The Department of Visual Art & Design at the University of South Carolina Beaufort presents the artwork of Jamie Berry, Attrition,at the Sea Islands Center Gallery. An opening reception will take place Friday, November 1, from 5 to 7:30 p.m. with a gallery talk at 6 p.m. The exhibit will remain on view through December 13. The Sea Islands Center Gallery is located at 1106 Carteret Street. Contact the gallery for current hours.
Jamie Berry will be exhibiting installations and sculpture that explore themes of symbiosis and parasitism through wood and clay. Berry’s process involves baking clay pieces and physically combining them with wood while still hot, burning the wood and creating a caustic chemical relationship between the two materials. Through the baking of clay and the burning of wood, Berry physically and chemically melds the two materials together, an act of both destruction and creation.
Underlying this caustic relationship of wood and clay, Berry says the biological terms of symbiosis and parasitism serve as the conceptual framework for his work. Symbiosis deals with the establishment of a relationship between two entities (usually animal to animal), while parasitism is a type of relationship that brings harm to one entity to the advantage of another, thus creating a “host” and a “parasite.”
Despite the complex biological terms, Berry’s work is ultimately about human relationships and the connections that can exist between two separate entities. 
“I explore visual relationships between wood, displayed as a host, and clay, displayed as a parasite,” he says. “The corruption, degradation and otherwise harm that the wood overtly shows indicates a caustic reaction that has been brought about by the ceramic piece. The irony to most of my visual work is that this harm that the wood shows also draws more interest to the wood than it would under normal circumstances. This complexity can often be seen in human relationships that appear one way on the surface, yet may be dramatically different in reality.”
Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Berry earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Montevallo in Alabama, and a Master of Fine Arts at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, in 2018. He now serves as Artist-in-Residence, Gallery Director and Instructor at Lyon College in Batesville, Arkansas.
Contact the gallery at seaislandscentergallery@uscb.eduor 843-521-3147.
