Armoury @ The Cedar Gallery - Opening reception

Here are a few images from the opening reception on January 15th. You can view the rest of the images HERE.

Katie Kraft

Karin Haas & James LaLonde
Sophia Flood

Kevin Giese

Ginger Lukas

Armoury @ The Cedar Gallery

The Armoury returns for an exhibition in the Cedar Gallery for winter Gallery Night - Friday, January 15th 5-10pm

Jessica Steeber and Cassandra Smith of the Armoury Gallery return for their first exhibition since closing the doors on their gallery this past spring. Gathering six of Wisconsin’s finest up and coming artists, the exhibition will be held at the Cedar Gallery in the 3rd ward through Saturday, March 13th. Gallery hours will be Wednesday through Saturday from 1:00 - 5:00pm.

Works by Ginger Lukas, Sophia Flood, Kevin Giese, Katie Kraft and a collaboration between Karin Haas and James LaLonde will fill the two floors of gallery space, opening to the public Winter Gallery Night.

Currently studying for her MFA at UW-Madison, Ginger Lukas’s colorful installations will take over the first floor of the gallery space. Simultaneously referencing our obsession with material, consumption and wealth, while rooted in a simpler time of chandeliers and grand balls, they draw comparison between the old and the new, the frivolous and the grand. Lukas earned her BFA at the Maryland Institute – College of Art, and has a host of scholarships, fellowships and grants to her credit.

Also studying for her MFA at UW-Madison, Sophia Flood’s mixed media assemblages reflect a sensitivity to color, shape and space, while drawing out unexpected relationships between her chosen materials. Flood earned her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Massachusetts, Ameherst, and has exhibited nationally.

UW-Milwaukee fine art instructor Kevin Giese will be exhibiting new and old works, including new installation work. Heavily rooted in the natural world, Giese's works often include material elements taken directly from nature, reworked and displayed in ways questioning our relationship to landscape.

Milwaukee native Katie Kraft will have a new series of paintings on display. Graduating in 2008 from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Kraft’s work is playful and intelligent, challenging our perceptions of the ordinary. Aerial views of pool tables make up this series, a simple yet aesthetically purposeful look at a common pastime.

Finally, a collaboration between MIAD graduate Karin Haas and James LaLonde completes the exhibition. Straying from her delicate yet unnerving prints, Haas and LaLonde will install a herd of miniature zebras in the gallery space, an innocent take on relationships and the childlike qualities we so easily forget.

Thanks!

Thanks for all the support and well wishes!  We're going to miss you guys too.  Here are some great, thoughtful articles written about our closing.

From Julie Lawrence at OnMilwaukee.com.

From Mary Louise Shumacher at Art City (with great comments by Rex Winsome).

From Mollie Bouttel-Butler at Milwaukee Decider.

From  Mary Dally-Muenzmaier at Cricket Toes.

Closing Letter

Dear friends of the Armoury,

As reluctant as we are to join the list of closing galleries and businesses around Milwaukee, it has unfortunately come time to announce that the Armoury officially closed with the end of our last show on May 2^nd.  Due to a variety of reasons, not least of them being financial, we will no longer be continuing to run our space in the Fortress Building.

While we will be closing the doors on the physical gallery space, we are looking forward to new projects and new ways to connect with artists both locally and nationally. It has been a wonderfully enriching experience both of us, and we have worked hard over the last 18 months, garnering numerous benefits personally and professionally. We hope to continue working, collaborating and connecting with people, expanding our horizons and channeling our energy into new projects in the near future.

Of course we want to thank all of the artists who showed with us this past year, along with anyone in the press who took the time to write about and promote our venture.  We would also like to thank everyone who has visited the Armoury for an opening or during gallery hours, shared kind words of encouragement and thanks, or recommended us to others. A special thank you to our ardent supporters and advisors: Jason Yi, Sonja Thomsen, Mike Brenner, Jill Sebastian, Josie Osborne, Pegi Taylor, Mary Louise Schumacher, and finally our parents, without whom we would not have enjoyed the fantastic food and drink at every opening.

We will continue to maintain the Armoury Gallery online as an archive of our past shows and you can still contact us at this email address if you have questions about the gallery or any past artists.  

Thanks again and take care!

