REGIONAL ART EXHIBITION PARTY

The 'Gun' was drawn

Local artists were on the hunt for Crystal Bridges jurist’s eye, awards

"The Gun Show," a regional art exhibition put on by Drawl Southern Contemporary Art, opened with a bang May 20 with a party for participating artists and guests at the event space at Cache Restaurant & Lounge. The show is on display at Drawl, 5208 Kavanaugh Blvd., Suite 5, through June 18.

For the party, mixologist Regina Gallucci used dry ice to create "The Gun Show" opening's signature cocktail, deemed The Smoking Gun. However, the star of the show was Carly Drew, whose watercolor, graphite and acrylic diptych, After the Hunt, garnered $2,500 and first-place honors by jurist Chad Alligood, curator at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.

Brian Hoppers' stained-glass panel, Charleston, took second place and won $1,000 for Hoppers. Third-place winner was Keith Thomson, with his oil on canvas painting Nice Rack. Thomson won $500.

Honorable mentions -- with $100 cash awards each -- went to Daniel Cassity and Michael Nott.

Cache's menu was heavy on hors d'oeuvres, including a charcuterie platter with Dijon nibbles, baked barbecue shrimp skewers, melon and prosciutto bites, and Parmesan meatballs in sauce

"The work we received was amazing," said Drawl owner Guy Bell, whose work Cain & Abel was part of Crystal Bridges' "State of the Art" exhibit in 2014.

"I don't think anyone would have an easy time deciding what works to include," Bell continued. He said Alligood's expertise "provided a remarkable presentation that was diverse in both content and medium."

The event space at Cache was actually larger than Bell's space at Drawl, which was too small to appropriately display Drew's award-winning piece.

Another "Gun Show" artist, Dayton Castleman -- museum director at the 21C Museum Hotel Bentonville -- created a simple yet meaningful piece from a stop sign he shot with 9mm ammunition. The pattern he created spelled out the word "stop" in Braille, and the ammo size represented the size of a brain tumor Castleman had removed during surgery in March in Fayetteville.

"'STOP' took on a whole new meaning for me personally as I was facing brain surgery," Castleman said. "It was also pretty cathartic actually doing the shooting. [It's a] great stress reliever to shoot an aluminum panel from about 12 inches away." He created the piece about a month before his surgery.

-- Story and photos by Cyd King

High Profile on 06/05/2016

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