"The Barnstormers"
2004-07-17 until 2004-09-26
Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art
Winston-Salem, NC, USA United States of America

Winston-Salem, NC— The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art will present Painted Saws: Jacob Kass, an exhibition from the The Barnstormers are a unique, ever-changing collective of artists, designers, and friends, headed by former North Carolinian David Ellis, who attended the North Carolina School of the Arts' high school program before moving to Brooklyn in 1989. Since 1999, Ellis, along with partner Michael Houston, has led a group with as many as 30 people (from as far away as Japan), to create large-scale, wild-style, post-graffiti collective murals on a series of old barns, tractor-trailers, shacks, and farm equipment in Cameron, North Carolina, just east of Raleigh.

According to Ellis, their journeys south have had a major impact on their work as they continue to interpret and communicate the visual, cultural, and spiritual awakenings from their projects here. The group carefully documents their activity by producing time-lapse films of their painting performances, where one artist is observed speedily covering an enormous floored canvas, followed by the next artist, and the next. Before our eyes, graphically arresting painted strokes become altered or even obliterated in the group process.

For their SECCA debut and their first major museum exhibition, the group will present an all-out array of painting, sculpture, music, and invention-unlike anything ever exhibited in the museum's galleries. Front and center will be a complete old tobacco barn, painstakingly dismantled, transported in parts, and rebuilt in the museum. The barn will receive an evolving, painted, collective mural over the course of the show as members of The Barnstormers visit the area. After the exhibition closes, the barn will be relocated to its original site with the painting intact. In addition, SECCA will be exhibiting several billboard-sized works depicting painted tractor-trailers, barns, and other objects. Look for several of their films that chronicle their unique group painting operation and check out an Ellis invention: gourd speaker cabinets.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of North Carolina

Other Important Exhibitions in United States