Featured Artists Exhibit August-September 2025
August 19 – September 27
The gallery is featuring the work of member artists Shelly Hehenberger, Karen Day, Natalie Boorman, Mary Lee Kerr and guest artist Alan Dehmer.
Opening Reception on August 22, 2025.
Alan Dehmer
Alan Dehmer’s work uses the gum bichromate printing process. Embracing both photography and printmaking this process leverages image making as time transforms layers of each piece. The end work carries an archetypal quality, like something from an old memory or a dream one can’t quite remember.
Alan Dehmer is a founding member of the FRANK Gallery, a published author, and a guest lecturer at NC State University.
Karen Day
Much of Karen’s work is rooted in a kind of personal excavation – visual and emotional. She thinks of her paintings as artifacts of an interior world, shaped by her dreamings of time and memory. Instead of something static or sealed, she imagines reliquaries in motion: shifting forms dissolving, evolving and reforming.
She builds layers of texture early on, then continues adding – sometimes scraping or masking areas to create visual moments of clarity, opacity, and depth. Her interest is in what is revealed, what remains hidden, and how meaning can live in the spaces between.
Mary Lee Kerr
For 40 years, Mary Lee Kerr has studied and created clay sculptures, gradually mastering the technical aspects of the medium and constantly searching for the best way to express her ideas.
Recently her larger work has focused on protection–of herself, her family and her community–and warding off the dangers of a threatening world. These figures are protected by shells, spines and claws, or hold talismans to ward off evil.
Natalie Boorman
Natalie Boorman has worked with clay for the past 40 years. Using the “Pinch Pot” method is meditative for her, allowing her to relax with the clay, interact with it, forming a relationship which is not always consciously developed.
Her finishing process includes burnishing, bisque firing the vessels in an electric kiln and then either fire them in a pit or a raku kiln, both variations of what’s known as smoke firing. Smoke firings are unpredictable, spontaneous and intriguing. Not for anyone needing a sense of control!
Shelly Hehenberger
Shelly’s recent work is inspired by the quiet but always industrious processes of regeneration at work in the earth around and below our feet. Sometimes slowly, sometimes with remarkable speed, forces break apart one form of life to make another, like a child assembling her blocks to build a form that is at once demolished to make another, and another. Her art process reflects this means of invention as her surfaces are composed of elements carved from other compositions and then reconstructed, creating a snapshot of life mid-leap from one embodiment to the next.
