Posing Possibilities: Drawing Inspiration From and For Charleston’s Parks

The City of Charleston Office of Cultural Affairs presents Posing Possibilities: Drawing Inspiration from and for Charleston’s Parks at City Gallery November 14 through December 18, 2017. This celebration of the beauty of Charleston’s public spaces features the work of Jack Alterman, Janie Ball, Christophe Drumain, Karyn Healey, Alan Jackson, Hirona Matsuda, and Fletcher Williams III. City Gallery will host an opening reception for the exhibition on November 17, from 5-7 p.m. An artists’ talk with the exhibiting artists will be held on Saturday, December 9 at 2pm. Both events are free and open to the public.

Posing Possibilities celebrates the promise of public parks and the people who nurture those spaces in a collaboration between multiple artists and the Charleston Parks Conservancy. Photographer Jack Alterman will present a series of portraits of the “Park Angels,” the dedicated volunteer corps that helps the Conservancy improve and preserve Charleston’s parks. The exhibition will also include a display utilizing the artwork of architect Christophe Drumain highlighting the Conservancy’s 10 years as a nonprofit organization that has collaborated with neighborhoods, businesses and the City of Charleston to renovate and beautify more than 25 city parks. Frequent collaborators Alan Jackson and Hirona Matsuda will present a series of works based on six of Charleston’s parks. Painter Karyn Healey will examine the proposed Lowline linear park. Janie Ball will present landscape studies of the parks she knew growing up in Charleston. Fletcher Williams III’s work will meditate on public art and the people who create it.

Through this exhibition, City Gallery and the Charleston Parks Conservancy hope to engage visitors and Lowcountry residents alike in thinking about the role of art in public spaces, as well as to inspire them with the beauty of local parks and landscapes.

About the Artists

Photographer Jack Alterman is a native of Charleston, South Carolina. His viewfinder has been framing the faces, buildings, and landscapes of Charleston since the 1970’s. He is an alumnus of the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California. Several of Alterman’s solo exhibits have featured his portraits and architectural photography and he has produced three multimedia documentaries. He was featured as a speaker at the 2016 TEDxCharleston. His most recent book, My City Charleston, was published in 2016. This large format fine art photography book shows the city as it is now, a product of time, the old and new layered, together. Alterman’s images document the city and its inhabitants from every angle and he’s still finding inspiration from this muse.

Janie Ball, Charleston native, has been engaged in creating art, for as long as she can remember. The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) graduate has had a successful marketing career winning ADDY and CASE Awards prior to returning to fine art. Her paintings are composed of bold thoughtful shapes of color which when visually combined by the viewer “paint” the image, be it en plein air, contemporary realism, or abstract expressionism. The Charleston Artist Collective member’s paintings are in private and corporate collections including the Belmond Charleston Place and MUSC Children’s Hospital. Ball’s work has been exhibited in solo and group shows, as far away as Portland, Maine. Spring 2017, her painting “Out of the Blue” was selected as the Community Choice Winner for ArtPop Street Gallery of Charleston, to be featured on an Adams Outdoor Advertising 672’ square foot billboard canvas for a year.

Christophe Drumain is a partner at DesignWorks, a Charleston-based Landscape and Planning firm. Christophe was part of the original founding team in 1994 when he moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Charleston, South Carolina. Christophe, originally from France, is a fully trained architect from Bordeaux University. After working for 3 years as a planner-architect for the City of Bordeaux as an urban Designer, he moved to the United States in 1991 to pursue a Master in Urban Design and Planning at Harvard University. He is also an accomplished artist in its own merit since childhood. He has tutored composition, watercolor and rendering in Cambridge and Charleston. Christophe’s art works are mainly commissions from portrait to mural. He also is very active in the local community and has donated portraits and paintings to charity auctions such as Spoleto Festival USA, Carolina Youth Development, the American College of the Building Arts and the Children’s Museum of the Lowcountry.

Karyn Healey has been an artist for many years, working as a graphic designer, a community art advocate, and adjunct faculty member teaching design and typography. In 2010, she shifted her focus to oil painting and has been developing different styles for a variety of subject matter ever since. Observing life, and specifically social issues in the Lowcountry, through perceptual painting and social realism has become her focus. She recently created a series called Women’s Work which explores the female experience.

Alan Jackson is originally from Savannah, Georgia. He graduated from the University of Florida, School of Architecture in 1975 and worked in a series of architectural offices in Savannah, Beaufort, Kiawah Island and Charleston. He has lived in Charleston since 1979. He is a LEED accredited professional architect and formerly a partner in the architecture firm McKellar & Associates. He now has a private practice. He has an interest in abstract expressionism and minimalist artwork. His artistic efforts have developed out of an interest in deconstructing architectural drafting and rendering techniques and reassembling them into simply composed and precisely rendered non-representational drawings. He is represented by The George Gallery and has been shown at the Corrigan Gallery, Mitchell Hill Gallery, The Vendue, and the Piccolo Spoleto Juried Art Show at the City Gallery. He recently collaborated with Hirona Matsuda on “Wall Line 2” a site specific installation at ArtFields in Lake City. Jackson lives in Mt. Pleasant with Pat, his wife.

Hirona Matsuda grew up in North Carolina with her two siblings in a house that served as her parents’ business as well as their home. She moved to Charleston, South Carolina to attend the College of Charleston and set up her studio in the downtown arts district after graduation. She curated her first show in 2007 and has shown work in many local and regional exhibits including a solo show at the Ethredige Center at USCA. She has also collaborated on several large scale installations and set designs with local artists, among them, Alan Jackson. Using primarily found and salvaged objects, Matsuda refocuses the viewer’s attention on things that have been deemed useless and of no aesthetic value. Her themes reflect on her life growing up as well as her immediate surroundings. The assembled compositions are a delicate balance of color and texture and light and shadow.

Fletcher Williams III is a Charleston-based interdisciplinary artist whose theoretical and conceptual art making practice is rooted in a southern vernacular, which he finds essential to documenting the unweaving of Charleston’s social and cultural fabric. Williams studied drawing, painting, print making, graphic design, and sculpture at The Cooper Union, where he received a BFA in 2010 and worked for several years thereafter as a freelance graphic designer. While the core of Williams’ education focused on the visual arts, a significant portion of his education was dedicated to studying ritual theory through the lenses of anthropology and sociology. These concepts play an important role in his later works. In 2013, Williams returned to Charleston and began creating multimedia objects and installations that explore historical and contemporary African American narratives of culture and utility that are unique to the Lowcountry.