The Maker City Directory Show
This show kicks off the weekend for the Outlandish Adventure Festival and it feels like the right way to begin.
Set inside Ijams Nature Center, this exhibition brings together a group of artists who see the world a little differently. Some are capturing it as it is, others are reshaping, layering, or pulling meaning out of the details most of us miss.
There is a shared thread: attention. To light, to texture, to place, to story.
Before the music starts, before the trails fill up, before this outlandish weekend gets moving, this is a moment to slow down and take it in and connect with the creative energy that captures what we love about the outdoors.
Participating artists:
Kelsey Dillow is an artist, photographer and co-founder of Whistlepig Farms, a collective of artists growing food and making art in the holler outside of Knoxville, TN. In her darkroom she practices various alternative photographic processes, specifically wet plate collodion (tintypes) and silver gelatin printing. She takes her tintype studio on the road throughout the region, making portraits at events, festivals and private house call sessions.
In her personal work, Dillow’s studio practice explores folklore, myth-making and the Appalachian identity. Her work has been exhibited throughout the region.
By trade, I’m a graphic designer. When Covid happened, I found myself with dwindled clients. Never one to sit around, I returned to my artistic roots and learned new art with painting and epoxy techniques. From that, I worked into a niche for guitar clocks and tables and fluid art. While still a traditional artist, I have come to enjoy abstract and modern art. I have been honored to show my paintings at the Van derPlas Gallery in New York as well as a residency for guitar art at the Vivant Gallery Reno.
Beth Meadows creates mixed media drawings and paintings on wood that mix her life in East Tennessee with an aspirational life inspired by contemporary fashion, graphic, architectural, and interior design. Her style is modern meets folk art, where things are drawn in a flat, cartoon-like way.
Beth is fascinated by human behavior, why we do what we do. Her subject matter often deals with interpersonal relationships and how that stems from the relationship we have with ourselves.
I am committed to bringing peace to the world through art. Each of my works is created in a peace-filled, uplifting, positive, joyful environment. This inspiring energy becomes infused into the art piece. I enjoy creating contemporary fabric art that has visual and/or actual textural elements. These elements often include beads, vintage buttons, feathers, hand-painted and manipulated fabric, yarns, and found objects. My art is eco-friendly. I create with recycled and repurposed items as much as possible. I love the play of textures and colors found in nature. I am influenced by African, Asian, & Tibetan cultures.
I create dynamic abstract paintings on dimensional shaped panels. Each piece I create is the result of an inquiry, addressing different aspects of art, math, science, and craft. Equally inspired by the beauty found in nature and the beauty found in science and innovation, these inquiries have led me to delve into the mathematical structure of flowers, to explore the planets and stars and our relationship to them through science and mythology, and to investigate the effect of geometric patterns on our visual perception and the role memory plays in that process. This approach to making my work has resulted in my own innovations in painting, woodworking, and most recently, prismatic photography. Ultimately, through my work I seek to deepen my understanding of the world and my place in it and to encourage my viewers to do the same for themselves.