Cassandra and Jessica

Night Work: Gallery Online

Our Gallery Online is now complete for Night Work!  Below are a few photos from the show, but please visit our website to see the entire exhibition.  You can click around on each piece in the gallery and view it close-up.  Enjoy!

Also, we'll be open this Friday, April 17th for Gallery Night from 5:00 - 9:00 pm.  It's a great time to come by and see the show if you haven't already.

Night Work runs until May 2nd with gallery hours on Saturday from noon - 5:00 pm.

Night Work: Reception photos

Here are some photos from the opening reception on March 27th. You can view the rest of the photos HERE on our Flickr page.

Susceptible to Image review

We got a short review of our current show on the Susceptible to Images blog by Kat Murrell. The original text is below, but it's part of a much larger post you should go check out HERE.

Night Work opening at the Armoury Gallery

Openings at the Armoury Gallery are always interesting; they tend to have a good mix of people, the gallery itself is a unique space, but more than anything else, gallery proprietors Jessica Steeber and Cassandra Smith consistently put together intriguing shows. This time around, the exhibition is “Night Work,” pieces created by working art instructors. It may be night work, done after the obligations of the day (or so one could imagine), but these pieces are definitely not an afterthoughts or the remnants of creative energy.

Six artists are featured in the show, and it’s impossible to get a really good look at everything during an opening. But, I have to say I’m impressed by Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninch-Ganger, whose multimedia works blend elegant forms of drawing, collage, and art history tradition integrated with digital surprises. It’s a fascinating blend of old and new art technologies.

In the Armoury Gallery, there is an additional room, a small and humble space but becoming one of my favorite gallery spots. Because it’s a closed area and set off from the general hubbub outside, it has an immediate feeling of separation, as though you’ve entered into a place where, even more so than in the main gallery area, anything can happen. This time, the room holds two works by Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg, both simple but captivating. Unravel links the three-dimensional reality with the two-dimensional possibilities of drawing, and the charming and surreal Draft simply opens up all sorts of imaginative wonderment. Elegant, simple, and inventive.

Night Work @ the Armoury Gallery

Opening reception:
Friday March 27, 6:00 - 10:00 pm
Show runs: March 27 - May 2

Featuring:
Nathaniel Stern
Jessica Meuninck Ganger
Nicolas Lampert
Shana McCaw & Brent Budsberg
Sonja Thomsen

The Armoury Gallery is pleased to announce its 8th exhibition: Night Work. Focusing specifically on professional artists working as art professors and instructors in Milwaukee, Night Work is an exciting cross section of some of Milwaukee's most talented and recognized artists; three of whom are featured in the Current Tendencies exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University. Night work includes two collaborative teams, Nathaniel Stern & Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and ShanaMcCaw & Brent Budsberg, as well as new 2D work by Nicolas Lampert and recent photographs by Sonja Thomsen.

Along with teaching at UW-Milwaukee, Nicolas Lampert is a curator, a co-editor of a book on anti-war illustrations and an artist who works in a variety of media and has exhibited his work extensively across the country and abroad. Lampert co-curated a traveling political art show that toured 33 cities in Canada and the US during a five year run. He has work in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in NewYork and Milwaukee's own Art Museum. Lampert is also part of the Justseeds Radical Artist's Cooperative that is currently exhibiting an installation at UWM's Union Art Gallery.

Taking over the installation room will be a collaboration by Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg. In seven years of collaboration, McCaw andBudsberg's work has evolved from playful performances about human interaction and rites of passage toward miniature architectural installations investigating transition, space and the passage of time. For Night Work, McCaw and Budsberg will exhibit two new companion sculptures. Incorporating a mysterious wind and subdued atmospheric effects, both pieces create a perception of space beyond the gallery wall, while also suggesting an indirect narrative. McCaw teaches at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and Cardinal Stritch and Budsberg is a MIAD 3-d lab supervisor. As a collaborative team, they won a 2008Mary Nohl Fellowship in the Established Artist category.

