AVA shines a spotlight on four talented emerging artists
Establishing an arts festival that becomes an integral part of a community for almost two decades is no easy endeavor, but it’s exactly what AVA, the Association for Visual Arts, has done with their 4 Bridges Arts Festival, which kicks off its 19th year this weekend.
4 Bridges Arts Festival will be open to the public on Saturday and Sunday, April 13–14, from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. at the First Tennessee Pavilion. The festival began as a way to showcase the passion of local artists, but it’s grown to include submissions from across the country. This year’s event will include work from 150 talented artists.
“[4 Bridges] has just been a consistent part of Chattanooga’s creative landscape for 19 years, and with each year it’s really grown,” said Phyllis Mescon, Director of 4 Bridges. “It started out as a smaller, community type of event, but now it’s part of the national community of art festivals.”
Admission to 4 Bridges only costs $5 and gives attendees the opportunity to view and purchase local original artwork, with some pieces under $100. AVA is also hosting a preview party Friday, April 12, which is a ticketed event and social gathering with access to some preferred pricing on artwork.
As part of AVA’s Emerging Artists program, which helps to spotlight local artists and provides exhibition space at 4 Bridges, there will be four incredibly passionate Chattanooga-area artists displaying and selling their artwork.
This year’s festival is also going to include live music with help from Friends of the Festival. There will be food trucks and food vendors as well. Mescon explained that the festival is a great opportunity to hang out downtown and support local artists, which is a tradition AVA hopes to carry right into 2020.
Colin Campbell
For poster artist Colin Campbell, the goal is to bring a new idea to something that may seem past recollection. He focuses on reclaiming aspects of different artwork and molding them into one collage-like creation to make something new and unique.
“They’re all based on old, found, vintage photography or posters, advertisements. So it’s basically that I try to take stuff that is old and forgotten and kind of remix it and run it through my own lens,” Campbell explained when discussing his posters. “I take something small and unimportant that I’ve just found in a random context and then ironically make it important by making it really large and neon. There are a lot of collage elements in there, too.”
Campbell teaches art at Cleveland High School and has been teaching art at the high school level for around seven years. Although he’s spent the last two to three years making immense progress on his posters, he’s never really shown his artwork before; however, his passion for art and teaching has allowed him to help his students show their artwork instead.
“I came from [teaching] elementary school, so coming from teaching that level to, you know, juniors and seniors in high school, I knew I was really going to have to kick it up some, so I started really practicing and making my own stuff,” Campbell said. “They’re smart and creative in their own ways; they bring their own ideas and colors. And so it’s a cool place to kind of workshop ideas, especially with juniors and seniors who really like art.”
Campbell’s passion for his students and their own artwork has been one of his main motivating factors in pursuing his interest in art further. He’s spent most of his life drawing, but it wasn’t until he became a teacher that he really started to delve further into his art.
“My motivator has been to really push myself in stuff that I make out there because it’s kind of the same stuff I tell my students. Practice what I preach, kind of. And allow them to get outside their comfort zones,” Campbell said.
In regards to his own artwork, Campbell said he really hopes that everyone sees each piece a little differently and that they bring their own lens to it. He uses pretty recognizable imagery, so everyone can find something they can relate to in each poster he creates. Campbell also portrays the idea of fake nostalgia through posters, music, and advertisements. He focuses on fonts and graphic design, too.
Thanks to the Emerging Artist program with AVA, Campbell said the opportunity to show for the first time has motivated him to create even more pieces, and the experience has been awesome. Campbell will have seven to eight large posters, and several smaller ones as well, on display at 4 Bridges this weekend. As for the future, Campbell is going to keep experimenting with his posters and just see where his art takes him.
Jennifer Kring
Inspiration is something that can often be found in the most unlikely of places, such as in an ancient library of Reader’s Digest magazines, which is exactly what sparked the unique art processes of Jennifer Kring.
