Jack McWhorter “Crossing the Horizon” Barbara Campbell Thomas “Thisness”

The Painting Center

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The Painting Center presents Crossing the Horizon, an exhibition of new paintings by Jack McWhorter in the Main Gallery. McWhorter is searching within painting for a connection between something that hovers just below the world of visible matter and systems of recognition and information in our material world. These are hybrid spaces formed between human systems of organization and analysis and natural systems of growth and failure. Maps and charts are mixed together with crystalline structures and cell formations. The paintings are developed through layering these various languages one upon the other. The record of the intersections and negotiations of each color, mark, and layer of paint sets up moments of conflict in the resulting image. McWhorter’s work brings a strong sense of touch and play into this predicament of describing a world of space and form full of change, conflict, and fleeting evidence.

Jack McWhorter lives and works in Akron, OH. He is currently Professor of Art, School of Art, Kent State University at Stark. The artist has participated in exhibitions at Sint Luca School of Art & Design, Brussels, Belgium, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, China, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Painting Center, New York, NY, Jeffrey Leader Gallery, New York, NY, WAH Center, Brooklyn, NY, University of Arizona, Tempe, AZ, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI., among others.

The Painting Center is pleased to present Thisness, a solo exhibition of paintings by Barbara Campbell Thomas in the Project Room. Barbara Campbell Thomas’s paintings are equal parts paint, collage, and fabric piecing set within the painting ground. Thisness, in Barbara Campbell Thomas’s studio, is the coupling of painting with quilting, a fusion rooted in the artist’s simultaneous love for painting and her dissatisfaction with the narrow definition of abstract painting canonized in western art history. But Campbell Thomas’s attentive working of paint, fabric and collage is not an end in itself; rather materiality is a conduit into the unfolding co-exploration of her own bodily thisness. Through painting she asks: What is it to make a painting as a body? What is it for a body to breath and also to paint? When does a body end and a painting begin? Such questions fan out across the surface of her paintings through rhythmic shifts of wobbly line and through repetition of simple shapes made at ever-larger scales.
Barbara Campbell Thomas’s paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States, in North Carolina’s Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta and the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI.She received her BFA from Penn State, her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and she attended Yale Norfolk and Skowhegan.She recently received a 2018- 2019 North Carolina Artists Fellowship.Upcoming exhibitions are planned for the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston- Salem, NC.Barbara Campbell Thomas is an Associate Professor of Art at UNC Greensboro.She lives and works in Climax, NC.