Joy Drury Cox / Fall 2018 Exhibitions & Updates
Hard Places
October 5 – November 10, 2018
Ejecta Projects
Carlisle, PA
Opening Reception: October 5, 5 – 8pm
Meet the Artists & Reception: October 27, 5 – 8pm
Ejecta Projects Hours: Thursday – Friday, 3-7 pm; Saturday, noon – 7pm
The title of this exhibition, Hard Places, is at once a slightly tongue-in-cheek nod to the expression “between a rock and a hard place,” but also a more literal affirmation of the solidity of the surfaces photographed during travels to the Pacific Northwest. The artists, Joy Drury Cox and Ben Alper, acknowledge that in a very overt way, the title describes the challenges of photographing landscapes of great beauty and grandeur within the limitations of a camera’s singular lens. With a long history of majestic landscape paintings and photographs in mind, the artists also reframe seemingly sublime wildernesses within the context of tourism and present-day environmental changes. The photographs on display in Ejecta Projects simultaneously resist and respond to these pictorial precedents. While some photographs offer glimpses onto expansive vistas of woods, wildflowers, and the sea, other spaces—densely woven tree roots, rough rock faces, and dizzying plains of gravel – appear curiously flattened, constrained, and abstracted.
Compound Fractures
Forthcoming book with Ben Alper
In early 2018, Ben and I completed a collaborative project photographing in tourist caves in the Southeastern United States. Our project was featured in the August Issue of PDN Magazine in an article by Jon Feinstein. Check it out here.
In the next coming weeks, we will be releasing a self-published limited edition artist book of this project through Flat Space Studio. Please be in touch if you would like me to reserve a copy for you.
Born Under a Bad Sign
October 5 – 26, 2018
The Neon Heater
Findlay, OH
Opening Reception: October 5, 5 – 8pm
Featuring work by:
Andy Dailey
Anna Paola Guerra
April Bachtel
Gregg Evans
Joy Drury Cox
Taha Ahmad
This exhibition is part of the Neon Heater’s 7th year of programming, 30 shows between September 2018 and May 2019, called The Temperature, in which the Neon Heater is taking the temperature of the art world and the socio-political climate. The 30 exhibitions of the Temperature are connected by a narrative through-line, and each month has its own theme which progressively builds the narrative. October’s theme is Cast of Characters and introduces the characters into the world that was created in September’s The Setting.
Born Under a Bad Sign is an exhibition that explores, both generally and symbolically, a generation born into a world in transition. A world that has already been discovered, a world in which the previous generations worked so hard to “build” and gift to their children, while ironically robbing them of their potential to create their own lives. A generation so overwhelmed with their full access to the world (via globalization and the internet) that they are unable to find a place in it. A generation seeking to be seen.
Anti- Nostalgia
October 4 – 21, 2018
The Carrack
Durham, NC
Opening Reception: October 5, 7 – 9:30pm
Curated by:
Olivia Huntley and elin o’Hara slavick
Desire has no history. – Susan Sontag
Anti-Nostalgia is a group exhibition of artists invited to create works utilizing found photographs. Artists explore: our relationship to the photograph as an object; memories and sentimentality; history and the familial; the vernacular and the archive; and alternative and interventionist narratives. A photograph provides both a historical and unattainable reality. Anti-Nostalgia investigates how our attraction to and/or repulsion by found photographs does not come from nostalgia, but comes from a desire to confirm, deny and transform a reality. Theorists argue that nostalgia can be a form of fascism – a longing for a glorified past that leads us down an authoritarian path. Anti-Nostalgia is a topical and critical approach to our current global situation, an attempt to draw attention to the way we read, feel, understand and use imagery in the name of ideology and personal whim.
and the light followed the flight of sound
published by One Day Projects
One Day Projects is pleased to release their third collaborative book, “And light followed the flight of sound.” Inspired by both the natural wonder and symbolic possibilities of the 2017 solar eclipse, the book features photographs by 52 artists and is presented as a 30-foot-long, hand-bound accordion with an enclosed saddle-stitched zine and essay. Edited, designed and produced by Jared Ragland and Eliot Dudik, the limited edition book is printed on digital offset, covered in a foil-stamped cloth, and comes housed in a clear Mylar sleeve, also foil stamped. As the book is removed from its sleeve, the foil stamps mimic the passage of the moon in front of the sun. Despite a wide variation of styles, approaches, and locations, the photographs in “And light followed the flight of sound” remind us of our commonality, advance a vision of community regained, and reveal the transcendent power of science and citizenship, activism and art, beauty and imagination. To see and purchase, visit onedayprojects.org.
Just closing…
Seeing the Weave: Textile based abstraction from the Piedmont
September 7 – October 5, 2018
Smith Gallery
Schaefer Center for the Performing Arts at Appalachian State University
Featuring works by:
Maria Britton
Martha Clippinger
Joy Drury Cox
Julia Gartrell
Kayla Anderson
Jennifer Schmidt
The Smith Gallery will host “Seeing the Weave: Textile-based Abstraction from the Piedmont,” a group show featuring diverse works — from painting, quilts, weavings and textile to sculpture and video — that use textile design, history and construction to engage with the legacies of artistic abstraction. The exhibition and related programs are free and open to the public.
In the last twenty years, there has been a global upsurge in contemporary art making based in textile materials, designs and histories. This exhibition provides a survey of some of the ways that North Carolina artists have contributed to expanding this field in new directions. It focuses on work from the Piedmont region, which is both a dense center of artistic production in the state and an area rich with craft and industrial textile history. The artists represented integrate textiles into a wide variety of forms and make frequent use of techniques associated with textile construction, including piecing, sewing, weaving and knotting their works together. They experiment boldly with color, pattern and the tactile qualities of fabric, and they interrogate both the cultural meanings associated with their materials and the legacy of textile-based abstraction, which has its roots in the early twentieth century.
