Mary Conner

These sculptures are the culmination of a year's work and a year of thoughts. The exhibit is a reflection of my view of life, which encompasses the natural cycle as well as the spiritual. The combination of materials and their use can be interpreted on a social level, the man-made elements versus the natural elements and their interaction.

"In my recent pieces the dress serves as a set format -- a vehicle for my 'paintings,' that is more personal than a conventional rectangular canvas, but one that is still basically a flat surface made of fabric and receptive to paint. With the use of an identifiable object (the dress) as a canvas, subject and form become one. Instead of a neutral field, the format itself is content-laden. A dress is shelter, decoration and second skin. It is a female uniform prescriptive of certain activities and prohibitive of others. As textile, sewn object and fashion, it constitutes historically female concerns -- the empty form paraphrasing anonymity. As a torso, it contains all of the guts, all of the vital organs, but lacks the capacity for thought (i.e., no brains) or action (i.e., no limbs).   On this foundation I build an image collaged from ancient myths, contemporary stereotypes and autobiographical experience, implementing natural materials (or culturalized imitations) and 'feminine' accessories such as jewelry, glitter, silverware, etc., frequently arranged in a pattern analogous to printed dress fabric. The materials are chosen for their tactile richness and their associational content (dirt, for example, connotes fertility, promiscuity, barrenness or humbleness), and the colors for their ambivalent cheapness and attractiveness.  

"It is my intent in these pieces to use the dress as a field upon which to create a dialogue -- a contrast of the bright colors and tactile surfaces with the implied violence, of the images of activity and birth with the images of emptiness and death."

Rick Randolph

"The mid-western, suburban landscape I grew up in has come forth in my sculptures. Glitter, red-hots, rhinestones and other materials covering them are examples of materials which have an immediate attractiveness and obscure anything that exists behind the surface. My objective is to use the superficial realm as a means to rediscover that which exists behind the surface."