First time collaborative duo Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern will present a new series of works. Playfully called "Distill Life," this series incorporates technologies and aesthetics from traditional printmaking – including Japanese woodblock and engraving circa the1800s, present-day etching, stone lithography, photogravure etc –with the technologies and aesthetics of contemporary digital, video and networked art, in order to create new forms. Hailing from South Africa, and currently studying for his PhD throughTrinity College in Dublin, Ireland, Nathaniel Stern joined the Milwaukee arts community in 2008 for his position with the Peck School of the Arts at UW Milwaukee. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he has a host of awards, residencies and fellowships to his credit. Jessica Meuninck-Ganger earned her MFA at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and currently teaches at the Peck School of the Arts, also having a host of honors, residencies and exhibitions to her credit.

Earning her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004, SonjaThomsen will present a series of new works from her time spent in 2008 at the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Englewood, Florida. Most recently featured in the aforementioned Current Tendencies exhibition at Marquette's Haggerty Museum of Art, Sonja has exhibited her work nationally and her photographs are included in the permanent collection at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Thomsen currently teaches photography classes at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and was a founding member of the Coalition of Photographic Arts (CoPA), serving as president until June of 2008.

Night Work: Postcards

Our next opening:

NIGHT WORK

Friday, March 27 from 6:00 - 10:00 pm

Show runs March 27 - May 2

We're Anonym.us Press Release

Lost in a Volcanic Maze: Dispatches from We're Anonym.us
A one-night-only event showcasing over a year’s worth of work: the completion of the "We're Anonym.us” project by local filmmaker, Brian Perkins

Friday, March 13th 2009
6:00 – 10:00pm
screening at 7:30 pm
(Please note this event has been postponed from its original date of March 6th)

The Armoury Gallery is pleased to announce its first ‘one-night-only’ event, featuring the videos, slideshows and text that comprise the “We’re Anonym.us” project. Accompanying paintings will be exhibited, created by the filmmaker Brian Perkins specifically for this event. The artwork will be on display until 10:00 pm and it will be accompanied by a related photographic slideshow.

A video screening will take place at 7:30 and run about 40 minutes, featuring a newly edited assembly of all webisodes and slideshows created for the website, with new entr'acte video segments.

A statement from the filmmaker, Brian Perkins:

“We're Anonym.us" is a multimedia, dream-like fable created in a format that is unlike anything we are aware of. Serialized in thirteen parts on the internet and told in videos, slideshows and text, it relates the story of the writing, delivery and reception of anonymous letters. Like a cross between "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Trial", "We're Anonym.us" is a mixture of fantasy, sly humor, and menace.

For more information, please visit the “We’re Anonym.us” website: http://www.wereanonym.us/

We're Anonym.us Postcards

This is the next event that we're having at the gallery. It is a one night event showcasing the work of local filmmaker Brian Perkins.

CoPA Show

Tomorrow evening we are hosting the Coalitions of Photographic Art's 4th birthday party. Every year CoPA's celebrates their anniversary by throwing a party/fundraiser for their Photographic Educational Grant. This year we will be hosting the event which will be a silent auction of prints donated by CoPA members.

The show will be from 6:00 - 9:00 pm on Saturday, February 21st.

Midwest Airlines Magazine Article

The gallery was recently mentioned in an article that ran in the Midwest Airlines in-flight magazine. The article focused on artists and galleries in Eastern Wisconsin. HERE is a link to the article. It is quite long, so below is just an excerpt of the section where we get mentioned:

A Sense of Place
Eastern Wisconsin’s artists have visions for the future that look to the area’s heritage and landscape for inspiration

by Sam Polcer

“It was less than a month after we got back that we were looking for studio space to make our own art,” says Jessica Steeber, who, along with her friend and recent MIAD graduate Cassandra Smith, founded the Armoury Gallery (thearmourygallery.com) upon returning to Milwaukee after a six-month around-the-world journey. They found a spot just north of Downtown that was too nice to use as studio space and decided to fulfill their ambitions of opening a gallery. While only on its sixth exhibition, Armoury has built a solid name for itself and continues to attract attention. For example, kathryn e. martin, an artist garnering acclaim from the Wisconsin art cognoscenti, recently presented her work at the gallery (a large-scale installation of Martin’s, titled flotant, can be seen at the Kohler Arts Center through Jan. 11). Martin is impressed by entrepreneurs like Steeber and Smith, and with the spirit of comraderie that exists among the younger set of art lovers.

“With these galleries popping up, the owners seem to always be there to help each other out, and the artists support each other—as opposed to stepping on each other to get where they need to be,” she says.

