The Metamorphosis Project

The Finest in Contemporary Realism: The Metamorphosis Project Debuts in North Carolina at the Kinston Arts Center with an exhibition and workshops with student of Odd Nerdrum, Richard T Scott.

Kinston, North Carolina, May 21, 2009- August 8th, 2009 - Four of the country's finest contemporary realist artists show recent works at the Kinston Arts Center. The Metamorphosis Project is the four-man collaboration between Richard T. Scott (New York), Adam Miller(New York), Jonathan Matthews (Alabama), and Charles Philip Brooks (North Carolina). The four artists exhibit together on an ongoing basis with the aim of raising awareness of the relevance of naturalistic, skillful, and/or beautiful art in the contemporary art world.

Proposal

We believe that the future of art lies in exchanging collective ideas in a poetic language that speaks to both the artistically esoteric and the uninitiated. We feel that the challenge facing artists today is to communicate in a contemporary language to a larger audience, which transcends the current dialogue: to bridge the gap that separates the academic from the popular. We think that the fundamental communicative nature of visual art lies in the tension between the emotive and articulate, the beautiful and sublime, the narrative and iconic, both clarity and subtlety. This new artistic language involves integrating all of these elements in surprising and innovative ways, but does not rely on surprise or innovation as its primary content. We draw inspiration from all of the past, but also claim our independence to represent the world we see through our own subjective vision. Steering a course between these dichotomies is difficult, if not nearly impossible, but this is the nature of aspiring to create a masterpiece.

Above all we emphasize the relevance and necessity of technical skill, and indeed beauty, in the realm of contemporary art. We think that a great work of art requires three fundamental elements: intelligence, passion, and skill. Rather than negating meaning through deconstructive philosophy, and rather than presenting cold, purely intellectual art, we hope to present an alternative body of work which combines intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic content in a way that seduces and speaks to the viewer. We feel that post-modern philosophy tends to disconnect from the viewer because post-modern artists attempt to communicate verbal ideas through a visual medium. We choose to communicate visual ideas through a visual medium, and verbal ideas through a verbal medium. This is not to say that verbal ideas cannot be communicated, but that they must be filtered and reconstructed to be intelligible, which requires a technical knowledge of one’s medium.

Building on our belief that deconstruction is a process and not a philosophical conclusion; we propose to appeal to the emotions, to the spirit, to the body, as well as the mind. Thus we have chosen the theme of Reconstruction: to rebuild meaning, utilizing the technical mastery passed down to us by the Old Masters and the ideas and analytical tools passed on to us by all eras.

The Metamorphosis Project catalogue is now available!