“Changing Perspectives: Savannah Etheredge and Albert Sperath”

Opening Reception November 4, 5:00 – 8:00 pm

On view November 4 through December 31, 2016

Gallery West presents the work of two extraordinary and seasoned artists, bringing together two very different expressions of artwork

through sculpture and works on paper, emerging from two very different lives spent in the arts.

The opening coincides with the celebration of State Street First Friday Art Crawl for November, co-sponsored by the City of West Columbia

Albert Sperath’s long career has always been connected art and arts organizations. He was the Director of the Kentucky Arts Commission Traveling Exhibition Service in the 1970s and 80s. He went on to assume positions as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Art as well as the Director of the University Museum and Historic Homes at the University of Mississippi in Oxford MS, until his retirement in 2009.

Now living in Black Mountain NC, his life is devoted to his own art. His multi-media sculptural works are painstakingly executed, beautiful and quirky at the same time. He says of his work, “When I make art, I want to show you something you have never seen before. I’m fascinated by manufactured items and their perfectly pristine nature and often juxtapose them with naturally occurring materials”. His favorite materials are acupuncture and suture needles, fishhooks, cat whiskers, maple and privet twigs, bone, feathers, leather and porcupine quills.

Savannah (Marion Talmage) Etheredge also has a history as a multi-media artist. While in South Carolina in the mid 1970s, she was commissioned to create a bronze cast bust of the Civil War hero Robert Smalls for Beaufort County. In 1977, she moved to New York where the rich art scene of the time was “like oxygen to my lungs”. It was there in her loft that she produced the bulk of her artwork in a wide range of media, from 1,500 small-scale carved fertility figures, to an inflatable ladder in Central Park that later appeared in a Milos Forman film. She returned to South Carolina in 2002.

The drawings in the current exhibition have never been exhibited before, though they were made in New York. These India ink and brush works are very close observations of landscapes and foliage and the “fecundity” of the southern summer landscape as she remembered them. They are inspired by the 17th century Japanese artist Hokusai, who was said to have searched his whole life for the living line. Her abstract, almost obsessive depiction of these landscapes, are all the more intensely poignant because of the nature of her recollection.