Interval, a new space for the arts in Winston-Salem, opened in September with "Interleavings," featuring the work of three Triad-based artists. The inaugural exhibition closes this week.
Interval is run by co-directors, producer Margaret Norfleet Neff, and artist curator Paul Bright, who took WFDD’s David Ford on a gallery stroll.
You enter the red brick, 1920s-era industrial building turned gallery through the loading dock. Paul Bright greets me at the door, and we launch into the theme of "Interleavings," something that ties the three featured artists together: wood products, paper and trees. The first pieces that catch my eye are large canvases of life-sized, vine-covered tree trunks — almost like portraits of trees — by Mariam Aziza Stephan.
But Bright steers me toward his much smaller Stephan favorites.
"She often does these very small, abstracted landscapes that are more conceptual," says Bright. "So these are emerging, not so much from direct observation, although there are elements of that; they're more like psychological landscapes."
And then it was on to our next local artist, Terri Dowell-Dennis. Bright says her work deals with trees and nature, not through her imagination, but through her experiences hiking.
"Here we have actual chunks of nature put into these prints and mixed media works, and she's done it so seamlessly that you don't realize at first that this kind of central element is actual thin tree bark that she's incorporated," he says. "So there's a literal incorporation of nature into these things, as well as depictive elements and abstracted elements."
To the untrained eye, the next exhibit looks at first glance like a pile of discarded books, paper and paper airplanes.
"Paul Travis Phillips, another Winston-Salem artist who's worked here for a long time, one of the elements in what is essentially an installation in about a third of the space started out in a sort of Donald Judd-like fashion with these old encyclopedias that he had ripped the covers off, and it's set in this array," says Bright. "But they were meant to be taken apart and disturbed, and part of the process of the work was to invite people to make paper airplanes of this ancient information and to send it off into the cloud."
Bright says it’s been a very popular feature of the show, and it’s backed up by the evidence: dozens of paper airplane remnants strewn about the floor. Interval is just the latest chapter in the Marshall Street project in Winston-Salem, an effort to revitalize the area with culinary and creative opportunities. The exhibition is "Interleavings," and it closes on Sunday, November 9.