Event: April Bachtel Artist Lecture
Date & Time: January 28, 2016, 5:00 p.m.
Where: The University of Alabama, Sella-Granata Art Gallery, 109 Woods Hall
The University of Alabama Department of Art and Art History presents an artist lecture by full-time instructor, April Bachtel, January 28 at 5:00 p.m. in the Sella-Granata Art Gallery, Woods Hall. Bachtel will share her artwork, current projects, and her influences including: the subjectivity of perception, the transgressive nature of the romantic and the grotesque, and the communicative power of objects. Additionally, she will talk about her relationship to materials and her process of transforming secondhand items into anthropomorphic, empathy-evoking forms. Her practice is rooted in the study and reconstitution of leftover items from material culture. She pairs the familiar and domestic with the uncanny and grotesque in order to call our routines and systems into question.
April Bachtel grew up in the home of an artisan furniture maker who instilled in her a visual curiosity from which she continues to draw. In 2011, she graduated summa cum laude with a BFA in painting and a BA in art education from Kent State University in Ohio. In 2014, she received the MFA in studio art from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She also studied at Oxbow School of Art and Artist Residency. She currently lives and works in Tuscaloosa, where she teaches courses in drawing, studio foundations, 2D design and color theory at The University of Alabama. Her work has been exhibited at Roane State Community College in Harriman, Tennessee; Des Lee Gallery in St. Louis, Missouri; Tahoe Gallery in Incline Village, Nevada; and at Shift Space in Wichita, Kansas, among others. This summer she will be a Summer River Fellow Resident Artist at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. Her website is here: http://www.aprilbachtel.com/
April Bachtel’s artist lecture is sponsored by the UA Department of Art and Art History painting area and the Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series.