sUgAR Gallery to Host Opening Reception for Three's a Crowd Exhibition

Photo Submitted

Images Courtesy of Grant Gustafson and Katie Sleyman

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — sUgAR, the University of Arkansas Student Art Gallery is proud to present Three’s a Crowd, an exhibition of ceramics-based work by artists working within post-baccalaureate positions at the University of Arkansas ceramics department. Artists within this exhibition include Grant Gustafson, Katie Sleyman and Ashley Atterberry. Three’s a Crowd will be on view from Nov. 6-26 with the opening reception to be held 5:30-7:30 p.m. Nov. 6.

Grant Gustafson received his Bachelors of Fine Arts from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Ambitious for future opportunities, he plans to use this first year of his post-baccalaureate position as a source of dedication to developing bodies of artwork and planning his next career steps.   Gustafson searches for the line between abundance and excess as he draws inspiration from mid 17th Century Dutch Painters’ still lives and theories that the “ornate still lives.” Questioning whether something so beautiful can become repulsive, Gustafson creates large-scale ceramic objects with luscious, glossy glazes to convey such ideas.

Katie Sleyman received her Bachelors of Arts in Studio Art from the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. Within her second year of the post-baccalaureate position, Sleyman has used opportunities of time, resources, and environment to explore themes of ownership and quality through functional and sculptural objects. She plans to use the resulting portfolio for applications to future endeavors such as graduate schools and residencies. Sleyman’s current work consists of a series of porcelain press-on nails, using the surfaces of nails as a perfectly refined canvas. Driven by a fixation of process and acute attention to detail, Sleyman strives for these nail pieces to become playful, covetable, impractical and consumable objects.

Ashley Atterberry graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Ceramics from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Within her second year of the post-baccalaureate position, Atterbery has continued developing a body of work to explore the connections between objects and emotions, using this work for residency applications in the future. Influenced by comic books and graffiti, Atterberry’s work is an abstraction of her autobiography and emotional narrative. She strives for aspects of nonsense and depth as each series of work reflects current life events. Pulling the viewer back and forth between two-dimensional and three-dimensional forms, Atterberry takes advantage of bold lines, flat surfaces, bodily guts and figurative characters.

The sUgAR gallery is an interdepartmental exhibition space featuring the visual research of students, faculty, and visiting lecturers from the Department of Art and Fay Jones School of Architecture representing the Departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Interior Design. sUgAR is made possible by the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Art, the Fay Jones School of Architecture, and the University of Arkansas’ Facilities Management.