Blue Spiral 1 started off the 2012 exhibition calendar with the annual reprise of New x Three. This year’s show features new works by five southeastern artists that are themselves new to the gallery.
Asheville resident and abstract painter Barbara Nerenz Kelley is the only two-dimensional artist featured in this year’s exhibition. Her harsh brushstrokes layered over scratches and transparently covered words mark the show’s only work exclusive to the walls.
Michael Poness’s soda-fired stoneware vessels share the floor with Jennifer Allen’s post-WWII fabrics inspired porcelain teapots and plates, and Bill Slade’s lucidly liquid blown glass Slabs and Bullets.
But it’s Jeff Gundlach’s work that makes this show both playful and diverse. Three robots fashioned in a would-be futuristic style of 1940’s sci-fi, according to Gundlach, share a dog and owner domestic partnership with insects. T190 takes a five-foot- long fluorescent green beetle on a walk, while X89 feeds “little” one foot long bugs to its black widow.
New x Three hangs in Blue Spiral 1‘s Gallery 1, also known as downstairs, through Saturday, Feb. 25. http://www.bluespiral1.com
