The art world has long mucked about in biographical matter to get to the nub of the art, as if it were an elusive, illuminating Holy Grail revealing a work’s deepest meaning.

But in the work of Beverly McIver, they can dispense with such pursuits. Her work spares you that sort of “Where’s Waldo” fact ferreting. It’s all right there on the canvas.

Whether lavishing saturated, layered brush strokes or tracing tentative, spare black lines, the Greensboro, N.C. native (who now lives in Canada) has long laid her own life bare in the name of her art. From poignant family dynamics to the exploration of racial identity, McIver’s work has centered on her own likeness to mine the depth and range of human emotion, from joy to despair, from frustration to serenity.

Up now at the Gibbes Museum of Art, a survey exhibition of McIver’s work, which runs through Aug. 6, reveals all the deeply felt candor of a decades-long practice. To borrow a phrase from the show’s title, “Beverly McIver: Full Circle,” the artist indeed comes full circle, channeling her personal experiences — and very person for that matter.

Organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the exhibition was curated by Kim Boganey, arts and culture manager at Museum of History and Art, Ontario, Canada, and was first shown at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Much about McIver is there for the viewing on the third-floor walls of the Gibbes Galleries 8 and 9. But for more context still, there is “Raising Renee,” the 2011 HBO documentary that chronicles the artist’s journey with her developmentally and intellectually disabled sister Renee. It also examines her upbringing in racially charged Greensboro, as one of three girls raised by a single mother.

While not required viewing for the show, the film does shed light on some of the paradoxes at play in McIver’s richly and often vibrantly dipped paintbrush. Among them is how the artist took great pains to create portraits of her sister, “My Pretty Red Outfit, 1994,” only to then smear her sister’s features into a lashing blur. She then does the same to her own in other works.

In “Loving in Black and White #5, 1999,” she rests her head on the lap of her white lover, her tranquil face covered in black clown paint, which many have identified for its unsettling association with minstrelsy, a choice that in the documentary the artist stands by, considering it part of the complexity of her identity.

In “Invisible Me, 1999,” the artist/subject dances with this partner, her smile all that remains in tact in the rubbed-through, painted-and-painted-upon face. Above them on a shelf is a tilted slice of watermelon.

As a high school student from an impoverish part of town, the artist was bussed from a housing project to a better-resourced school elsewhere in town, where she found solace in a clown class on offer. The black clown makeup is a through line of her self-portraiture, seen in works like “Clown Portrait, 2018.”

The “Dear God” series goes so far as to take the form of personal journal entries that relay the events of the day, like the election of President Barack Obama, accompanied by self-portraits. As the events of her family life unfold, her art reflects them: her mother’s death, her once-estranged father’s birthday, her own struggles with depression and collaborations with movement artist Eiko Otake.

It might also lead you, as it did me, to mull how a work can be at once laden with thick, rich oil paint, which dissipates in a blink into scant black lines forming figures on the white canvas beneath, as if forever reminding us that this is but paint on a surface, and this imagined world is finite.

Still, whether McIver coats dense dollops or pulls back, this striking artist’s singular, beating heart is on full, fearless display, bearing its salves and its shame for all of us to see, perhaps so that we may be seen, too.

In Galleries 2 and 3, another North Carolina native forages in the personal, but with a notably different twist of the brush.

In “Damian Stamer: Ruminations,” up through Oct. 15, we get a semblance of his hometown trappings: the North Carolina imagery through which he mines the human experience. But in a departure from his fellow artist, his are produced with an assist from A.I.

Yes, the topic dominating the headlines today is front and center in the art world, too, sufficiently raising all manner of head-wrecking questions that during its recent Art Charleston weeklong event, the Gibbes devoted a session to them.

Moderated by Chase Quinn, curator of education and programs at the Gibbes, the panel discussion included Stamer, along with two other digitally-focused artists — Charleston native CONCEPT RXCH and Carla Gannis, a Brooklyn-based artist with Appalachian roots whose show “wwwunderkammer” is up through July 15 at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art.

As for Stamer’s work: Lest visions of starkly digitized landscapes and grids cranked out with sterile precision dance from the realm of your not-so-artificial intelligence, you may want to think again. The artist renders rough-hewn, rural Southern scenes with a detailed brush, but he does so by using a text-to-image generator for the source imagery.

The resulting works are at once elegant and raw, vivid and charged. Merging realism and abstraction, they are punctuated by the detritus of rural North Carolina — its abandoned houses, its time-worn barns.

Thus in the large-scale, oil-on-panel “Horry County 31, 2023,” a rendering of window through which one can see what appear to be loblolly pines ignites the somber, interior space from which we stand, going wild with scratches of white and patches of teal and peach and yellow.

In a more frenetic treatment still, “South Lowell 159, 122,” cats light the doorway of a rustic wooden barn now a spectrum of charged strokes. In a series of three “collaborations,” presumably with that partner being A.I. , the palette is emboldened by sweeping arcs of color, some identified as “Rembrandt blue,” to portray the artist’s photographic memory of a home heaped in junk.

Stamer has said in interviews that fellow North Carolina native McIver had encouraged him, and there are certainly affinities from one artist’s vision to the other. Both imbue memories of the South with vivid, oil-based color, segueing from realism to representational, from the layered to the fleeting. Like McIver, at times Stamer stops short, the pulse on his panel abruptly truncated by unblinking white space.

