About

Opening Reception: Friday, June 6, 2025, from 6 to 9 pm
The opening reception on June 6 invites all to engage with the art and meet the artists in an inspiring atmosphere. Additionally, the Sunday Artist Talk & Paper Pulping Workshop on June 22 offers a hands-on opportunity to learn about the art of paper pulping and “art composting” directly from Susan Harrison.

We look forward to welcoming you to this colorful celebration of contemporary art.

JD Schall’s Show STATEMENT

“The two great tediums that encircle me - the tedium of being able to live only in the Real, and the tedium of being able to imagine only the Possible.”  — Fernando Pessoa

I have been jealous and inspired by cultures that contain images and myths; whose stories can be drawn upon to explore the natural or social world around us. As an artist, I am always looking for symbolism and ways to create stories. I’ve been attracted to boats as a metaphor, whether they are changing direction, stalled, or moving forward — every voyage creates its own story.

 Thus, I have created a series with figures traveling on boats, be they animals or vessels, that are suspend in a moment of time, a moment in a story.  And, embracing anthropomorphism, I hope to capture a moment of emotion and elements of the human experience. The reliquaries, instead of being filled with the bones of saints, contain mirrors reflecting back on the viewer.  And, whether looking through a mirror or at two rabbits on a tortoise, it is up to the viewer to reflect on how they got there and where are they going.  I hope you enjoy the pieces as much as I enjoyed making them. 

                                                                                          J-D Schall

 

BIOGRAPHY
J-D Schall received his Bachelor of Arts in English literature, with minors in Religious Studies and Anthropology, in 1994 from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. During his last semester, he took a pottery class to satisfy an art credit. Schall continued to take classes and work as a pottery studio technician at the university until moving to Baton Rouge in 1997. In Louisiana, Schall co-founded a 15-member artists’ cooperative, Studio 801. He also became the head potter for Burts Cason Inc., a pottery design firm specializing in interior design.

 When Schall moved to Louisville in 2002, he created Schall Studio & Design, which features wheel-thrown ceramic lamps, dinnerware, and pieces for the garden. His lamps have been featured in Elle Decor, Domino, Home, Southern Accents and Oprah magazine.

With the covid pandemic shuttering everyone in place, and with no shows, Schall changed his direction and began combining his love of large ceramic shapes and sculpting. Follow him on instagram @schallstudio or Facebook at JD Schall.

Harrison on The Absurdity of making sense

Susan Harrison created this collection of automatic drawings and “manipulated matter” over three years.  These spontaneous works, my version of Dada (Kurt Schwitter’s Merz), are the result of designing within the constraints of using discarded and limited materials, such as scraps of decorative paper, unwanted composite board, corrugated packaging, cotton rags, encaustic wax, et al. 

I aspire to transform refuse into objects that I value and that represent my joy of discovery and the rich, layered nature of things. My great need is to process material waste into valuable form and find a copacetic arrangement that makes sense using coloring, patterning, layering, structuring, and balancing to alter what is there. It is my version of art alchemy. I glean, sort, and play with cast offs, and degraded materials, attempting to resurrect their value, their faded glory, offering them up, to live one more life on my studio walls.

Imagery is arbitrary to me, a by-product of my mark-making activities, and is secondary to my focus on the mystery, ordering and transforming of daily energy, random marks, and matter. I seek out infrastructure and curious pathways within haphazardly placed elements. Many of the works featuring overlays of India Ink drips represent my improvisational attempts to use my sense of composition to infuse chaos and disorder with structure and balance, as well as to elicit a sense of spirit and wonder.

In turn, the process of making my handmade paper with a Little Critter Hollander beater serves as an act of celebrating the circles of life, growth, and decay. I affirm Being by decomposing and composting my life’s organic matter (cotton sheets, shirts, and so on) into pulp that then gets to live again as new paper tablets -- full of possibility.

Previously I have scanned many of my patterned works into Adobe Photoshop to manipulate to create more complex and polished images printed out on metal.

With these new works, it is the physical effort and hands-on struggle in “real time and space” that becomes visible, that steadies and steels me.

Immersing myself in this mix of media is my way of offering a kind of song to my lurking sense of the absurd. Suspended between chaos and order, art making is an exercise in freedom, in which the injunction to “stop making sense” is balanced by a desire for coherence.  While in the act of composing, I often think of Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus.” And I assert that Sisyphus was secretly happy in the endless process of rolling a boulder up a hill, no matter it was destined to roll back down. That implicit sense of hope is where my art begins. 

 Enjoy the products of my art composting.

Susan Harrison

June 2025