Jasper is Back On Main Street for First Thursday Fun! Join us from 6 - 8:30 pm in our old stomping ground at Tapp's! This month we're featuring Janet Kozachek, F. Michael LaRosa, and Bonita Strickland. We've also got live music in the works, so stay tuned for that announcement! Come shop, have a drink, and hang out with us in the alley! The artists and Jasper Board members will be on site to chat about their work.
Meet the Artists:
– F. Michael LaRosa is a Midlands native, sculptor, artistic explorer, poet, musician, skinny old man, and perpetual seeker who is still in love with the far flung cultural diversity and personal freedom that truly made America great. He aspires to the motto “Create freely, without judgment or inhibition.”
– Janet Kozachek is an internationally trained and exhibited artist with a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Parsons School of Design in New York and a Certificate of graduate study from the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Columbia Museum of Art, The Morris Museum, The South Carolina State Museum, and in numerous private collections. Ms. Kozachek is the recipient of numerous art awards, including National Endowment for the Arts State subgrant awards, a Puffin Foundation Award, and a Humanities Council Award. She is the author of The Book of Marvelous Cats, My Women My Monsters, A Rendering of Soliloquies – Figures Painted in Spots of Time, A Book of Bothersome Cats, and has published in The Colorado Review, Ekphrasis, Porlock, Local Life, The Heron Anthology, Pain News Network, and The Harpy Hybrid Review.
“Creating art for me means remembering how to concentrate within the unavoidable milieu of multiple distractions. My work brings focus to an idea over time. I enjoy the benefits of technology, yet I find solace and meaning in balancing the rapid rush of information with the deliberate slowness that my low tech pencils, papers, inks, and paints yield. Art is often that one grounding thing in a world of perpetual change.
Change has come frequently and dramatically to me. My life and art education took place on three different continents and in multiple languages. Complex and life altering illness took me bodily and intellectually into unexpected terrains. My mixed media works encapsulate this mutability and what I write, paint and assemble serves as a counterbalance to what I perceive as misunderstandings about life, death and health in our culture. Accidents and illness are things that happen more often than not without provocation, yet American culture emphasizes personal accountability in these matters to an almost obsessive extent. Health challenges especially are often framed in the context of a “battle” or as some sort of competitive sport– something won or lost. Indeed, I recently saw a drug company advertisement for a breast cancer drug featuring a woman donning boxing gloves!
My art explores the concept of chance occurrences, the vagaries of fortune, and the illusion of control within a multicultural mileux. This concept of inevitability is clear in my smallest drawing, rendered in inks and charcoals, It Cannot Be Stopped.”