Kring is an altered book artist. Through carving and drawing, she crafts intricate small scenes into old books that are no longer serving a purpose. Her pieces are incredibly detailed, and because she literally hollows her designs into the pages, they are also three-dimensional. When she was left with a library of books no one wanted, she was finally able to find the art form she calls “her jam”.
“[My grandmother] had a whole bunch of those Reader’s Digests, and she left them to me, and they all have these really cool, like 1970’s wallpaper-looking covers, you know. And I was like, these are awesome, but I don’t want to read these,” said Kring. “I sold a pile of them at McKay’s, and I was like, nobody else wants to read these either, so I don’t know. I thought, maybe I’ll just put drawings in them. Before I know it, I’m making one right after the other.”
Sometimes people will ask Kring why it seems like she’s destroying books, but her work is quite the contrary. She’s always loved reading and books, and her work is more of a way to honor them, especially since many of the books she uses have already been discarded or fallen into disrepair. She also mentioned how it’s interesting we’re living in a time where libraries are getting rid of their books; it almost seems as if we aren’t valuing knowledge as much as we did in the past.
Kring has always had an interest in art; she’s spent most of her life drawing, and she’s also dabbled with painting and acoustics. However, it wasn’t until about three years ago that Kring was really able to discover her passion. She was a teacher for seven years, and while she loved teaching, there weren’t lot of opportunities to delve further into her art. After deciding to take a break and to take some time for herself, she finally discovered her calling, which is altered books.
“All I’m doing is living and breathing studio. Finishing stuff. I keep trying to make stuff, and I’m like, you can’t keep making stuff. You have to finish these,” explained Kring. “I think it’s kind of like, you just have a momentum, and you can’t force that, so when it happens, you just have to sit down, shut up, and go with it.”
Kring has shown her artwork around the southeast in the past, but she hasn’t had a lot of opportunities to do so while she was still teaching. It was a friend who encouraged her to get involved with AVA, and once she did, it didn’t take long for her to be presented with the opportunity to submit her pieces to be shown at 4 Bridges. Kring said she’s very grateful and excited to be participating in this year’s arts festival.
“I just want to put my art more places. I know this sounds like the quintessential artist thing, but I just want to make more stuff,” Kring said. “I could kind of care less where they end up; I know that sounds bad, but I just want to be able to make more work. As long as I can keep working, I’m a happy girl. It’s all about process for sure.”
Brooke Craig
Life has many trials and tribulations; it’s what makes life, well, life. An unfortunate reality is just how difficult the hard times can actually be. However, it’s often the strongest people who embrace the hard times and use them as a platform for change or creation, which is exactly what photographer and artist Brooke Craig is doing.
Craig’s artwork, which is quite varied, focuses on the idea of a diseased body, and, in turn, the idea of mortality. Some of her more prominent pieces include her medicinal self-portraits, which help to shed light on disease and medication. Her work also focuses on the idea of the feminine body and the way in which the body functions; some of her pieces have incorporated bodily fluids as a medium.
“So I’m calling them medicinal self-portraits because what I’m doing is, I’m taking film, and then I’m processing it with the medications I take, or I paint the medications onto the emulsion side of the film. So the different chemicals, the different pH’s of the chemicals, create a different color scheme. Through that, I’m trying to make a piece of film a body, to function as my own body,” explained Craig when discussing her self-portraits.
Craig was diagnosed with transverse myelitis, a rare neuroimmune disorder similar to multiple sclerosis, when she was only 11 years old. Due to the debilitating nature of her disease, Craig spent a lot of time at an inpatient hospital in Atlanta, where she was introduced to art therapy as a way to sort of express herself.
“That [therapy] kind of taught me that art can be a way of coping, but later in life, I kind of push away from that idea. I want my work to be thought of more as a healing process than coping,” Craig said.
She went on to continue pursuing her artwork, graduating from UTC with a BFA in photography and media arts in 2016. When she first began getting serious with art, Craig said she focused more on eating disorders and body image because it was something she experienced secondhand, and thus, she felt like it was something she needed to focus her art on.
