Centenary art professor opens exhibition at Meadows Museum
SHREVEPORT, LA — Centenary studio art professor Shea Hembrey’s exhibition, calculation, opens November 8, at 10:00 a.m. as the third installment in the Meadows Museum of Art’s Project Gallery Space, a versatile gallery showcasing monthly exhibitions by local artists. Hembrey’s exhibition depicts tallies of flowers in peak bloom installed on site by first painting, then dusting the walls with ashes of sacred religious texts. The imagery slowly disintegrates and sheds onto the floor during the exhibition run.
"I believe in soul-filled art with masterful craftsmanship and intellectual rigor. I focus on exploring big questions and speaking to a broad audience while playfully transcending myself and identity," said Hembrey. He often plays the role of trickster, while seriously exploring the best current understanding of the structure of reality. That exploration, currently, is questioning the best projections about the future.
Hembrey notes that this work was created last week during, “the negotiations in Glasgow about shifting timelines over points-of-no-return and needed climate action before it is too late. I painted while monitoring global negotiations with sincere hope for actual scientific data winning the day and in disgust at little political will to actually save our environment. The shifting numbers and changing forecasts match my physical way of painting here—where I have a short window of workable wet paint to rapidly get an image on the wall. You can feel the shifting, the ciphering that was going on both in my mind and in rapidly working with the materials to pin down our current uncertainty.”
Hembrey, an Arkansas native, came to Centenary as new studio art professor in 2019. Prior to coming to Centenary, he established an international career with representation in New York and London. His biennial, Seek, was created and displayed throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, and China. This biennial project debuted on the TED stage and had become a popular TEDTalk featured on Netflix. He has been featured on NPR and PBS, and was followed for a year by the New York Times for a six page profile in their Sunday Magazine. Though most of his techniques and processes are self-taught, Hembrey studied art at university for nine years, finishing with an MFA from Cornell University.
Hembrey’s exhibition will be on display until December 4. More information about calculation and other current Meadows Museum exhibits is available at themeadowsmuseum.com.