Local artist Aimee Wise will present her first solo exhibition, Mechanisms of Resilience, at Artists’ Guild of Spartanburg Gallery at Chapman Cultural Center with a series of works, both old and new.
A Spartanburg native with deep roots in the community, from Pine Street School to the Spartanburg Day School, Wise’s return home is a palpable motif in her art. After years of producing and exhibiting in Chicago, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Colorado, the 28 year old artist is excited to present an exhibition of her own in her hometown.
The free exhibit runs through Saturday, Sept. 17. The Guild gallery is open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and Sunday, 1-5 p.m.
“Recently I have been struggling to develop a cohesive body of work, similar to developing my own story, minus all the words,” Wise said. “I tend to incorporate a lot of creatures in my art. I think that the symbolism and the minute subtleties of nature can appeal more largely to the viewer than a portrait can. The factual nature of scientific illustration together with interpretative feelings derived by the viewer are common elements in my work. I gravitated towards insects, snakes, blackbirds, and particularly the lotus flower to formulate works that I felt could communicate symbolically as well as emotionally,” she said.
Wise typically employs nature as a means of communicating personal artistic experiences. Her academic years at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago opened the doors to painting and drawing courses in both scientific illustration and form invention. Wise continued to cultivate biological research in her free time, as well as her time spent volunteering with insects at The Butterfly Pavilion (an invertebrate zoo in Westminster, Colorado) and handling snakes at the Spartanburg Science Center. Paintings and drawings of insects, fauna, and flora — artifacts of her continuing investigation in scientific illustration — are not merely representations of the specimens, but rich descriptions of her understanding of existence. “These narratives, found in the folds of fact and fiction, are the purest forms of truth,” she said.
“In preparing for this exhibition, I relied heavily on the forms and scenes I found in nature as a means of creative expression. Some of the pieces I included in this show have been works in progress over several years; others were produced in a matter of days or even hours. The process has been very non-linear, yet profoundly organic and satisfying. I feel personal experience is one of the truest stories that someone can offer to you and these pieces visually transmit the ideas I find so difficult to articulate verbally. Works like ‘The Red Lotus’ and ‘Coexist’ are emotionally complex; these works represent a time or times in my life when I have felt pulled under or even just at a stillness. The reasons are varied and the circumstances often differ but ultimately ‘Mechanisms of Resilience’ is a body of work in which I use natural imagery to tell my own emerging story.”
Wise is sharing not only her interpretation of nature and the nature of man, but her personal stories, obscured and synthesized into symbolic gestures. The artist is revealing intimate relationships, love and loss, desire and rejection, comfort and inquietude, her experiences of returning home.
For more information, please call (864) 764-9568.