April 2: artist Stephen Shingler

Join us for First Friday, April 2nd 2010

Work featured by artist Stephen Shingler

Gallery open 7pm-10pm

117 S. West Street
Raleigh, NC 27601

Stephen Shingler grew up in Tallahassee, Florida.  After high School he attended Ringling College of Art and Design and graduated with a BFA in Sculpture in 2003.  After taking a gap year to teach elementary school art in Guilford County, NC he attended Montclair State University and received a MFA in studio art in 2006. After Graduate School Stephen and his wife moved to Brooklyn, New York where he taught as adjunct professor and worked as an art handler at the Newark Museum.  Stephen and his wife moved to Raleigh two years ago and is currently teaching high school art at St. David’s School.  He is also a proud father of 19 month old identical twin girls.

The artwork shown in this exhibition was created from his studio in Brooklyn.  This is his second solo exhibition and first showing in North Carolina.

Within the last decade NASA launched a rocket to intercept a traveling comet and Japanese marine biologists captured, for the first time, video footage of a giant squid, never before seen alive. Both of these groups set out to retrieve information that will lead to a greater understanding of our universe, in turn fostering more questions. It would be impossible to know enough.

My work is not about scientific theory or about the discoveries. Knowing that I will never know enough keeps me wondering. I investigate what is clearly in front of me. For instance, under the earth, minerals form rocks and rocks form caves that grow more rocks. In my studio I am the catalyst for the same type of change that, in nature, fills me with such excitement. Using melted wax over slats of wood, and applying watercolor to paper I let the material act as it wants to act. The wax clumps and congeals and the watercolor evaporates causing the color in the pools of ink to separate. The methods I use with my materials provide linkages to the processes of the natural world.

Through making art that mimics the physical properties of natural phenomena I get pleasure in letting what I know exits in nature morph to something slightly unexpected. I relish in the ineluctable process of decay and growth in a romantic way. It’s the poking–it–just–to–see–what–happens phenomenon that drives me to create art.