Tuesday, March 5 at 5:00PM
The Carlos Gallery in the Visual Arts Building at the University of the South is pleased to present The Ambient Pause (A Rest from the Noise) by artist Christina Foard.
The lush, painterly works in The Ambient Pause (A Rest from the Noise) are born from Foard’s everyday experiences and observations, yet appear otherworldly in their magical sense of imagination. Domestic objects and spaces appear amidst rich swaths of paint, blobs of color, floating shapes, dynamic brush strokes and rhythmic patterns. The resulting paintings celebrate and explore materials, offer a window into Foard’s mind and transport the viewer to a colorful world where anything seems possible.
Painting interior/exterior scenes and making objects is a necessary personal response to experiences, emotions, and environments. Regardless of shifts in iconography, Foard’s work incorporates perceptions about time, memories, and often includes quotidian objects as symbolic placeholders. She translates observed scenes and incorporates invented components. Structure and pattern are her preferred starting places, and throughout, she strives to remain a state of “play,” housed in a curiosity and openness. She responds most to marks where there’s an intuitive response, a humanness, captured sensitivity, or personification over highly controlled or known outcomes. When Foard gets stuck in the puzzle of formal aesthetic concerns, she alters and experiments with materials to advance and deepen her ideation. The history of the marks and movements within a piece, the history of a specific place, and her own history converge as primary elements in the making of the work.
Christina Foard was born in Panama City, Florida and earned a BFA in Painting and Printmaking at the University of Cincinnati and her MFA from the University of Georgia. From 1990-2003 she was a project manager in the online learning industry in the D.C. area. Other roles include serving as Museum Educator at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, directing the Arts in Medicine program at UF Medical Center in Jacksonville and teaching at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. Foard is currently a full time studio artist, co-owner of a small communications company, serves as a Clarke/Oconee County CASA in support of foster children, and is the proud mom of three grown children, and two grown step-sons.
