"Cycles"
The City of North Charleston’s Cultural Arts Department is pleased to announce that mixed media works by Charleston based artist Jirah Perkins will be on display at Park Circle Gallery from May 1-31, 2024. Jirah is the winner of the 2024 North Charleston Arts Fest Poster Design Competition and her winning design, PlayPen, will be featured in the exhibition, which is presented as a component of the annual North Charleston Arts Fest. A free public reception will be held at the gallery from 5-7pm on Saturday, May 4.
In her solo exhibition, titled Sowing Seeds, Jirah Perkins presents a collection of works that, through visual storytelling, explore the many layers of kinship, community, and identity. The featured works investigate the merging of human experiences and nature – the idea that we are constantly reimagining and cultivating our future from a personal lens and existing through a myriad of cyclical occurrences. We are often inadvertently sowing seeds through our individual and collective journeys here. In this body of work, the artist reflects on the thought of healing and liberating our inner child through everyday happenings and natural experimentation.
Jirah Perkins is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Charleston, SC. She has been creating ever since she was a child and now, through UJORII Fine Art, she experiments with a variety of different mediums creating pieces that incorporate bold colors, textures, and her photography archive to generate a sensory experience. "Ujorii" originates from the combination of ujima, meaning collective work and responsibility, and satori, which means sudden enlightenment and understanding. Jirah believes that as a society, it is our duty to cultivate the world as a collective. Her abstract and representational pieces embrace nostalgic themes of adolescence and Black Womanhood and are centered around many influences in her life – her sister, her child, her neighborhood, friends, ancestors, and beyond. Jirah’s paintings have been featured in venue throughout the Lowcountry, including the Saul Alexander Gallery, Piccolo Spoleto Juried Art Exhibition, MOJA Juried Arts Exhibition, Bintü Atelier, Redux Contemporary Arts Center, Founders Hall, and the Delta Life Center. She currently works from her studio at Public Works Art Center in Summerville, SC. Learn more about the artist at ujorii.com.
The Park Circle Gallery is located at 4820 Jenkins Avenue in North Charleston. Admission is free and free street parking is available on Jenkins Avenue in front of the gallery, as well as on the adjacent streets and in parking lots close by. Gallery hours are 11:00am-6:00pm Wednesday-Friday, and Noon-4:00pm on Saturday. For more information about PCG, call 843-637-3565 or email culturalarts@northcharleston.
