Joyce Blunk: Collections and Scars

Like the rest of my Wordfest fellows, I'm covered up with final preparations for the festival. I wanted to take just a minute, though, to note an exhibit of some recent work by painter/sculptor Joyce Blunk. It's only up a few more days, through this Friday, but it's worth a special trip to the Ramsey Library at UNCA to see the small show (only sixteen pieces in all) that's hung there. It includes both some of her fabulous and distinctive constructions, her "boxes", and some new, very powerful paintings, including four luminous Scar paintings. Among the constructions, it even includes one of my old favorites, Deep Autumn Asheville, a photo of which served as one of the limenal images in NatureS.

In her artist's statement, Joyce discusses what she sees as the emotional resonances of the constructions, and articulates her concern that her work do what fully actualized art always does, embody and engender transformation:

Some of the boxes show my interest in introducing an element of deep space by incorporating the illusion of distant landscapes beyond a window. A contrast is created between the romantic beauty of the landscape and the starker reality of the interior. Most of these pieces show lush mountains at the changing of seasons and at a time of day when the light is moody and transitional. The predominant feeling for me is nostalgia, yearning, and great melancholy. In most of the boxes and mixed media paintings, ordinary items are transformed by being presented in a formal and ceremonious way that alters the viewer’s way of seeing.

May it be so.

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The image presents one of the new constructions, "Formal Collection".