April 22 - May 22, 2016
PRACTICE
Craft/Material Studies Candidacy Exhibition
Fumi Amano
Grace Kubilius
Chelsea Lee
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Jubee Lee
Stephen Nunes
Shannon Slaight-Brown
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Main, Helena Davis, Frable and smallspace Galleries
Opening Reception for the Artists
Fourth Friday, April 22, 2016
7:00-10:00 pm
Free and Open to the Public
Biography / Shannon Slaight-Brown
Shannon Slaight-Brown (b.1982) received her BFA in ceramics and a BA in studio arts in 2013 from Illinois State University. The following year she attended a Post-Baccalaureate program at the University Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently a MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth studying in the Craft/Materials Department. The origin of her sculptures begins with the relationships she observes to have a modulated existence with the environment, human interactions, nature, and life. These types of patterns interest her because they have their own discrete visual languages and modes of communication. At times, they allude to a sense of harmony, conflict, or transcendence.
Biography / Stephen Nunes
Stephen Nunes was born in Fall River Massachusetts. He has been a junk collector, construction worker, limo driver, crate-builder, and art handler. His art is a practice that focuses on revealing patterns of activity through the documentation of shifting physical states and exposures of active processes.
Biography / Jubee Lee
Jubee Lee was born in Busan, South Korea. In 2015, she earned a BFA with honors majoring in glass at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She was awarded the prestigious Rickery-Ziebold Trust Award for her thesis works. She also received many, talented student awards, scholarships and academic honors and as well as honors for her glass sculptures from institutions including Southern Illinois University in Carbondale; Lakeland College in Mattoon, Illinois; New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, Illinois; Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design; and the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York.
Currently, Jubee is pursuing her MFA studies in glass at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Jubee trained in both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional materials. Although focusing on glass, she also has a strong interest in illustration and printing and uses her own 2- dimensional images as inspiration. Her recent work with glass utilizes the P�te de Verre glass technique to create unique combinations of 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional images.
Biography / Chelsea Lee
Chelsea Lee is a sculptural ceramic artist in the Craft/Material Studies graduate department at Virginia Commonwealth University. She was born in Bismarck, North Dakota, where she grew up in an artist 's home. Lee graduated with a BFA from Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM) in 2010. She received the Excellence Scholarship from MSUM in 2009. Lee 's work has been in several shows in North Dakota and Minnesota, including the Plains Art Museum, the Upfront Gallery, the Hotel Donaldson in Fargo, North Dakota, and Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minnesota.
Biography / Grace Kubiluis
Grace Kubilius is a Fiber Artist whose work includes wearable objects, sculpture, and performance. She graduated with a BFA in Fiber and Experimental Fashion from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013 and is currently pursuing her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. Grace has been a Resident Artist at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center and Craft Alliance Center of Art and Design. Her work has been shown at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Reese Gallery, and Society for Contemporary Craft and upcoming exhibitions include Ohio Craft Museum, Duara Gallery at Lynchburg College, and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art.
Biography / Fumi Amano
Fumi Amano was born in 1985 in Aichi, Japan. She studied Art Education at the University of Education in Aichi. While studying Art Education, she learned about glass making as a traditional Japanese craft and worked diligently to master all techniques presented to her.
Upon graduating, she desired to learn even more about glass art. In order to expand her horizons and take her knowledge to the next level, she moved to Toyama to study at the Toyama Institute of Glass Art. In Toyama she studied glass art from completely different perspectives than she had previously studied in Aichi. While still studying in Toyama, Fumi received the best student award at the Nijima International Glass Art Festival. In 2009, Fumi came to the United States for the first time to take a workshop at Pilchuck. Upon returning to Japan, she worked at a junior high school teaching general art while continuing to exhibit her art work at APA Gallery in Nagoya. While she was generally satisfied continuing the work that she was doing, overtime she began to gradually question how she used glass in her art work. She realized that there was much more to glass than simply using it as craft material.
In order to learn more about glass and expand her horizons, she moved to Seattle, a place that many well known glass artists such as Dale Chihuly and Dante Marioni call their home. She worked in a glass blowing studio in Seattle for about a year before finally moving, in 2005, to Richmond, Virginia to formally study glass art at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Fumi is working hard to try and do new and creative things with glass while working towards achieving her ultimate goal; to demonstrate new possibilities in glass to people around the world, with hopes of impacting their lives positively.
Learn more: http://arts.vcu.edu/craft
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