Paper Products: June 2-25, 2016

DEANNA LEAMON: HEADS, SEPT. 24 – OC.T 5, 2010

if ART Gallery presents at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios, Columbia:

DEANNA LEAMON: HEADS
Sept. 24 – Oct. 5, 2010
Artist's Reception: Fri., Sept. 24, 5 – 9 pm.
For a PREVIEW of works by Deanna Leamon, CLICK HERE.

Deanna Leamon, Heads
@ Gallery 80808/Vista Studios, Columbia, SC
Sept. 24 – Oct. 5, 2010

Opening on September 24, if ART Gallery presents at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios in Columbia, SC, two simultaneous solo exhibitions by Deanna Leamon and Dorothy Netherland, respectively called Heads and D Days. The exhibition will run through October 5. The artists’ reception is September 24, 2010, 5 – 9 pm.

            Deanna Leamon (b. 1957) will present a new body of work made with oil stick on insulation board. In the paintings, Leamon uses the metallic surface of the insulation board as a base color for most of her portraits. Leamon is known for her figurative drawings, most often in charcoal and, therefore, typically rendered in blacks, grays and whites. In this new body of work, however, she uses color, especially blue, red, pink and yellow.

            Leamon recently moved from Columbia to Massachusetts. Until a few years ago, she taught at the University of South Carolina art department, from which she resigned to work full-time as a studio artist. Her work was in Thresholds: Expressions of Art and Spiritual Life, a 2004 exhibition organized by the South Carolina Arts Commission that traveled the Southeast for three years. She also was represented in The Felt Moment, a 2003 show of art from the Carolinas at the Columbia Museum of Art. Leamon was in 100 Years/100 Artists: Views of the 20^th Century, an overview of 20^th century South Carolina art at the S.C. State Museum.

Deann Leamon: Works of art

Red Head, 2009

Oil stick on insulation board

20 x 26 1/2 in.

$ 1,200

Ordained, 2009

Oil stick on insulation board

24 x 24 in.

$ 1,000

Devious Deity, 2009

Oil stick on insulation board

21 1/2 x 24 in.

$ 950

Betsy, 2009

Oil stick on insulation board

20 x 21 1/2 in.

$ 950

Works of art by Deanna Leamon are available at if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln Street, Columbia, SC.

Contact Wim Roefs at if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com or (803) 255-0068/(803) 238-2351.

if ARTwalk: Salon I & II: December 11- 24, 2008

For exhibition installation images, click here.

THE SALON I & II

Dec. 11 – 24, 2008

an exhibition at two Columbia, SC, locations:

Gallery 80808/Vista Studios

808 Lady Street

&

if ART Gallery

1223 Lincoln Street

Reception and ifART Walk: Thursday, Dec. 11, 5 – 10 p.m.

at and between both locations

Opening Hours:

Weekdays, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.

Saturday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Sunday, 1 – 5 p.m.

& by appointment

Open Christmas Eve until 7 p.m.

For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART:

(803) 255-0068/ (803) 238-2351 – if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com

For its December 2008 exhibition, if ART Gallery presents The Salon I & II, an exhibition at two Columbia, SC, locations: if ART Gallery and Gallery 80808/Vista Studios. On Thursday, December 11, 2008, 5 – 10 p.m., if ART will hold opening receptions at both locations. The ifART Walk will be on Lady and Lincoln Streets, between both locations, which are around the corner from each other.

The exhibitions will present art by if ART Gallery artists, installed salon-style at both Gallery 80808 and if ART. Artists in the exhibitions include two new additions to if ART Gallery, Columbia ceramic artist Renee Rouillier and the prominent African-American collage and mixed-media artist Sam Middleton, an 81-year-old expatriate who has lived in the Netherlands since the early 1960s.

Other artists in the exhibition include Karel Appel, Aaron Baldwin, Jeri Burdick, Carl Blair, Lynn Chadwick, Steven Chapp, Stephen Chesley, Corneille, Jeff Donovan, Jacques Doucet, Phil Garrett, Herbert Gentry, Tonya Gregg, Jerry Harris, Bill Jackson, Sjaak Korsten, Peter Lenzo, Sam Middleton, Eric Miller, Dorothy Netherland, Marcelo Novo, Matt Overend, Anna Redwine, Paul Reed, Edward Rice, Silvia Rudolf, Kees Salentijn, Laura Spong, Tom Stanley, Christine Tedesco, Brown Thornton, Leo Twiggs, Bram van Velde, Katie Walker, Mike Williams, David Yaghjian, Paul Yanko and Don Zurlo.

Works of Art: Deanna Leamon

Works of art by Deanna Leamon are available at if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln Street, Columbia, SC.

Contact Wim Roefs at if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com or (803) 255-0068/(803) 238-2351.

