Buckley and Chavises Return to Southside Gallery

Paintings, works on paper, and ceramics on exhibit in April

Charlie Buckley, Ashley Chavis, and Virginia Rougon Chavis will exhibit new work at Southside Gallery from April 2 through April 28. The exhibit will showcase oil paintings by Buckley, works on paper by Virginia Rougon Chavis, and ceramics by Ashley Chavis. This will be the third featured exhibit at Southside for Buckley and the second for both Ashley and Virginia Rougon Chavis.

“All three artists have a large regional following and strong ties to the arts community here in Oxford,” said Southside Gallery’s Wil Cook. “Their work is always well received.”

Ashley Chavis’s ceramic work emphasizes creative design and functionality. For his upcoming exhibit at Southside, Chavis will present wood and salt-fired ceramic works that incorporate “hybrid” (hand-building and wheel-throwing) construction techniques. Chavis

Ceramic mug by Ashley Chavis.

often etches decorative elements, such as patterns and designs, on the surfaces of his ceramics. His work is well conceived in its integration of modern aesthetic and traditional techniques. The ceramics Chavis crafts are skillfully designed and constructed, giving them artistic and functional duality.

A New Perspective is the title of Virginia Rougon Chavis’s most recent series of works on paper that will be exhibited at Southside in April. The title is a double entendre, playing on artistic and personal perspectives. The concept is a smart balance between cerebral thoughts and creative impulses. The works on paper that Chavis will display implement repetitive images of houses and boxes drawn in two- and three-point perspective to illustrate the delicate nuance of how perspective can be altered by moving just one line. This metaphor is the defining theme of Chavis’s show.

Buckley’s new paintings focus on rural Mississippi landscapes, with a particular emphasis on forests around Lafayette County and Lee County. Buckley’s inspiration for this series of paintings is a natural follow-up to a previous series of field landscapes he painted from around the same area. Fields were the foreground and trees were in the distant horizon in

Work on paper by Virginia Rougon Chavis.

Buckley’s previous landscapes, but now he has turned his attention toward the trees. With these paintings, Buckley has concerned himself more with the relationship of space and depth within the confines of the composition as opposed to the composition as a whole. In essence, each painting is a collection of interweaving subplots to help complete a narrative that began with Buckley’s landscape paintings from a couple of years ago.  In a linear sense, Buckley has worked backwards sequentially to uncover more of the Mississippi landscape that has framed his work for the past few years. The relationship between Buckley and his environment is a theme that he has revisited since his first exhibit at Southside. These paintings are an appropriate continuation of this process.

An artists’ reception is scheduled for Thursday, April 25, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.  For more information contact Southside Gallery.