JU’s Lily Kuonen to be featured in Times-Union, on Jacksonville area billboards in “Highway Gallery” art project

Another JU art professor’s work is being featured on digital billboards as part of “The Highway Gallery: A Public Art Experiment,” this time as a featured solo artist in September.

Lily Kuonen, assistant professor of foundations, will have her work shown on digital billboards beginning Sept. 1 throughout the Jacksonville area for the project, which is a public art collaboration between Clear Channel Outdoor and Florida Mining Gallery.

She’s also the subject of a Florida Times-Union story on her involvement in The Highway Gallery that is scheduled to run Sunday, Sept. 2.

“I will have five new works – text-based drawings — circulating on 26 digital billboards throughout Jacksonville. This is an exciting public art initiative,” Kuonen said. (SEE BILLBOARD LOCATIONS BELOW)

The program is the same one featuring artwork in August by JU sculpture professor Jim Benedict and former JU student Jesse Brantman (see Wave Weekly article at http://waveweekly.ju.edu/?p=1064).

Meanwhile, on Sept. 13, Kuonen will be included in a group show at the Herman Maril Gallery at University of Maryland. The show is called Counterconstructs: Modes of Painting.

Here’s an excerpt of the Curatorial Statement for the show, written and curated by Lauren Moore:

Stripped to its bare bones, a painting can be seen as merely a sum of its parts: wooden stretcher bars, raw canvas and paint. Responding to this notion, artist Lily Kuonen combines these primary materials with tools of the studio, equalizing their purposes in attempts to blur categorical and hierarchical distinctions. She explains, “It is no longer how one material is on top of the other, but rather how each is related to the other.” Through the liberation of her materials, Lily has developed a playful and experimental approach to art making. Her “PLAYNTINGS,” as she calls them, are the result of this process.

More information on Kuonen and her work can be found at LilyKuonen.com.