Appleton & Jian Two Person Art Exhibition Opens October 15

 The Coburn Gallery at Ashland University will host a two person exhibition which will feature artworks created by Texas artists Dan Jian and Kalee Appleton.

Dan Jian is a visual artist who works across painting, drawing, and project-based installation. She received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and from the Ohio State University, she gained her MFA with a minor in Comparative Study. 

Dan is a residency alumnus of Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She currently lives in Fort Worth, Texas, where she is an assistant professor of Art at Texas Christian University and maintains an on-going studio practice. 

Jian’s work explores landscape as a motif and metaphor that conveys a depth of meaning through the reductive representation of form. As an immigrant, she finds the landscape acquires meaning through memories; as we dwell, we are the subjects overwriting a landscape's original narrative through our reflections and recollections, while holding the potential of all future memory. Drawing and painting have been the constants on which she relies on to investigate this process. Each work is an open-ended formal search that examines how culture builds myths, defines what's ordinary, and incites emotion.

Kalee Appleton is a photography-based artist and assistant professor of Photography at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. Originally from Hobbs, New Mexico, Appleton attended Texas Tech University in Lubbock and received a B.F.A. in photography. Shortly after graduation she worked as a corporate and aviation photographer, and she later attended Texas Woman’s University in Denton, where she received a M.F.A. (2014) in art. Appleton’s work deals with digital technologies and their effects on society, as well as with the nature of photography, specifically landscape photography.

Appleton’s work explores the objecthood of the photographic backdrop, a prevalently used trades-tool of mainstream photography studios as well as challenges the tradition of the photographic print. Visually transporting sitters into idealized landscapes and utopian worlds, these backdrops' pure purpose is to act as a false contextual space. By manipulating the backdrop it is transforming the space it portrays, while simultaneously changing the nature of the object. The shape and size of the non-traditionally framed images in this series challenge the notion of traditional fine art photography by changing the traditionally square/rectangle format of the classic photographic frame.

The exhibition will run from October 15 through November 24, 2020. The Coburn Art Gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 4p.m. on Saturday and Sunday and is free and open to the public. New Covid-19 safety protocols include: a maximum of 15 visitors that may visit the gallery at one time, and groups no larger than 5, and face masks must be worn at all the times on the Ashland University campus including on the exterior of the buildings. For more information about the exhibition, call 419.289.5652 or visit us on Facebook.