Western States: Postcard Images

Western States: Press Release

Gallery Night: Friday, January 16th, 2009
Opening reception 5:00 – 10:00 pm
Show runs through February 14th

The Armoury Gallery is pleased to announce its 7th, and possibly most ambitious exhibition to date: Western States. Gathering up some of the most promising new artists the western half of the country has to offer, Western States gives Milwaukee a unique glimpse into art happening West of the Mississippi.

Aili Schmeltz, William Hundley, Gavin Brunner, Colleen Sanders, Adrianne Watson and Milwaukee’s own Colin Matthes will fill the gallery with a variety of 2-D, 3-D and installation work.

Living and working in Los Angeles, Aili Schmeltz earned her MFA in 2003 from the University of Arizona. She has since had 10 solo exhibitions to her credit, over 30 group shows and a host of publications including “Best of the West Coast” in New York Arts Magazine. Schmeltz has also had three separate prints appear in Jen Beckman’s 20x200 project based out of New York.

Hailing from Austin, Texas is photographer William Hundley. Earning his BFA in 1998, Hundley has since garnered international attention for his eerie-yet-playful images. With five solo exhibitions to date, and a bibliography that spans Poland, France, Germany, Chile, Spain, Italy, China and Argentina, we are pleased to be showing a series of his images this Gallery Night.

Also from Los Angeles, Gavin Bunner will be showing a selection of his 2-D works on paper. Appearing in New American Paintings in 2006, Artworld Digest and Studio Visit Magazine, along with three solo shows and a host of group exhibitions to his credit, Bunner is an artist to watch.

Both hailing from San Francisco, Colleen Sanders and Adrianne Watson round out the Western States line-up. Watson earned her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2008, and her work appears in the current issue of New American Paintings. Sanders earned her Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2005 before continuing on to earn her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2008. Both artists currently have work showing at the Sam Lee Gallery in Los Angeles.

Last but not least, Milwaukee’s own Colin Matthes will take over the installation space. Matthes’s artwork has been exhibited in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Denmark, Spain, and Austria. In 2009, Matthes will have a solo-exhibition at the University of Texas-Pan American and create a wall drawing for a group exhibition at the Haggerty Museum in Milwaukee. Matthes was also a 2008 Mary Nohl Fellowship recipient, and his work is currently on view in the Inova Gallery at UWM’s Kenilworth building.

(Links to all artists websites can be found on the right side toolbar)

Milwaukee's Own: Shepherd Review

Todays Shepherd Express includes a review of our current show by the talented Angelina Krahn. You can read the review HERE or below.

Local Cross-Section
Art Review
By Angelina Krahn


In "Milwaukee's Own," the Armoury Gallery's last show of 2008, Cassandra Smith and Jessica Steeber bring together four emerging local artists, three of whom created site-specific installations. "Milwaukee's Own" is an academic cross-section of sorts: All four artists are or will be MIAD alumni, trained in Milwaukee in the past decade. Aesthetically, the show is tied together by a minimal palette of paper, polystyrene, graphite, and black and gold paint, and, with the exception of some of Mary DiBiasio's works on paper, by coolly detached formalism.

Harvey Opgenorth's Space Debris: Objects of Desire (Hi-Vis Test #1) is the only piece in the show that rigorously incorporates the gallery's architecture. With a deceptively simple conceit, Opgenorth uses a corner of the gallery to paint a black square across walls and water pipes. The best seat in the house for viewing it is settled into the right corner of the gallery's settee, the vantage point at which the blocks of black paint converge to form the illusion of a two dimensional, flat black square festooned with amorphous globs of gold suspended in space.

In the gallery's small back room, kathryn e. martin's White Army is amassed, at ease, its tiny Styrofoam soldiers assembled from the bottoms of cups and plastic spears. Outside in the main gallery, her Untitled (Case Study) cascades down the wall in two clusters of ribbon-like Styrofoam, the tendrils extended and repeated by shadows cast from the overhead lights.

Colin Dickson's Reconnections takes advantage of the Armoury's high ceilings. Tightly-wound rolls of muslin printed with metallic gold are strung, clustered, and mounted to the ceiling. Similar in scale and shape, and placed sparsely throughout the gallery's aft, they hang like eight stalactites in a bright and commodious cave. Dickson's jointed strands, like the phalanges of plush fingers, rhyme visually with Mary DiBiasio's works on paper of traced and silhouetted hands.