Ordained, 2009, oil stick on insulation board,
24 x 24 in., $1,000

Devious Deity, 2009, oil stick on insulation board,
21.5 x 24 in., $950

Betsy, 2009, oil stick on insulation board,
20 x 21.5 in., $950

Yellow Emaline, 2010, oil stick on insulation board,
20 x 23 in., $950

Stanley McCrystal, 2010, oil stick on insulation board,
24 x 16 1/4 in., $1,000

Remembered Face, 2010, oil stick on insulation board,
55 x 48 in., $3,000

Pink Lady #3, 2010, oil stick on insulation board,
24 x 24 in., $1,500

Pink Lady #2, 2010, oil stick on insulation board,
24 x 24 in., $1,500

Blue Emaline, 2010, oil stick on insulation board,
24 x 24 in., $1,000

Pink Lady #4, 2010, oil stick on insulation board,
24 x 24 in., $1,500

Blue Betsy, 2010, oil stick on insulation board,
32 x 24 in., $1,500

Essay: Deanna Leamon

Shroud 2, 2007

Mixed media

60 x 40 in

DEANNA LEAMON

by Wim Roefs

2007

Deanna Leamon’s work is about humanity and its flip side, inhumanity, inflicted by humanity upon itself. For her current Shroud series, the impetus came from photographs of Iraqi war victims wrapped in cloth. 

Leamon collected newspaper photographs about Iraq, mostly from the New York Times, for two years straight. At some point, she says, the Times began showing wrapped, dead Iraqis. “I didn’t base my drawings on specific pictures, because there were so many. I ended up wrapping models in fabric and wrapping skeletons for direct source material.”

“To shroud,” she says, going into dictionary mode, “is, one, to wrap a corpse in burial clothing and, two, to shut off from sight; to screen. The noun form refers to, one, a cloth used to wrap a body for burial, and, two, something that conceals, protects, or screens. Synonyms include to block, hide, or obscure, with the shared central meaning ‘to cut off from sight.’ This evokes what our government does not want us to see and especially doesn’t want us to count – Iraqi casualties. It’s, of course, murky. But a study from Johns Hopkins University last October put the Iraqi casualty figure at 600,000. Since then, who knows?”

The current drawings, Leamon says, continue her concern with individual suffering as a consequence of large bureaucratic exercises of power. “I continue to explore new ways to extend drawing and to make the drawing medium serve the artistic message.”

The Shroud series demonstrates the trademarks of Leamon’s work. She uses great technical skill to create expressive art, typically large graphite or mixed-media drawings that have an immense emotional impact. She combines high formal qualities with unsettling content and imagery. 

In gross anatomy paintings a few years ago, Leamon treated skeletons less as corpses of dead people than the remains of people previously alive. A skeleton with a heart or with an expressive face, including eyes, gave the corpses a still-human touch. In Leamon’s technology drawings of the 1980s, featuring naked figures, she addressed the often-faceless tyranny of bureaucratic power and the disorientation of people lost and displaced by the abuse of technology.

In her widely and nationally exhibited early 1990s Hamlet series, 10 drawings addressed a 1991 disaster in a Hamlet, N.C., chicken-processing plant. When a fire broke out, 25 minimum-wage workers died because the plant’s owner had locked eight of nine exits to keep workers from stealing chickens. The large, monumental charcoal figures on a white background had a sculptural quality that is echoed by the bodies in the Shroud series. The Hamlet figures’ nakedness and unclear race and gender obscured their background, giving them a universal quality, as do the shrouds in the current work. Abuse of power, Leamon seems to suggest, can affect us all. 

The Hamlet figures appeared trapped, literally by how Leamon placed them in space, and figuratively, as obvious helplessness signaled pending death. The Shroud corpses are trapped by space, too, but more so by their wraps and demise. “The images may serve to remind us,” Leamon in the 1990s wrote about her Hamlet drawings, “that these people were real people, not abstractions or statistics.”

Biography: Deanna Leamon

Shroud 1, 2007

Mixed media

30 x 40 1/2 in

Deanna Leamon (b. 1957)

Columbia, S.C., artist Deanna Leamon teaches at the University of South Carolina art department as well as the S.C. School of Medicine, which hosted her 2002 show Lab Drawings. Her work was in Thresholds: Expressions of Art and Spiritual Life, a 2004 exhibition that traveled the Southeast for three years. She also was represented in The Felt Moment, a 2003 show of art from the Carolinas at the Columbia Museum of Art.

Leamon was in 100 Years/100 Artists: Views of the 20th Century, an overview of 20th century South Carolina art at the S.C. State Museum. She has been in group and solo shows across the country. The Alton, Ill., native holds a BA in visual communications from Eastern Illinois University and an MFA from Southern Illinois University.