New and returning guests, welcome to the EMD Gallery at the Farmville Community Arts Council (FCAC). We are pleased to present Susan Martin Meggs’ Interplays, an exhibition about the places we know and the many ways we come to see them. Works are on view and for sale from September 27 through November 7, 2026.

 

Meggs describes her art as “strongly influenced by my surroundings as a sense of place.” She is interested in more than what a building or landscape looks like. A place also holds what we remember, what we felt there, and what we notice when we return. She calls this connection between place and self “place identity.” It runs through the work in this exhibition, even as the materials, moments in time, and locations change.

 

Light is the vehicle Meggs uses to explore that connection. In Cast Shadows, a series of oil paintings first inspired by the unique light from a solar eclipse, shadows of organic forms fall across man-made geometric surfaces. Hard architectural edges meet softer, irregular shapes. The shadows make some details clearer and others harder to pin down. Meggs calls this an “interplay between light and shadow as well as natural and man-made forms.” The paintings ask us to spend another moment with a view we might otherwise think we know.

 

Meggs’ Shadowbox Series was motivated by her SoHo loft’s expansive views of the city that, at night, become contiguous with the interior. Meggs states that “It felt like sitting inside of a snow globe.” The viewer is drawn into a similar position: looking outward from an interior private space toward a world that continues beyond it. Often deliberately unfocused, the distant lights, softened forms, and fragments of architecture represent an interplay between exterior/interior environments and lights and darks. The shadowbox-like structural layering is calculated to reveal these perceptual illusions.

 

Her pen, ink, and watercolor landscapes offer another way of looking. Many began as quick sketches made during travel. They record particular places, yet Meggs has found that viewers bring their own associations to them. As she puts it, people respond with their “own personal identification of place meaning.” Recognizing a familiar place can bring back a feeling or memory all your own.

 

Meggs has worked across painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, illustration, and exhibit design. She spent thirty years in New York City’s SoHo art community and is currently a Professor Emeritus at East Carolina University. That range is visible here, but the question connecting the work is easy to grasp: what happens to a place when the light changes, or when the person looking at it has changed?

 

Within Interplays, there is room for each visitor to answer that question differently. A window can frame a city without telling us everything about it. A shadow can make a familiar structure seem strange. A travel sketch can call up a memory of somewhere else. Meggs gives us the view, then lets us notice what we bring to it.

 

Find more of Susan’s work and creative experiences at www.martinmeggsfinearts.com

 

Or connect with her:

www.facebook.com/susanmartinmeggs www.instagram.com/meggssusanmartin/ www.linkedin.com/in/susan-martin-meggs-2039a937

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