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Two Iowa artists are October’s featured exhibit at Charles City Arts Center

Two Iowa artists are October’s featured exhibit at Charles City Arts Center
Artist Generva Daley makes uses of found objects and familiar textiles to create art that blurs the line between object and body. Her work will be featured as part of the October Artists of the Month exhibit at the Charles City Arts Center. Submitted photo
Two Iowa artists are October’s featured exhibit at Charles City Arts Center
Artist Generva Daley makes uses of found objects and familiar textiles to create art that blurs the line between object and body. Her work will be featured as part of the October Artists of the Month exhibit at the Charles City Arts Center. Submitted photo
Two Iowa artists are October’s featured exhibit at Charles City Arts Center
Artist Dorian Dean uses “regular objects, language, drawing, time, and the body to create spaces that feel like riddles.” Dean’s work will be featured as part of the October Artists of the Month display at the Charles City Arts Center. Submitted photo
Two Iowa artists are October’s featured exhibit at Charles City Arts Center
Artist Dorian Dean uses “regular objects, language, drawing, time, and the body to create spaces that feel like riddles.” Dean’s work will be featured as part of the October Artists of the Month display at the Charles City Arts Center. Submitted photo
By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Two Iowa artists will be featured as the artists of the month for October at the Charles City Arts Center.

The works of Geneva Daley, currently an assistant professor of art at Maharishi University in Fairfield, and Dorian Dean, who lives and works in Iowa City, will be featured in the exhibit that will run from Friday, Oct. 7, through Saturday, Oct. 29.

There will be an opening reception on Friday, Oct. 7, from 5 to 7 p.m. with food, drinks and artists in attendance. The artist of the month opening is, as always, free and open to the public, according to information from the Arts Center.

The show is titled “Has Been Will Be.”

Daley said she is “interested in the everyday, mundane rituals and objects of domestic life and how they speak of the body behind them.”

A coat hanging in an entryway is seen as a person’s cast-off skin, an unmade bed mimics the twisting of an anxious stomach, found objects and familiar textiles grow in their own volume and seem to take on a life of their own.

The blurred line between object and body is fostered through Daley’s daily physical act of making in her studio. Tactile memories emerge as materials are combined, punched, squeezed, coaxed, and stitched again and again until patterns emerge that begin to mean something beyond their original use.

Forms that confuse the limits of the body, internal as external, feelings made physical, and the privacy of the apertures of the body, such as slits, cuts and holes, are exposed as each piece emerges from her studio.

Daley received her Masters of Fine Arts degree through a provost fellowship from University of California, Davis. During her time at Davis, she received the Robert Arneson Art Award, Mary Lou Osborn Award, as well as the Keister and Allen Art Purchase Prize. She was recently featured in issue 12 of MAAKE magazine and has work in the collection of the Manetti Shrem Museum in California.

Dean’s interdisciplinary based works are not always what they seem, but exactly what they are, “using regular objects, language, drawing, time, and the body to create spaces that feel like riddles,” she said.

“There is a love for obsolete objects, with the insistence that they perform their original role but transform into characters that are confidently ridiculous,” she said.

Dean creates “Swiss army knife combos” of tragically earnest tools trying to do a good job – or that already did a job and are now resting on the wall.  Many of the combos are old things that don’t actually function, straddling the old and new contexts.

Dean completed an MFA in painting and certificate of book arts at the University of Iowa and received their BFA from Tyler School of Art in 2007. She said community engagement through building relationships is an essential part of their art practice.

Teaching for over 15 years, Dean uses art as a tool for social change, with the belief that sharing creative experience in non-hierarchical models empowers people to get curious and question whose “rules” really serve them. She is curator for the Times Club at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, and has taught and developed curriculums at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of art and the Barnes Foundation.

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