Munroe Family Community Gallery

December 10, 2022 - March 25, 2023

Currently based in Havana, Florida, sculptor and painter Mark Georgiades began his art career in Tallahassee as a student at Leon High School. Early in his career, he started sculpting metal before engaging in other mediums like mixed media sculpture and landscape painting.

Visage is an exhibition of Georgiades’ welded metal sculptures and striking paintings. Georgiades intertwines his skills as a welder with his love of art to create his sculptures, utilizing construction grade materials such as copper, aluminum, and steel-cut nails. Welding steel rebar and flat metals to create their structural bases, he fashions the forms of his pieces using different types and gauges of wire, including non-stainless steel, stainless steel, and copper wire. Inspired by nature and fantasy, Georgiades’ paintings bring motion and expression to a variety of creatures and figures. While some of his works are more whimsical, depicting fanciful animals, the pieces presented in Visage evoke Georgiades’ flair for the edgy and psychedelic.

Mark Georgiades won Best in Show in the 2021 33rd Art in Gadsden Juried Exhibition for his metal sculpture, Behind the Façade. This life-size figure created entirely of handmade nails gently lifts her mask (or face) away from her body. The juror, Aja Roache, was intrigued by the sculpture’s dualities, and wrote that “the work is both mysterious and inviting, using masculine media and depicting a feminine form, the hard exterior, and the visible transparent interior---these binary dynamics are executed so effortlessly.”

March 25 - June 10, 2023

Fiber artist Carole Fiore has been stitching since she was in elementary school. Starting off with simple cross stitch samplers using cotton floss, she has since spent her life experimenting with various types of needle arts and threads. To Fiore, embroidery is an expansive medium that takes advantage of traditional threads and ground fabric, as well as new and unusual materials, like construction supplies. Embroidery can be defined as any art form that is accomplished using a needle with an eye.

In recent years, Carole has started exploring techniques that create texture and depth in this mainly two-dimensional art form. She makes use of a wide variety of stitches and mediums to create these images— Zinnias in a Vase (after Clementine Hunter), for example, is a tent stitch piece done in needlepoint on an even weave canvas, a technique used on many church kneelers. Florida – State of the Arts is a mixed media piece stitched with single strands of embroidery floss, featuring a map that was hand-colored with acrylic paints. The most innovative piece in the collection, Sailor Take Warning, is a mixed media rendering of the iconic Saint Marks Lighthouse, using acrylic paint, fabric collage, mirror organza, hand-dyed cheese cloth, memory thread, cotton and silk floss, and straw silk.

Fiore is a member of the Embroiders’ Guild of America, as well as the American Needlework Guild and the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework. Her work was juried into the last six Art in Gadsden annual exhibitions.