PRESS RELEASE - FEBRUARY 18TH 1998

On Friday March 8th, an exhibition comprising various works in bronze, glass, drawing and print by artist Sharon Bladholm will open at the Checkered Raven Contemporary Art Center Gallery in Peoria. The body of work spans a period of more than a decade and portrays her exploration into the realm of the inevitable disharmony between the primitive and the technological. Born of a middle class midwestern family caught up in the spirit of the 1960's, an intrinsic interest in untamed environments and their inhabitants led to a cycle of journeys that took her through the major rain forests of Central America. Venezuela and Brazil. Utilizing an inherent ability to draw, she has chronicled some of the last remaining peoples left on the earth content to remain culturally embodied in the "Stone Age". These drawings and mono-prints of natural protagonists in the mundane conduct of their everyday lives within idyllic and unspoiled settings tend to analogize this tenuous world's attempt to co-exist with a relentless encroachment caused by the near proximity to the malice of the onset of technology.

The many self-portraits within the show expand upon this theme in a stark depiction of a sort of cross-cultural awkwardness felt by the artist in portrayals of her own vulnerable identity balanced against backdrops of various cold and empty settings. This theme is further expanded upon by the larger ceramic reliefs and glass cum bronze assemblages whose vague sense of disorder hints at an inherent discord existent within our own species, which of itself, seems increasingly at odds with the impact of its own creations. A collection of smaller bronze cast figures taken in studies from life emote from a different perspective focusing more on perceptions of gesture with a significant emphasis upon the tactile. The greater statement of the work as a unit, in the final analysis, becomes the personal celebration of an unhindered natural universe whose fragile beauty is captured for posterity in the irony of modern man-made materials.