Artist: Charles Clary
Exhibition Title: Be Kind Rewind!
Exhibition Dates: November 2 - December 11, 2026
Reception: November 5, 2026
Bio:
Charles Clary, he/him, was born in 1980 in Morristown, Tennessee. He received his BFA in painting with honors from Middle Tennessee State University and his MFA in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He has shown in exhibitions at Galerie Evolution-Pierre Cardin in Paris, France, the Netherlands’ CODA Museum Paper Biennial in 2021, the Shanghai Paper Biennial in 2021, Art of Paper Fair in New York City, and many other international, national, and regional juried, group, solo, and museum exhibitions. Clary won Top Prize at the 2016 ArtFields Competition in Lake City, SC, and in 2019, he won both the People’s Choice Award for 2D and the Merit Prize at ArtFields. He has also been named the South Arts 2024 South Carolina State Fellow and the South Carolina Arts Commission Fellow in Visual Arts for 2026. He recently sold three commissioned pieces to Google corporate offices, and he was named the HTC Distinguished Teacher-Scholar at Coastal Carolina University in 2022, the highest award bestowed upon a faculty member by the university. Clary has been featured in numerous print and Internet interviews, including Create! Magazine, Candyfloss, This is Colossal, WIRED magazine (US and UK), Hi Fructose, Beautiful Deay, and Bluecanvas Magazine. He has also been featured in publications including Paper Art III, 500 Paper Objects, Paper Works, Paper Art, Papercraft 2, and PUSH: Paper.
Charles has exhibited regionally, nationally, and internationally in numerous solo and group shows, is represented by Paradigm Gallery + Studio in Philadelphia, The Grand Bohemian Gallery in Greenville, SC, Charleston, SC, and Asheville, NC, AZART Gallery in NY, and R02 Gallery in Dallas, Texas. Clary currently lives and works in Conway, South Carolina, where he is a Full Professor of Studio Art and Associate Chair of Visual Arts at Coastal Carolina University.
Artist Statement:
In February of 2013, I lost both my mother and father two weeks apart from each other to smoking-related cancers. It was a devastating time in my life, but I channeled my grief into the conceptual ideas of my work. Cancer is a disease that is a perfectly structured killer; it is beautiful in its architecture but grotesque in its eventuality. I began to think about nostalgia, longing for a childhood I never had, and parents that I needed. My recent work is an exploration of the escapisms I used as a child to escape my everyday reality. I repurpose retro-pop culture VHS from my childhood to re-envision the movies and fiction that became my surrogate parents and allowed me to find order from my chaos, beauty from destruction, and hope for more joyous times.