Art Exhibits. Mattie Kelly Arts Center Galleries at NWFSC

The 2011-12 season of Art Exhibits at the Mattie Kelly Arts Center Galleries continues with two exhibitions on display from October 29 to December 2, 2011. An Opening Reception will be held Saturday, October 29, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. The McIlroy and Holzhauer Galleries will display two artists’ takes on the meaning of home during the 2011 holiday season.  In the McIlroy Gallery paintings and installations by Lou Haney will inspire (or move viewers to question) nostalgia for the colors, shapes, and tastes of a grandmother’s kitchen.  Her large-scale canvases seem ripped from the pages of vintage cookbooks or women’s magazines, but her Pop Art aesthetic turns up the volume on the color, texture, and focus.  Viewers will find themselves visually bombarded by images of home, whether it’s defined by food, kitsch, celebration, or consumption.  Haney is a painting professor at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and had exhibited across the US.  Berlin-based artist Joelle Dietrick explores another side of the domestic sphere in her ongoing Sherwin Series.  Dietrick will create a site-specific installation for the Holzhauer Gallery as part of a larger exhibition that addresses how the collapse of the housing market has shaken Americans’ sense of home.  Dietrick’s project takes the hues of the Sherwin-Williams 2007 Color Forecast and applies them to fractured and remixed images of actual foreclosed houses to document not only the economic but also the emotional toll of the recession.  In the Front Hall, works by Emil Holzhauer in the Adopt-a-Painting program will be on view.  For information contact Gallery director KC Williams williamsk@nwfsc.edu. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 10:00 am – 4:00 p.m. and 90 minutes prior to most Mattie Kelly Arts Center Mainstage and Sprint Theatre performances.  The Mattie Kelly Arts Center is located on the Niceville campus of NWF State College at 100 College Boulevard and is easily accessible via Interstate 10, U.S. Highway 285 and Highway 85.