Exhibit Dates:  June 1, 2016 - June 25, 2016
Artist Reception:  Thursday June 16, 5 - 7 p.m.

About The Exhibit

The exhibition includes nine artists who at some point in their artistic careers recognized and appreciated that one of the most challenging and rewarding ways an artist can participate in society is to play the role of guide and mentor to younger artists. These nine artists share enthusiasm for the unexpected and expressive ways that art can pose questions, convey ideas, challenge conventions, and potentially excite and redefine the traditions in which we view and engage in the world around us. They believe in art as a tool for intellectual questioning, conceptualization of ideas, and as a process for communicating personal expression. This critical and creative thinking is revealed both in their dedicated studio practices and their pedagogy.

Three to the Third Power refers to three artists from three higher education institutions responding to three words (3x3x3). Each of the invited artists provided three individual words of their choosing which were then placed into a “hat.” To maintain the spirit of play, the artists met in the afternoon on March 3, the third day of the third month, and drew three words at 3:33 p.m. The three words drawn: Whole Phantasmagoria Duality.

About The Artist

TMCC:

Dean Burton: Biography: Dean Burton is a Professor of Art / Photography at Truckee Meadows Community College. He teaches courses that include studio lighting and darkroom processes and is currently engaged in a sabbatical project to create a photography degree that will become available in 2017. Burton is well known for the abstract digital photographs from his Linear series and The Camera’s Demise. His new work is a return to his photographic roots that uses large format view cameras and analog methods. Specifically, a modern version of William Henry Fox Talbot’s Calotype process using paper instead of film to capture the image. Response to theme: The photographic medium is dualistic by nature. It involves many states such as positive/negative and black & white that are symmetrically opposed. Photographic images are flat, yet they have the illusion of depth. My work for the exhibition involves photographing stainless steel darkroom trays in states of opposition such as clean/dirty. I am creating a grid of 9 images with enough variation that the appearance of randomness emerges. My process is a sort of metaphotography. I am photographing things used to make photographs. I see photography as a medium that occupies a superposition of dead and alive. The Camera’s Demise is an exploration of that state.

J Damron: An artist/educator committed to progressive learning methodologies, J. Damron’s studio is just on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. His art objects tend to occupy a ground between ritual and play, seemingly coming from some other place, not just a place of art. Are they cultural objects more than art objects? Do they carry the residue of an apparent function? The movement between art objects and photography often results in photographic apparatus. Photographs soothe his desire for poetic moments in place.

The design-build part of Jay’s studio practice also produces custom furniture pieces, commissioned projects and limited edition small batch objects made predominantly with wood that is reclaimed with an emphasis on integrating practical value with understated design principles that don’t hold to passing trends.

He has been teaching in higher education for sixteen years, and he currently teaches at Truckee Meadows Community College and Feather River College. Recently, for four years, he was a lead instructor and curriculum writer for Galileo Learning, the Bay Area’s innovative experiential education organization.

He completed his MFA in the New Genres Dept. at the San Francisco Art Institute. dirtfloorstudio@gmail.com

Candace Garlock: Candace Nicol Garlock is an artist, educator and galleries curator at Truckee Meadows Community College, Reno, Nevada. She also sits on the board at Doral Academy of Northern Nevada and Sparks Heritage Museum and Cultural Center. Candace’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and occupies such prestigious permanent collections as the Boise Art Museum, Corcoran College of Art and Design, Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper at Rutgers University, Southern Graphics Council Archives, The Kinsey Institute, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and Painting and Sculpture Museum Association, Istanbul, Turkey. She has been awarded the distinguished Nevada Arts Council Artist Fellowship in 2009 and recently been awarded an honorable mention in Printmaking Today, a review of fine art printmaking at the Dedalo Center for Contemporary Art, and the Castle of Castiglione Museum, Abruzzo, Italy. Nicol’s work can also be seen in 100 Artists of the Male Figure by E.Gibbons.

A Native Nevadan, Candace uses the male figure as a means of formulating a response to her experiences in Nevada’s often contradictory landscapes of desire. Her work has been described as a fusion between printmaking, painting, and digital photography. As a result, Candace’s multilayered compositions posit engaging questions to viewers regarding relationships, social identities, and societal issues surrounding the female gaze. www.candacenicol.com

Sierra Nevada College:

Russell Dudley: Born in Gold Beach, Oregon in 1961, Russell Dudley earned his M.F.A. in photography at the University of Arizona in 1989.

