2010 Spring Quarterly: Artist Preview

By AU Director, Brad Edwards

It’s that time again, and the Spring Quarterly is quickly approaching this month.  On April 24th, we will once again host a one-night-only gallery exhibition in the home of a St. Louis City resident.  While the details are still coming together, we officially have our artist lineup!

This Quarterly will be a new direction for Art Underground.  Our Quarterly Call for Art continues to attract some of St. Louis’ most talented emerging artists.  Our 2010 Winter Quarterly: Positive Obsession, had a very strong aesthetic focus and was visually just stunning.  While our Spring Quarterly will as well, this one is strongly content or message-driven.  Each of these pieces intend to say something, and they say it through a variety of different means, styles and volumes!

Brandon Barnes

Brandon Barnes is a senior at Webster University, graduating in May.  His workcombines sculpture and drawing by taking the linear qualities of ink on paper, and creating sculptures that reflect these qualities and physically branch off of the work.

Seth Caplan

Seth Caplan is a senior photography major at Washington University in St. Louis, originally from New York.  His work explores the idea of performance in identities and relationships, and how cultural norms affect these performances, personally and in our interactions with others.

Jeremiah Clark is a senior at Greenville College.  Something that he has become particularly interested in recently is process.  Jeremiah uses video as his chosen avenue to show the process that an artist can go through to produce a work of art, both literally and metaphorically (due to the nature of his medium, you will just have to wait until the Quarterly to see a sample of his work).

Arushi Kumar

Arushi Kumar is our first every fashion designer and artist!  She is a recent graduate of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Fashion Design. The focus of her work is the realm of conceptual fashion and specifically, deconstruction of common stylistic elements found  in contemporary clothing.  The picture shown here is an example from her last line.  She will be unveiling her new work, worn by models mingling with the crowd throughout the evening, at the Spring Quarterly!

Mary Richards

For Mary Richards, Buddhism, psychotherapy, and neuroscience are the basis ofher current body of work.  She is interested in how the process of drawing (the behavior itself) can link to neuroscience and the recent research contending that humans can re-wire, de-clutter, re-route and modify our synapses – our brain chemistry. Her drawings are repetitive, include mark-making sounds, are relative to the natural curve of wrist/hand/arm, involve time, are obsessive and thus extremely meditative.

Kim Wardenburg

Kim Wardenburg will complete her BFA in printmaking at Washington University in St. Louis in May 2010. I use traditional and experimental printmaking techniques to investigate covenants (specifically, their significance to the United States’ involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) and explore connections between disparate people and places, struggling against imminent disaster and brokenness.