STEPHENVILLE (February 5, 2016) — The Clyde H. Wells Fine Arts Center Gallery of Art at Tarleton State University presents the second art exhibition of the spring 2016 semester, Soft Rains, featuring printmaker and multimedia artist Jason Urban.
The exhibition is free and open to the public Feb. 15 through March 17. A special lecture featuring the artist is forthcoming.
Inspiration for the exhibition comes from “There Will Come Soft Rains,” a chapter in Ray Bradbury’s 1950 dystopian novel The Martian Chronicles, which describes an automated house in 2026. Devoid of inhabitants, the “home of the future” cooks, cleans and carries on unaware that its family is victim of some manmade calamity. Somberly, the story ends with the destruction of the house.
This chapter is a jumping off point for a series of works by Urban called A Library for Soft Rains. He’s been using this chapter as a motif to explore the growing interdependency of analog and digitally printed matter. The various pieces in the exhibit process the Bradbury story through a range of technologies from high to low tech. CNC routers, rapid prototyping and digital photography as well as simple relief printing are used to create images and objects that are both complex and rudimentary in their origins.
Urban is an artist, writer and teacher living and working in Austin, Texas. Originally from northeastern Pennsylvania, he earned a bachelor’s of fine arts from Kutztown University in Kutztown, Pa., and a master’s of fine arts from the University of Iowa. His prints, drawings, paintings and installations have been featured in numerous national and international venues.
Urban currently teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. As a supplement to both his research and teaching, he is part of the online collaborative, Printeresting.org. In 2011, Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation awarded Printeresting an Arts Writers Grant.
For a complete schedule of upcoming events presented by Tarleton’s Department of Fine Arts, view the Spring 2016 Fine Arts Calendar at https://www.tarleton.edu/finearts/documents/eventscalendar.pdf.
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