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Artist Talk
Photo by Alexandrea Lassiter
Wednesday, August 21, 2024, 6 - 7:30 pm
Block Gallery will host an artist talk featuring the artists in the "plants, and birds, and rocks (and things)" exhibition. Add this event to your calendar.
About the Guest Curator and Artist-in-Residence
Rock Profile - Witness, Sculpture (Materials: wood, paper, text, UV resistant acrylic), 31.5” x 23.5” x 4”, 2021
Scott Hazard
Scott Hazard is a visual artist based in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S. His mixed-media works are a meditation how people engage, understand, and exploit the land and the cultural lenses through which we perceive, experience and engage with our environment.
He has exhibited his work at venues including CAM (Contemporary Art Museum) Raleigh; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, NC; Mixed Greens, New York, NY; Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, VA; CONTEXT Art Miami, Art Silicon Valley; Adah Rose Gallery, Kensington, MD; Davidson College, Davidson, NC; and Artspace in Raleigh, NC. He is currently the 2023-24 Artist in Residence for the City of Raleigh Parks Nature Preserves. His work has been featured in a number of magazines and online publications, including Glamcult, WILD Magazine, Oxford American, The Washington Post, BOOOOOOOM, Juxtapoz, Hi-Fructose, and Colossal. He is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship in Visual Arts from the North Carolina Arts Council, Individual Artist Career Opportunity Grant from South Arts, and Professional Development and Artist Support Grants from the United Arts Council. Hazard was born in San Diego, California and received his landscape architecture education at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. He earned a Master of Fine Arts with an emphasis on sculpture, photography and video at the University of Florida.
Instagram: @hazardscott
Desert Child of Soil and Sky, Desert soil and pressed plants on canvas, 20” x 22”, 2021
Claire Alexandre
Claire Alexandre is a queer Afro Caribbean artist, abolitionist feminist storyteller
and student of ecologies who weaves autobiographical reflections with ancestral wisdom. Through mixed media paintings and street art, she elaborates detailed portraits that highlight the myriad of ways Black and Indigenous freedom has historically been and will continue to be intimately intertwined with a power of landscape literacy and environmental reciprocity.
“By exploring what soil pigments, botanical dyes and inks lend to my artwork, I seek to not only connect with ancestral artistic practices but also look at how time and colonialism materialize in the earth’s layers and local floras.”
“I consider my paintings portals that carry the responsibility of offering alternative versions of the world, ones that celebrate the leadership of Queer and Trans BIPOC femmes in this time of climate collapse.”
Instagram: @onlyclairity
Night Stage, Oil on Canvas, 36” x 42”, 2021
Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson
Geddes Levenson and Annie Blazejack both grew up in Miami, FL. Their collaborative art practice grew organically from their childhood friendship. In 2013, while attending separate graduate schools, they formalized this collaboration and have been creating and showing work exclusively as a duo ever since. In their paintings and installations, they explore the relationship between humans and ecosystems as climate change becomes increasingly inevitable.
Blazejack received her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine arts, Boston/ Tufts University in 2013, and Levenson received her MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 2014. Notably, Blazejack and Levenson have installed solo shows at Ortega Y Gasset Projects Skirt Space, Brooklyn, NY, Lump Projects, Raleigh NC; Anchorlight, Raleigh, NC; The Carrack, Durham, NC; The Art and Culture Center, Hollywood, FL; Placeholder Gallery, Miami, FL; and The White Page Gallery, Minneapolis, MN. They have also shown at The National Liberty Museum, Philadelphia, PA; The Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; and Norte Maar Art Space, Brooklyn, NY.
Together they experiment with painting as a way to conjure up impossible places. The world of paint is infinitely malleable, and they set loose a series of industrious explorers to manipulate their painted environment, opening portals, eating brush strokes, and merging with cosmic landscapes.
Instagram: @annieandgeddes
Flower Portrait 2, Oil on Canvas, 30” x 40”
Julia Einstein
Julia Einstein is from New England and lived on the coast of Maine where the light and landscape inspired her work. She is currently Artist in Residence at Raleigh City Farm where she creates from her new home studio in the Warehouse District of Raleigh, North Carolina. She makes paintings with an artist’s eye on nature in vivid compositions, elegant arrangements, and painterly surfaces. Her recent work is a delve into the natural world using a palette of bright, saturated color, and a sense of scale to supersize the smallest of plants from farm to easel.
“My studio practice is aligned with the growing season at Raleigh City Farm and is centered around creating community.
The most recent project in conjunction with Raleigh Nature Preserves expands my study to the indigenous plants found in the Piedmont.”
Instagram: @juliaeinstein
migration 26, carbon pencil, 12” x 12”, 2022
Janet Link
Born in 1962, Janet Link was reared in Raleigh, North Carolina in a family that valued and nurtured her constant desire to make things. In 1988 she went to Paris to study drawing and painting in a traditional atelier program with Ben Long and the following year received a BA in Art from Meredith College. During the years between undergraduate and graduate school, Janet worked as a studio artist in Raleigh and Oriental, NC. In 2004 she completed an MFA in Painting and Drawing at Louisiana State University, where she worked with Michael Crespo. Janet’s professional life is devoted to the practice, teaching, and elevation of observational drawing. Her work can be found in the collections of the City of Raleigh and the University of Arkansas, and she has a national exhibition record, including shows in North Carolina, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Toronto. Janet has participated in visiting artist and residency programs in Tahanaout, Morocco; Penland and Kinston, NC; Gatlinburg, TN; and Spring Island, SC. She has taught at the NCSU College of Design, Penland School of Crafts, Arrowmont School of Crafts, Meredith College, Centre College, and LSU.
Link navigates with charcoal and graphite, laying down thousands of individual marks in an effort to capture a description of intangible things like light and air. Janet lives with her husband and two dogs in Raleigh where she works in the community of artists at Anchorlight.
Instagram: @janetlink
