PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

George Long

March 9 - April 15, 2006
Opening Reception with the artist: Thursday, March 9, 6 to 9 pm
Castleberry Art Stroll: Friday, March 10, 7 to 10 pm

Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by George Long, his second at Marcia Wood Gallery. George Long received his BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1995 and currently lives and works in Atlanta.

Long’s first exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery, “8 x 8,” in 2004, featured an installation of over 500 mixed-media paintings on panel installed in grids along the walls. These small square paintings of mixed media – incorporating drawing, resin, found images, scrap metal and so on – affect a compelling intersection of painting, sculpture and installation. For the upcoming exhibition, the latest work in this series will be joined by a body of larger, 60 x 60 inch panels, conceived as a part of the same larger body of work as the 8 x 8 inch boxes, investigating the same themes and same language of iconography, using many of the same materials. These larger works, installed among the “eight by eights,” are envisioned as a sort of macro-view of the smaller works.

Reminiscent of quilt patches as well as pages from an artist’s journal, the works have a compelling intimate quality that is emphasized both through their scale and through the fragmented aspect of a story being told in bits and pieces. Long’s process in creating these works is related to the process his Grandmother used to make quilts. Long elaborates, “She made her own aesthetic decisions, and made her piece out of necessity. A worn out pillow case, a wedding dress scrap, an apron's extra yard- these are the remnants that my grandmother would use to piece together her quilts. As single squares they simply represented a moment in time, yet together they tell a story of not only that year or decade, but the lives of her family, friends, and environment.” Long in turn uses his environment and experiences as source material. As a result, everything is fodder. Scraps from custom metal work, drawings from his dreams, and remnants from his daily life are collaged into these paintings creating an unconventional personal narrative.

Since his first exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery, George Long has exhibited a solo show at the Columbus Museum of Art and a featured inclusion in the Jacksonville Museum of Art’s “Activating Space: Sculpture as Environment” exhibition, curated by George Kinghorn. Long recently returned from a prestigious residency at the International Kunstler Kolonie in Nuremburg, Germany, during which he began the construction of the works to be featured in the upcoming exhibition.