Opening reception with the artists: April 2, 6 – 8 pm
Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present Nature Gathered, an exhibition featuring works by Texas based artists Sherry Owens and Suzi Davidoff. Owens and Davidoff explore and share an emotional connection to the flora of the South by using natural elements as their media.
Sherry Owens is known for her meticulous crepe myrtle sculptures, as well as large outdoor works in bronze and steel. Informed by observations in nature, she constructs nest-like objects using twigs and branches to create both dense, chaotic forms and open drawings in space. Her dynamic works represent the beauty and fragility of the natural world while concurrently investigating spiritual themes.
Inspired by her close connection to nature, and by what she calls “the spirit of investigation and observation of the natural world,” Suzi Davidoff creates mixed-media drawings and paintings, prints and installations that consider intricate patterns in nature and the overlaying systems used to observe, map and define organic landscapes. Her work begins with a walk, most often through the West Texas desert, where she lives. Along the way, she picks up bits of moss and lichen, handfuls of dirt, and other natural materials, which she brings back to her studio and rubs into the paper serving as the ground for her compositions, connecting nature itself to her interpretations of it.
Owens, a native Texan, resides in Dallas. She received her BFA from Southern Methodist University in 1972. She has exhibited nationally throughout Texas and the southwest and internationally in Peru, Greece, Turkey and India. Her work is in numerous corporate and public collections including JW Marriot, American Airlines, Love Field Airport (Dallas), and Neiman Marcus.
Suzi Davidoff is based in the Chihuahuan desert of West Texas. She attended the University of Texas at El Paso for her BFA and New Mexico State University for her MA and MFA. Davidoff’s work is the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Art in Embassies, Monterrey, MX; and the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso. She has been the recipient of the Mid-America NEW Fellowship and a Ford Foundation/ Pollack-Siquieros Binational Art Award.