'Looking for You' - old and new photos by Rimas Zailskas

Hendersonville-based photographer Rimas Zailskas will display more 150 images old and new, including his most recent series — masked figures cavorting in a forest — in “Looking for You,” a new exhibition at Flood Gallery Fine Arts Center.

The show opens with an artist reception 6-9 p.m. Saturday, May 20. Shelby Stephenson, the North Carolina Poet Laureate, will sing and read his poetry at the event. Flood Gallery Fine Arts Center is at 2160 U.S. 70 near Swannanoa.

Zailskas and his wife Mary publish "Bold Life" and "Carolina Home + Garden," two local magazines. Zailskas' projects, which include editorial, portraiture and “strange” images, have previously been shown at Flood Gallery in Asheville and Upstairs Artspace in Tryon.

His "The Living Mask" solo show at Flood Gallery in Asheville in 2012 was composed of 30 pinhole portraits of people. "Asimulacrum" in 2014, the "flip side" of his previous exhibit, was made up of 20 black and white portraits whose large size provided intimate and penetrating look at his subjects.

"Looking for You," which runs through June 30, is an exploration of masks, showing portraits of people hiding their innermost personas behind exotic masks from around the world.

Stephenson will read from his forthcoming book of poetry, titled "Country." He grew up on a small farm near Benson, in the Coastal Plains of North Carolina. “Most of my poems come out of my background,” he said, “where memory and imagination play on one another." 
The state of North Carolina presented him with the 2001 North Carolina Award in Literature. He has also received the Bellday Poetry Prize, the Oscar Arnold Young Award, the Zoe Kincaid-Brockman Award, the Brockman-Campbell Award, the Bright Hill Press Chapbook Prize and the Playwright's Fund of North Carolina Chapbook Prize.