults are stripped of their rights at an ever-increasing rate, especially in the South. Every day I fear that she will not survive this, and I am enraged at those that have made her an object of hate, a threat to their close- minded existence. I am also excited about who she is becoming and proud of her strength and determination. I only want what all parents want; for her to be able to live in the world safely and happily.

Keith Tolen (Columbia)
As an artist and educator rooted in the rich soil of Batesburg, South Carolina, my work has always been about connection—between people, history, and spirit. My collection Conversation with A Dot began as a minimalist meditation but quickly became something much more: a visual language born from the quiet presence of a single mark. The “dot” in these works represents the origin of communication, the beginning of movement, and the seed of understanding. It speaks, listens, and challenges.

Each piece in the Conversation with A Dot series explores how something so small and still can evoke rhythm, conflict, dialogue, and transformation. Layer by layer, I use color, space, and gesture to respond to the dot’s silence with narrative, improvisation, and at times, resistance. These works are deeply influenced by my experiences as a Black Southern man, an educator, and a witness to both the struggles and the resilience of my community.

My broader body of work reflects similar themes—identity, heritage, and the power of mark-making as testimony. Whether through mixed media, paint, or sculpture, I explore the intersection of personal memory and collective history. Teaching art for many years across the Carolinas has also shaped my creative practice. It has taught me that every voice matters, even the quietest one. Sometimes, that voice starts with a dot. 

Ultimately, my art is an invitation to slow down and listen. To see how something small can grow into something meaningful. To engage in a dialogue—not just with the work, but with ourselves, and with the world we share. It is reflected in these brief lines.