Where Opgenorth engages the brain through the eyes and Dickson and martin hint at organic forms, in "Milwaukee's Own" the artist's hand, as it were, is nearly invisible. DiBiasio, however, repeats hers, infusing the show with literal representations of the body. Traced heads in profile, hands and fingerprints are used liberally throughout DiBiasio's work. In Great Expectations, a vertical diptych, graphite is gently dragged up from the bottom of the page, where fingers of cactus-like outgrowths jut from the mouths of limned heads in the desert landscape of empty space. There is a sense of longing in the gesture, as if grasping for the hands above beyond reach.

The artists of "Milwaukee's Own," are superficially linked by educational background and by geography, but each artist's voice is distinct. And while for now they belong to Milwaukee, their work is poised to alight and transcend it.

Milwaukee's Own: Decider article

The Onion has a new(ish) off-shoot website called The Decider. Each city has their own Decider website, and Mike Brenner is writing for the Decider Milwaukee. This month, in his column "Now Hanging", he mentioned our current show, as well as the shows at Dean Jensen and Paper Boat. You can read the article HERE or below.

Now Hanging
Decider visits local galleries looking for stimulation
by Mike Brenner

Mayuko Kono buys cheap plastic dog figurines from her local 100 yen shop, which is Tokyo’s equivalent of a dollar store. She then spends hours sanding them down until all the layers of fur (and sometimes the flesh and eyes) are removed to reveal exquisite little sculptures resembling chiseled marble, each with a distinct personality. Kono and the 40 other artists in Big, Big Bangs/Small, Small Bucks (Dean Jensen Gallery, through Jan. 24) comprise this who’s-who exhibition of artists with ties to Milwaukee. From silly, anti-art pieces like Scott Reeder’s Snake on Phone to more substantive works from Jensen’s stable of Milwaukee art professors—Sonja Thomsen, Lynn Tomaszewski, and Jason S. Yi—Big, Big Bangs/Small, Small Bucks showcases 100 works of art, all of which are priced at or under $750 and are well worth the investment.

A minuscule number (by comparison) of circular remnants from the 50,000 Styrofoam cups used to create Kathryn E. Martin’s largest-to-date solo exhibition, Flotant (John Michael Kohler Arts Center, through Jan. 11), were saved by the artist and stuck together with cocktail picks to create the 250 robot-like soldiers in Martin’s even more recent work, White Army, Version 6.

Milwaukee’s Own (The Armoury Gallery, through Jan. 2) features the work of three other Milwaukee Institute Of Art & Design grads: Mary DiBiasio, Colin Dickson, and Harvey Opgenorth. As the viewer moves about the gallery, Opgenorth’s Space Debris: Objects Of Desire (Hi-Vis Test #1) just doesn't seem right, almost incomplete or lacking, but when you’re on the very right side of the vintage yellow couch next to the gallery director’s desk, everything falls into place. What seemed like random geometric shapes becomes one solid, grounded square dotted with giant, golden meteors.

Self-taught San Francisco artist and gallery director Lisa Congdon created a completely new body of work for her Milwaukee debut, Life In WonderMountain (Paper Boat Boutique & Gallery, through Jan. 11). Congdon’s first-ever three-dimensional installation juxtaposes pieces of thrift store crochet with found sepia-toned portraits that the artist embellished with multi-colored neon swatches of paint. The old and new are blended into an eerily satisfying altar to WonderMountain’s fictional inbred populous.

Milwaukee's Own: Gallery Online

For each opening we create an interactive gallery online where you can view the entire show by clicking around on photographs of the gallery.  HERE is the link to our Gallery Online for our current show, Milwaukee's Own.  Below are some examples of the work from the show.  On view until January 3rd with gallery hours on Saturdays from 12:00 - 5:00 pm.

kathryn e martin

Harvey Opgenorth

Mary DiBiasio

Colin T Dickson

Milwaukee's Own: Shepherd Preview

This week's Shepherd Express has a preview of our show opening this Friday. You can see the original article HERE, or read an excerpt from the article below.

