February 3 - 26, 2024 | Opening Reception Saturday, February 3rd, 4-6pm
Turnip Green Creative Reuse is pleased to present “Reclaimation” with the eight-person collective based under Vadis Turner at Vanderbilt University. Their work is centered around using the found, scavenged, gathered, and forgotten to tell stories through abstraction. By transforming, manipulating, questioning, and challenging our materials, they are able to create communicative vessels that both share our ideas and present repurposed items in unexpected ways.
More About the Artists
Aidan Cozzolino
The work from this class reflects a version of myself that was overwhelmed beyond belief. In being forced to do too many things simultaneously my brain was shattered into a multitude of pieces, as if driving into a brick wall at 200 mph. Colorful, lost in itself, and confined to its own construction, this work lies as a testament to a truly burdened mentale, in a remarkably unfair timeline.
Cherish Farmer
Cherish is a sophomore student at Vanderbilt University majoring in art and computer science. She has been enthralled by the arts from a young age and finds joy seeing and creating art from the unexpected. After graduating, she hopes to pursue animation or video game design in the future.
Kelci Creath
Suited for the mixed media realm, Kelci Creath has lifelong been compelled to make the most of unlikely materials. Her most fulfilling experiences with surprise media have been repurposing textiles to create her piece “flyover” and mixing concrete to produce the work ground up. Kelci made her serious entrance into the art world on a path to a keener eye for fashion but has found great joy and passion in the works she has both enthusiastically experienced and meditatively produced along the way.
Jonathan Ma
Jonathan Ma is a first generation Chinese-American artist and neuroscientist who explores selfhood and identity by joining seemingly disparate realms together through materially diverse works that engage both the sciences and arts. Collateral Places explores the collateral sulcus – the region at the base of the brain which processes place information – to depict the effects of dislocation from both time and space. The maps of the brain are made of bamboo, which comes from a thousands year-old legacy in China but is considered in America to be invasive, and chart the contradictory paths back home.
Nat Tooley
Nat is an aspiring designer, wishing to use her knowledge of art, space, and human behavior to make the world an easier place to navigate and explore. As a Cognitive Studies major at Vanderbilt, their resources are limitless and well sought out. The material that they most enjoyed tinkering with was wood this semester, and learning to use it in ways one wouldn’t normally think to use it was the most interesting part of the semester for her.
Hannah Walton
Hannah is a Senior at Vanderbilt University majoring in Studio Art and Psychology. She uses reclaimed materials as a means of introspection; particularly, on her childhood and lived experiences. By experimenting with found materials, she challenges herself to reconsider their typical uses while playfully expanding on psychological concepts she finds herself resonating with, recontextualizing how both can be viewed.
Christina Valentine
Christina Valentine's work presented at this showcase highlights her appreciation for precision and reclaimed materials. Although she had never done abstract art before this class, she learned to embrace uncertainty and let the materials guide her to the finished product.
More About our Green Gallery
Turnip Green Creative Reuse’s Green Gallery is housed within our larger Reuse Center and features local reuse artists in rotating monthly exhibitions, with opening receptions on the first Saturday of every month as part of the Wedgewood Houston Art Crawl.
