Artwork by Laura Terry Selected for 'Horizon: Contemporary Landscape' Exhibition in Kentucky

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Laura Terry's painting "View from Afar" is acrylic on linen with stitching. It was selected to be part of the "Horizon: Contemporary Landscape" exhibition at the Community Arts Center in Danville, Kentucky.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark — Work by Laura Terry was selected from among 250 entries to be part of the Horizon: Contemporary Landscape exhibition, which will be on display through Nov. 12 at the Community Arts Center in Danville, Kentucky. An artists' reception is planned for Thursday.

Terry is an associate professor of architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, and this is the second time her work has been included in this exhibition.

"I was in the exhibit two years ago," Terry said. "It is wonderful to be a part of a show committed to the subject of 'contemporary landscape.'"

The national exhibition was open to all artists using visual media and whose work was completed since January 2011. The exhibit is designed to test the limits of what the public thinks of when it hears the word "landscape," blurring the lines between the traditional and experimental, according to the arts center's website. While many artists portray classic landscape paintings, others delve into more abstract realms, submitting everything from collage and photography to mixed media and cast metal sculptures.

A special reception displaying all 50 selected pieces will be held from 6-8 p.m. Thursday at the Community Arts Center. The exhibition juror will award prizes for first, second and third place to the artists whose works display artistic excellence and strength of execution, the website states.

Artworks were chosen by Mary Rezny, the juror for the exhibition. She is a well-known and respected artist who maintains a studio, M.S. Rezny Studio/Gallery, in Lexington, Kentucky. Rezny was an exhibiting artist in the 2014 Horizon: Contemporary Landscape.

The piece by Terry is titled "View from Afar" and was completed this summer. It is painted in acrylic on linen and stitched with thread. The painting was created over the period of a week.

"It was a painting that actually happened fairly quickly," she said, "because I had the luxury of uninterrupted time in the summer." Then, she "looked at it for a while."

During that time, she was taking photographs of dead trees in the landscape. After a couple of months, she added the hand-stitched tree next to the only architectural form in her piece, a house.

"This is the first time I have introduced an architectural feature on the landscape. But I felt it was a natural evolution in the artwork," she said. "Putting in the house takes the work outside of abstraction. The house is a recognizable structure in the piece."

Terry has been working with abstracted landscapes for a long time. "I am interested in the horizon, where the earth and sky meet," she said. "It is interesting to me. The color suggests what is earth and what is sky."

She was inspired for this piece by another painting she did for an exhibit in Nebraska at the Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art. She attended the opening reception for that show in May, and the wide, open landscape she witnessed on the trip was a part of her inspiration for "View from Afar."

"The inclusion of the architectural form was inspired by the barns and other agrarian architecture that I saw in that landscape," Terry said.

By adding the "house" structure in her painting, Terry said, it read instantly as a landscape - figures against geometry. The structure also fixed the point between earth and sky. "Now the viewer has an immediate way into the painting by recognizing the silhouette," she said.

"I do the work for myself, but at the same time, if the viewer doesn't understand what I am trying to say, then it's meaningless," Terry said. "I don't think I compromised the work by adding recognizable structures."

Terry has taught first-year design studio since arriving at the University of Arkansas in 1998. She also teaches a hands-on elective class, with this year's focused on printmaking. "The students embrace it. It's an outlet for creative expression," she said.