New Exhibition | Lifting the Veil by Bryce Hammond April 27 2015

In the featured gallery:
Bryce Hammond: Lifting the Veil

On view: May 2 - 30, 2015
Opening reception: Saturday, May 2, 4-7pm
Artists Talk: Friday, May 8, 11am

New Smyrna Beach, FL — In the featured gallery, painter Bryce Hammond presents Lifting the Veil, on view May 2 - 30, 2015 with an opening reception held on Saturday, May 2, 4-7pm.  

Lifting the Veil is a collection of mixed media paintings by New Smyrna Beach artist Bryce Hammond. This exhibition presents the latest installment of the artist’s experiments with new concepts, materials, techniques. The works included in this exhibition utilize a variety of painting techniques that focus on shape, line, and color to create intriguing spatial compositions. The artist uses discarded wood, latex paint, and construction chalk from a carpenter’s plumb line as raw materials for his paintings. Viewers will encounter paintings of oddly placed mobile homes. Some of these structures are stacked like favelas, some are unmoored from their foundations, and some are curiously placed inside cathedrals to form a pseudo-city.

Throughout his career as an artist, Bryce Hammond has drawn creative inspiration from the architecture of his surroundings. In the past, urban environments and gritty abandoned interior spaces were the subjects of his multiple point perspective paintings. In Lifting the Veil, the artist continues his interest in architectural structures, but he has turned his attention to structures closer to home—Central Florida.

Hammond’s version of Florida does not present the "sunshine paradise” of popular imagination. Instead, his Florida is populated by the remnants of quirky roadside attractions, dilapidated motels, and tin-can trailer parks. Hammond’s conceptual interest in abject structures in particular mobile homes emerges from an ongoing project to promote public awareness of the disadvantaged communities that reside alongside tourist destinations. The artist seeks to unveil the illusions and contradictions that sustain these tourist destinations.  

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Bryce Hammond received his BA in Art History from Furman University in 1992, and his MFA in Emerging Media from University of Central Florida in 2013. He has had solo exhibitions around the US including New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta among many others. His paintings are held in major corporate and private collections throughout the United States. Mr. Hammond has received the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation Fellowship, Florida Fellowship for the Arts, the Gulnar Bosch travel grant, and Fiscal Sponsorship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

In the alt_space: Gesamtkunstwerk: A Synthesis of Arts by Jacksonville artist Liz Gibson will be on view May 2 - June 13, 2015 with a reception to meet the artist on Saturday, June 8, 4-7pm. The exhibition is a mixed media installation with a thematic focus on deformity, adversity, and empowerment. The exhibitions, receptions, and Artists Talk are free and open to the public.