2014 was off to a great start with the Dogwood Arts Festival show, and now things are really getting going.
My Tumblr page is taking off, and has recently been updated, so check that out if you Tumbl.
Papercut Magazine recently featured me in their latest issue of 17 artists who work with paper as their medium, in an edition called Life is Art.
As for upcoming shows, here are the ones starting soon:
- Fold, Paper, Scissors – May 2 – August 10, 2014 | Dobson Main Gallery – Mesa Arts Center | One East Main Street | Mesa, Arizona 85201
- Mesa Arts Center Opening Reception: Friday, May 9, 2014 (7-10pm) FREE and Open to the Public
- Paper Cuts: A Group Show – May 3 – 24, 2014| Spoke Art Gallery | 816 Sutter St | San Francisco, CA 94109 | Tuesday through Saturday | noon to 6pm
- From Ordinary to Extraordinary: Paper as Art – May 22-August 31, 2014 | The Cornell Museum Exhibition at the Delray Beach Center for the Arts at Old School Square | 51 N. Swinton Avenue | Delray Beach, FL 33444
The show at the Cornell Museum in Florida will feature Mia Pearlman and Brian Dettmer; it is the greatest honor to show with them!
The MTSU Magazine at Middle Tennessee State University also did an alumni feature on me called, “Creating a Paper Trail” by Darby Campbell. She writes, “When you step into an exhibition of Charles Clary’s (’04) paper sculptures, it can be an overwhelming experience. The playful shapes come off the wall and reach out to the viewer. Cut in such precise, delicate detail, the tiny brightly colored landscapes invite you to come closer for exploration. What you see there may surprise you. Organic topographies, pencil marks, and subtle imperfections let you know that each piece was cut by hand. Given that the room contains hundreds of pieces with thousands of layers—all hand-cut—the sheer volume of work is astonishing.” Thanks, Darby and MTSU!
MTSU also gave me some press in the campus newspaper, Sidelines, in a feature by Molly Mobely called, “Infectious art: Seeing paper another way.” The article has a great description of how I got to where I am with paper art:
Clary enrolled in graduate school at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and from there his work began to infiltrate the art scene. Through the school, he was able to participate in a New York residency art program for three months. This led to an internship in Brooklyn, and eventually developed into a freelance job in Miami. But it was in New York that Clary’s’ art took a turn from 2-D painting to 3-D paper sculptures. “I wish it was more romantic,” Clary laughed. “But I was in New York, and I was doing large scale wall paintings with hundreds of little cut-out drawings interacting with one another on the wall. I left for home from my internship, got off the subway, and started walking back to my studio, and I passed a paper store. So I walked in, and I’m a little ashamed to say that the paper that struck me the most was done by Martha Stewart; it was her scrapbooking paper. “I grabbed as much as I could at that time and took it back to my studio and started playing around with a lot of the abstract forms that were in my paintings but cutting those out and layering them on top of one another to give them a two-and-a-half-dimensional environment in which my little characters could reside in and that set me on this path.”
I am preparing to submit to several more juried shows this year, and I plan to present at SECAC in the fall. Happy Spring, everyone!
Charles Clary 