Together, the shows make for a Gibbes foray that is as dynamic as it is probing, as anchored in painterly tradition as it is forward-moving, as personal for two artists from the state up the road as they are strikingly, truthfully, perhaps soothingly, universal.

Premier of “Among the Sky” infused with LG OLED and Lifestyle TVs
during Frieze New York from May 17-21, 2023

NEW YORK, May 19, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — LG Electronics (LG OLED) announced today another breakthrough collaboration with Six N. Five (Ezequiel Pini b. 1985), an award-winning Argentinian designer and digital artist based in Barcelona. Over the last decade, Pini has increasingly explored how 3D tools and software can be used in his artistic practice to create imaginary, dreamlike worlds whose aesthetic is at once modernist, contemporary and, above all, elegant. The collaborative exhibition Among the Sky, includes six specially commissioned artworks presented on large-scale format LG OLED and Lifestyle Screens, is being launched and exhibited during Frieze New York during a private preview held at The Shed May 17, and during the fair from May 18 – 21.

LG OLED Arts’ collaboration with Six N. Five highlights a continuing and concerted effort in bringing together the world of digital art and advanced technology by presenting contemporary art experiences through LG OLED screens to inspire new and changing forms of the platform and broadening the ways viewers can and will experience visual culture. With premium self-lit picture quality and powerful image processing technologies, LG OLED TVs elevate the viewing and user experience in digital art display.

“We believe that LG OLED will break through the limitations of conventional media and open up the possibilities for digital art and artists,” said Kate Oh, vice president of the Brand Communication Division at the LG Home Entertainment Company. “In accordance with our motto, We inspire art, LG OLED will inspire many artists as they advance into new forms of art, transcending the borders of different fields. We could not be more excited in working with the most talented digital native artists – such as Six N. Five who understand this space.”

The series of six newly commissioned works, “Among the Sky” are inspired by landscape paintings, expressionism, and fantasy realms of the surrealist masters but whose practice draws on digital tools of digital artwork to produce animate vignettes that blur the distinction between natural and outer worldly expressions – one physical and the other, digital. Through this unique collaboration with LG OLED and LG Art Lab, each work can be seen and experienced viscerally in the physical world while also being made available across purely large-scale, digital platforms. Aptly presented on LG’s state-of-the-art OLED evo TVs, which accurately reproduce the textures and colors of the work. Offering higher brightness, clarity and detail, LG OLED evo delivers exceptionally immersive images.

“The sky has no boundaries. Its immensity has always represented a sacred journey beyond perceived limits to me. The world as we know and experience has a finite horizon. It is broken when our vision is raised to connect with the sky,” shares Six N. Five. “For some, it proposes the connection to the beyond, to our divine and spiritual essence. We look up there when we ask for things, when we seek an explanation, or simply when we decide to “end” the verticality of our bodies to allow us a physical and mental rest, surrounded by nature.”

The six series of works by Six N. Five will be available as NFTs (Non-Fungible Token) via LG Art Lab on May 25^th at 12:00AM EDT and also be exhibited during Frieze New York from May 17 – 21, 2023 at The Shed 8th Floor, Tisch Skylights located at 545 W 30th Street, New York, NY. The exhibition is curated by Ezequiel Pini and supported by Triple X.

Instagram: @lg_oledart #LGOLED #LGOLEDArt
Twitter: @LGArtLab
Website: lgoledart.com and lgartlab.com

About LG Electronics Home Entertainment Company
The LG Home Entertainment Company is a recognized innovator in televisions and audio-video systems. LG offers an elevated home entertainment experience through its award-winning OLED TVs, which, in 2023 mark the 10th anniversary, and QNED LED TVs powered by the innovative webOS smart TV platform. Aiming to help provide consumers with top-class user experience, all of LG’s home entertainment products are designed with environmental sustainability in mind, from production all the way through to disposal. For more news on LG, visit www.LGnewsroom.com.

About LG Art Lab
LG Art Lab is a curated digital art marketplace designed to bring together digital art and technology. By combining the best of both worlds, LG Art Lab enables artists to showcase and distribute their work to a larger audience, while providing art lovers with access to artworks they may not have been able to find elsewhere. Through their platform, they offer digital artworks, NFTs, digital prints, and curated collections by various artists. Follow the journey of LG ART LAB, visit www.lgartlab.com.

About Six N. Five
The artist Six N. Five (Ezequiel Pini b. 1985), is award-winning Argentinian designer and digital artist based in Barcelona. His signature style coupled with the rejuvenative, spiritual narratives embedded in his works makes Six N. Five one of the most recognizable digital artists in the world. Six N. Five’s artwork has recently been exhibited in Art Basel, Moco Museum, Fotografiska Stockholm, Museo della Permanente, and his design work was recently featured in Microsoft Windows 11 and Microsoft Surface wallpapers. Pini and Six N. Five are now represented by Triple X exclusively, an organization founded by Derrick Li that specializes in digital art, and aims to be at the forefront of building and supporting new and sustainable digital art ecosystems.

Media Contact:

Irene Lam 
[email protected] 

SOURCE LG Electronics USA