Site-Specific Art
By Peggy Sue Dunigan

Also opening this week is the Armoury Gallery's new exhibit, "Milwaukee's Own." It features four recent Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design graduates, with work constructed specifically for the gallery.

Nationally recognized artist Harvey Opgenorth paints optical illusions directly onto the walls, provoking dual visions of reality, while Colin Dickson fashions a muslin cave. In Dickson's first professional show since graduating in June, screen prints are combined with clusters of cotton to construct a large piece of art. kathryn e. martin, whose work is also on display at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center's "Flotant" exhibit, revisits her circles of Styrofoam cups to create spiral forms envisioning clouds. 2006 graduate Mary DiBiasio portrays hands and human figures through tracings and cutouts rendered in graphite wall hangings.

These eclectic installations "create final products having more potential to shift," says gallery owner Cassandra Smith. The opening reception takes place on Friday, Dec. 5, from 6 to 10 p.m.

kathryn e martin

Harvey Opgenorth

Mary DiBiasio

Colin Dickson

Milwaukee's Own: Press Release

Friday, December 5th 6:00 – 10:00 pm

Show runs December 5th - January 3rd

The Armoury’s next exhibition looks homeward, featuring four local artists – kathryn e. martin, Harvey Opgenorth, Mary DiBiasio and Colin T Dickson.

The Armoury Gallery is pleased to announce its 6th and most experimental exhibition to date: Milwaukee’s Own. Featuring four of Milwaukee’s most exciting young artists, this not-to-be-missed exhibition will fill the gallery space almost entirely with installation work, including a stalactite cave of muslin, Styrofoam remnants in cloud-like formations, and an optical game involving two walls, a ceiling and giant gold nuggets.

Milwaukee artists kathryn e. martin, Harvey Opgenorth, and Colin T Dickson will utilize the three week break between exhibitions to work in the gallery space, each creating site-specific pieces encompassing a majority of the exhibition space. Mary DiBiasio will present a new series of mixed media works to round out the exhibition. Each artist uses repetition of shape, form, and line in limited color palettes to examine our understanding, perception and relationship to objects and places, simultaneously redefining the interior spaces of the gallery.

kathryn e. martin, having just unveiled her most recent solo exhibition at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, shifts focus to a more deliberately confined space for this exhibition, forcing her work to adapt and rebel against the limitations imposed by the walls. martin will engulf a portion of the gallery in masses of Styrofoam ringlets, cut from their previous life as cups and given new meaning as delicate objects of desire. martin is part-time faculty at both UWM and MIAD. In 2001, she earned her BFA from MIAD in Sculpture with an Art History minor, following that up with both her MA and MFA from UWM in InterMedia Studies.

Harvey Opgenorth will also have a site specific installation, involving an optical wall painting and oversized gold nuggets, simultaneously challenging our relationship with and understanding of our environment. Best known for his “Museum Camoufluge” series that earned him national recognition, Opgenorth is inspired by everyday places and our perceptions of them, often using visual games and nostalgic objects to focus our attention on the often overlooked aspects of daily life. In 1999, Opgenorth received his BFA in Painting from MIAD with a minor in Sculpture.

Presenting a new series of graphite drawings is Mary DiBiasio. DiBiasio’s work presents the figure in contour. The ghost-like images exist as mere remnants of the human form, repeating, falling, running across the page, reminding us of our interconnectedness through the fragile nature of human life. Since graduating from MIAD in 2006 with her BFA in Printmaking, DiBiasio has shown consistently in the Milwaukee area, most recently with the Cedar Gallery on Fall Gallery Night, and at the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts.

Finally, recent MIAD graduate Colin Dickson will create muslin stalactites to fill a portion of the gallery space with a cave-like creation. He will be using the installation to contrast the formality of the space, while establishing a dialogue with human movement, interaction and reaction. Graduating from MIAD in the spring of this year with a degree in Sculpture, Dickson’s work takes on a grand scale, the artist undaunted by cost, time nor space instead forging ahead in pursuit of his vision. Dickson received the 2008 Fine Art Excellence Award for “3 1/2 miles to the center of somewhere else”, his interactive senior thesis installation that, according to the MIAD website, “invites viewers to get lost in the geometrics of mass and illuminated space”.