Carol Russell Website: carolrussellstudio.com

Shawn Kabelund website is: https://shawnskabelund.com and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shawnskabelund/

currently showing:

‍ ‍Tending Places 

Opening date Friday, October 22nd for the 4th Friday Art Walk

PRESCOTT, AZ—DATE—The Art Hive invites the Prescott community to engage A collaboration between Prescott painter, sculptor, and architect Carol Russell and Flagstaff installation artist and sculptor Shawn Skabelund in Tending Place. This show is a collaborative exhibition containing four site-specific, place-based installations. Combining figurative painting with sculpture and using collected natural materials, the artists have created living ‘landscapes’ that contemplate loss, adaptation, and renewal. The exhibit allows viewers time and space to think about the local communities and ecosystems they inhabit. The art initiates playful consideration, thoughtful inquiry, and heartfelt engagement, reminding viewers of our connection to community and our place on Earth.

Carol Russell is a painter, sculptor, and architect. Her subjects arise from her community and the raw landscapes of Arizona. The narratives she weaves are drawn from life and often incorporate found objects, props, and backdrops to tell a story: to advocate for beauty, bring loss to the foreground, or offer up the overlooked for consideration. 

The subjects of these paintings are portraits of people who embody shared values and act in the world in ways Carol admires, as well as to evoke a universal quality that transcends the personal. 

As an architect,Carol is drawn to work with a gallery space as a canvas, intrigued by the opportunity to create a more immersive experience with scale and volume. Her experience as a sculptor has exposed her to the use of straightforward natural materials - wood, stone, clay - and the possibilities of shaping work in three-dimensions.

Shawn is a place-based, site-specific installation artist working in landscapes to reveal their complex ecologies and cultural histories. The inhabited landscape become the studio, not as subject matter to draw or paint, but for observation, discovery and the collection of materials to create new forms of art. 

Shawn’s creative process involves collaborating with place and thinking like a mountain, focusing on what Wendell Berry calls “the unsettling of America”—how historical and contemporary Manifest Destiny have impacted specific landscapes and cultures in the United States. To prepare for each work, Shawn researches the history of the place to learn how the interaction of the wild and the human has determined the direction and cultural makeup of that place. 

In this collaborative installation, Tending Place, Shawn Skabelund and Carol Russell bring together painting, sculpture, and architectural space to create immersive ‘landscapes’ that have a story to tell, emerging from a heartfelt care for this place of diverse landscapes, wild beauty, and human engagement.