Having lived most of his life in the western United States, Dudley and his art are deeply informed by mountains, desert, climbing, and being alone both in the land and in a more existential way. Dudley has said his images provide “the kind of sense you make when you have stayed too long alone.” At once provocative and prosaically slow, Dudley’s work takes various forms: photography, installation, sculpture, and video.

Dudley’s most recent project is the designing and directing of the low residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program at Sierra Nevada College. Through this program, Dudley has brought diverse visiting artists and students from throughout North America to SNC, where he has been a Professor of Art for the last 20 years.

Mary Kenny: Mary Kenny is an artist/educator creating mixed media works on paper with a studio practice in Truckee, California. She creates complex, intricately layered drawings and collages. Her work dances around autobiographical memories and hearsay. She is a graduate of Kent State University (MFA, printmaking) and Baldwin Wallace University (BA, Studio Art).

Sheri Leigh O’Connor: Sheri Leigh was born in Memphis, TN in 1962. She earned a B.F.A. in ceramics from the University of Colorado, Boulder where she studied with Betty Woodman, and an M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University studying with Paul Soldner. She has taught ceramics since 1988, at Aims Community College in Greeley, Colorado, and in 1997, began teaching at Sierra Nevada College, at Lake Tahoe. Currently she chairs the Fine Arts Department at SNC Tahoe, and directs the Summer Visiting Artist Workshops. Her work has been featured in Ceramics Monthly, Clay Times, Black Pearl and Other Saturated Metallic Glazes, by John Conrad, and Ceramic Sculpture: Inspiring Techniques, American Ceramics Society. Her work has been included in local and national exhibitions. She created “A New Decade of Clay: 2010”, a national ceramics exhibition juried by Richard Shaw, and curated “The Soldner Society” exhibition at NCECA, the national ceramics conference, in Tampa, FL. For the past few years, Sheri Leigh has been organizing travel courses and public travel workshops to Japan. sherileighceramics.com

University of Nevada, Reno:

Megan Berner: Megan Berner is a visual artist living and working in Reno, Nevada. She graduated with her MFA in Intermedia from the University of Iowa. Megan is greatly influenced by the landscape of her native Nevada home as well as the vast prairies of the Midwest, mapping and exploration, and countless hours of daydreaming.

Jeff Erickson: Jeff Erickson earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture and printmaking from Southern Oregon University (98’) and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Nevada, Reno (09’).  Jeff is currently working as the Assistant Chair of the Department of Art and Assistant Director of the John Ben Snow Sculpture Center at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Jeff Erickson is a working sculptor with interests spanning from object creation to vast land art installations. His work has been exhibited in various galleries in the West and Pacific Northwest including the creation of a permanent public sculpture for the City of Reno.  Erickson’s professional practice has recently included collaboration and installation of large-scale and site specific sculpture, including Transamerica by Ball-Nogues Studio, Mushroom | Clouds with sculptor Chris Drury and Sierra Nevada: An Adaptation with Helen and Newton Harrison.

Tamara Scronce: Tamara Scronce’s major areas of interest are sculpture, installation art, and video. Catherine Angel, fine arts photographer, professor, and curator writes, “Tamara’s studio endeavors produce innovative, beautifully crafted objects imbued with vulnerability and sensitivity. Her sculpture and installation work, although always beautiful, cannot be dismissed as merely nice to look at – her work is equally intelligent and challenging both in concept and content.”

Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, Tamara attended graduate school at the University of Illinois, Chicago and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She completed her Master of Fine Arts degree at UNLV in 1997 and moved home to join the faculty at the University of Nevada, Reno in 2000.

Tamara earned tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor of Art in 2006-07, and has been honored with two College of Liberal Arts teaching excellence awards, one in 2007 and again in 2016. Tamara directs the Master of Fine Arts graduate program at the University of Nevada, Reno and was awarded the University’s Outstanding Graduate Advisor award this year. She teaches all levels of sculpture in addition to MFA and BFA studio and critique practice courses.

Tamara has exhibited her artwork in solo, group, and juried exhibitions, and participated in a number of collaborative projects. She has been honored with awards in juried exhibitions and has received several artists’ grants in support of her work, including the distinguished Nevada Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award, and the Sierra Arts Foundation Endowment Grant. Tamara was awarded two substantial University of Nevada, Reno faculty research/creative activity grants in support of her work in video and sculpture installation.