The newest exhibition at Gallery 208 brings together many of the artists who have been a part of the gallery’s history during the past ten years. Chronicles of Time: A Retrospective Exhibition is the last exhibit of the 2024 season, opening Oct. 22, 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Visitors to the exhibit will experience the ongoing discourse on the role of image and object-making that is taking place by 18 artists. The exhibit is a celebration of 16 artists who have exhibited before and two artists exhibiting at Gallery 208 for the first time. The artists in Chronicles of Time: A Retrospective Exhibition all contribute to the larger dialogue taking place in visual art today.
Visitors will see a painting hanging next to a digitally generated image, a mixed media alongside a photograph. The mix allows for comparisons, to observe common themes or differences in an artist’s approach — deepening our engagement with the artwork and the possibilities of art and creativity.
There are other advantages of a large group exhibit. We are able to compare and observe common themes or differences in what artists choose to focus their work on. Emerging and mid-career artists are exhibiting with established artists — providing an accessible and affordable way for collectors to discover new talent and acquire unique pieces.
Johanna Gore and Shane Booth are examples of an emerging artist exhibiting with a professional artist. Gore, a young artist, has explored identity in the last two years with a series of self-portraits. The work titled Life Mirrors Reality is a blurred digital image floating between the mark-making above and below the portrait.
Gore’s self-portrait hangs next to established artist Shane Booth — an artist known for his years of investigating the self-portrait as a theme in his work. Both artists are exhibiting portraits that hang next to each other in the gallery. Looking at the two portraits, we see the influences of very different historical and cultural experiences between each portrait.
Not all art is a self-portrait. But for many artists, their unique perspectives, preferences, and worldview can be interpreted as reflecting the artist’s identity and, therefore a self-portrait. Leslie Pearson is such an artist who imbues the work with her love of nature, the cycle of life (skeletal remains), and a fascination with our ecosystem.
In the exhibit, Pearson is showing small handmade books. In Pearson fashion, part of a bone or a lock of hair is submerged in a clear epoxy window on the surface of her hand-sewn books. Thick in depth, the books are journals for the owner to take notes in a work of art - each page is part of the greater aesthetic of the functional, abstracted, sculptural book form.
Dwight Smith and Vicki Rhoda both bring the self-portrait to their work. You cannot separate the artist from the image. Smith is exhibiting a small mixed media and is known for his large abstract paintings with references to African and African American symbols.
In Elizabethtown, North Carolina, Vicki Rhoda grew up with a church named Lula’s Temple located across the street from her house. Her recent body of relief prints interprets her memories of the pastor of Lula’s Temple. Rhoda shares her experiences in the print titled Lula’s Temple: Redemption.
One of two digital artists, Jonathan Chestnut used technology and AI to explore known texts. Chestnut’s print titled Genesis 3:24 is an interpretation of a quote: "So he drove out the man, and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." Using technology, AI, his drawing and digital skills, Chestnut is creating new visual interpretations on an old subject religion.
Abstracting nature is a theme by two artists: Katey Morrill and Callie Farmer. Farmer has shifted her interest in capturing the beauty of nature to abstracting it in graphic patterns of color and shapes. Morrill is exploring “the process of abstracting observed landscapes by emphasizing southern terrain patterns through color and shape.
Beauty is a theme we still see in a contemporary art world filled with conceptual art and spray paint. Jaden McRae is exhibiting a pencil study of an aged cherry tree in front of a building and its set of stairs. In the drawing titled Nappy Canopy, McRae reduces his subjects to value and planes.
Beverly Henderson is another artist who brings her love of nature as a subject. In the exhibit, Henderson is showing a mixed media work that explores not only the beauty of nature, but the potential of the unseen.
Titled Unconditional Love, Kyle Harding brings the beauty of childhood in a photographic portrait of her daughter Savannah with one of her large dogs. Throughout the years Harding’s two children are a perfect subject to capture the magic and fleeting essence of childhood. In this image, Harding has captured the ineffable: “the joy we experience from unconditional love and trust.”
In contrast, Angela Stout’s portrait painting titled Self-Embrace is filled with a sense of angst, but it also evokes beauty. Not only is it painted beautifully, but as Stout shares: “we can find beauty in the midst of despair.”
Leslie Pearson and Skylor Swann are the only two artists exhibiting three-dimensional works. Swann’s ceramics contrast with Pearson’s organic books. Swann’s recent work has shifted from his well-known organic forms, delicate tendrils emerging from protruding surfaces. His new work is the opposite. Beautifully crafted, the work is a play on minimalism and the everyday object. Made out of clay, Swann has created the illusion of an opened paper bay, standing upright, the open end reveals the negative space of the interior of the bag.
The two artists who have never exhibited at Gallery 208 are Adrienne Trego and Bobbe Garcia. Trego is a fiber artist exhibiting a triptych titled Entangled: Mycelium, Veins and Roots. Visitors will see how Trego uses different colored threads as her medium and focuses on nature and detail. The artist stated: “my work concentrates on the minute, the detail, the minuscule patterns, which we are interconnected in their own forms and with the larger world.”
In the long list of artists, Bobbe Garcia’s prints are another example of a fresh interpretation of beauty and nature around us. Her compositions of patterns and color move across the surface of her paper, reminding us of the patterns of color that can be lost in a moment when the light changes.
A refreshing exhibit, Gallery 208 welcomes the public to view the Chronicles of Time: A Retrospective Exhibition. The gallery is located at Up and Coming Weekly, 208 West Rowan Street in Fayetteville. Gallery hours are Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The exhibit will remain until Dec. 11. For more information call 910-484-6200.

(Photo: Jonathan Chestnut print titled Genesis 3:24 is a piece using both AI and Chestnut's drawing skills.)