“But I got to a point where I kind of realized I was making art for other people. I don’t think you can create art about what you don’t know, so I realized I needed to start making pieces about myself and my experiences,” Craig explained. “And so, it kind of just became an experiment at first, and then it grew into a practice that revolves around this idea of a diseased body and how that leads to other people questioning their own mortality.”
Since 2014, Craig has been focusing on the medicinal self-portraits as a way illustrate her diseased body. Craig is still focusing on femininity in her pieces, and she’s starting to experiment with a sort of blueprint design in her work as well.
Craig said she’s really excited to share her artwork at 4 Bridges; she wants to work on building some of the connections with the art community she lost after her time at UTC. For the future, Craig would love it if her art didn’t have to be about disease, but right now, she said, it still does.
“My art is not about bringing awareness of things, but as an artist, you have this ability to actually create change that a lot of people want but don’t necessarily do,” Craig said. “So I hope people keep making wonderful things and art keeps taking this interesting turn.”
Hollie Berry
When many people think of art, they likely think of painting, drawing, sculptures, and mediams of that nature. However, there are a lot of non-traditional art processes that aren’t as widely known, and local torch artist Hollie Berry illustrates the beautiful artwork that can be created with something as seemingly simple as flame.
“I call these torch paintings, and they’re burned into plywood using mostly propane torches. I’m the only person I know of doing this specifically; it’s kind of an offshoot of pyrography. I started doing this maybe three years ago, off and on,” explained Berry. “I’ve been working on perfecting my technique and figuring out tools I can use to get more detail using this method. I’ve gotten just about as detailed as it’s gonna get, I’m pretty sure.”
Born and raised near Houston, Berry received her BFA in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin. She and her husband moved to Chattanooga about seven years ago; she said the mountains were what drew them here, but they’ve since been able to discover how great the city is, too.
All of Berry’s torch paintings have a photo reference, which she studies every intricate detail of before beginning with flame because there’s no erasing.
Berry works fulltime at her studio at the Chattanooga WorkSpace, and she has also partnered with the Chattanooga Zoo to bring awareness to the animals through art, with both the “Artists in the Wild” program and her live torch demonstrations at the “Spirits in the Wild” program.
Over the past three years, Berry said she’s completed at least 50 torch paintings. Some of her other focuses include portraits, horses, fire dancers, pets, and more. Berry is also an oil painter and equestrian artist; she has a vast library of intricate oil paintings. She’s currently working on a series inspired by Cavalia, an exhilarating Cirque du Soleil-on-horseback type of performance.
“I usually work large, but I’ve been working smaller lately just for the festival because, with my typical work, I could fit maybe five pieces in a 10x10 booth,” said Berry. “I’m a traditional oil painter in addition to torch painting, so I usually alternate between the two. I like being able to alternate because it’s a very different way of working, and sometimes I get tired of only one color [with the torch paintings], so it’s nice to be able to do something else.”
In regards to 4 Bridges, Berry said she’s focusing on smaller pieces; she’s bringing at least 30, with price points under $300, so she can have an adequate inventory. Berry is quite familiar with AVA; she got involved with the gallery shortly after moving to Chattanooga, but she’s excited to be showing as an emerging artist at the festival.
For the future, Berry is going to keep fueling her passion for art, with the goal of earning a real livable wage. She welcomes both commissions and collaboration; she makes commissioned pieces on a regular basis, and she can also be hired for an hourly rate.
“Being an artist is just owning a small business, and the product you’re selling as a small business is the artwork, but it’s very laborious and time-consuming to create that artwork, and that doesn’t leave you a lot of time left for the business side of things, or vice versa,” explained Berry “It can eat up all your time, and then you don’t have time left to make anything. I’m anxiously awaiting the day when my income justifies the hiring of an assistant, because I definitely have enough work for an assistant to do.”