Month: May 2018

Categories
Arts

First Fridays: May 4

A selected collection of Dave Moore’s enamel, acrylic and mixed-media paintings are on view at the Music Resource Center through May. Courtesy artist

Dave Moore believes in the sensuality of painting.

“I want my paintings to look like paintings,” he says. “I am not trying
to fool anyone into believing that an object is on the canvas. The painting is the object and the experience, whatever the subject may be.”

A self-described “art history nut” who loves “all styles, time periods, cultures, movements,” and the fact that it’s all still ongoing, Moore particularly loves experimenting with materials, seeing what paint can do in a certain environment.

Through the month of May, a series of enamel, acrylic and mixed-media paintings on wood panel that Moore has made over the last decade will be on view at the Music Resource Center, including “Current” (pictured), which Moore says is the result of “paint sliding around and drying weirdly in really cold temperatures.”

From that sensual starting point, the rest of the art-making process “becomes a process of editing and problem-solving to finish the painting…it’s like a game or a puzzle,” he says. “But of course, there is always nature, landscape, myth, love, music, everything—to get inspired by.”

Moore is currently reworking some of the very large paintings that he made during the same time period, ones that won’t be included in this particular show, which he thinks of as a preview of what’s to come. It’s “like a period on a sentence,” he says. “Then I can start the next paragraph.” 

First Fridays: May 4

FF Angelo Jewelry 220 E. Main St. “Striation Series: Brazilian Tides & North Shore Waters,” featuring intimate drawings and mosaic mirrors by Eileen Butler. 5:30-7:30pm.

Annie Gould Gallery 121B S. Main St., Gordonsville. An exhibition of works by Brigitte Turquois Freeman, Hannah Huthwaite, Mary Jane Zander, Carol Barber and Ted Asnis. Through June 14.

Art on the Trax 5784 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Nesting In II,” featuring mixed-media works of bird nests by Nancy Spahr. Opens May 12.

FF The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. “For Sale: An Auction to Benefit The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative,” featuring work by Jeremy Taylor, Lana Lambert, Marie Landragin, Brielle DuFlon, Annie Temmink, Jesse Wells, VM Fisk, Bolanle Adeboye and many others. 5:30-9:30pm.

Buck Mountain Episcopal Church 4133 Earlysville Rd., Earlysville. “Welcome Spring!,” a multimedia group show of work by Buck Mountain Episcopal Church artists. Opens April 11.

The Charlottesville Women’s Initiative 1101 E. High St. “Halcyon Explored,” featuring works from the Fiber and Stitch Collective artists. Opens April 8.

FF Chroma Projects 103 W. Water St. “Fluid Passages,” featuring Scott Smith’s black and white and subtly pigmented photographs that are an homage to the phenomena of the physical world. 5-7pm.

FF CitySpace Art Gallery 100 Fifth St. NE. Featuring two exhibitions, Charlottesville City Schools’ ARTQUEST and the Bluebird Project auction. 5:30-7:30pm.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “The Blue Ridge and Beyond,” featuring posters of Virginia locations by graphic designer and illustrator Barbara Shenefield. Opens May 12.

FF C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “The Joy of Color and Light,” featuring functional glass art by Norma Geddes. 6-8pm.

FF C’ville Coffee 1301 Harris St. An exhibition of oil paintings by Caroline Planting. 4:30-6pm.

FF Dovetail Design + Cabinetry 309 E. Water St. An exploration of art with L. Michelle Geiger. 5-7pm.

FF Fellini’s 200 E. Market St. “Pets and Wildlife,” a show of works in charcoal, conte, graphite and pastel by Sabrina Acton and Emily Gordon. 5:30-7pm.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “The Art of Protest,” an exhibition highlighting the ways in which artists have both documented and participated in the protests of the 20th century; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.

FF The Garage 100 W. Jefferson St. “Scaffold,” a group show curated by Matt Kleberg featuring work by artists who approach image-making in a manner either directly or indirectly related to architecture. 5:30-7:30pm.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. An exhibition of new work by Frank Walker that addresses the notion that black bodies are disposable and easily erased. 5-7pm. Opens May 5.

FF Joseph Joseph & Joseph Antiques 134 10th St. NW. A show of paintings from Edward Thomas, dating from 1998 to the present. 5-7pm.

FF Kardinal Hall 722 Preston Ave. “The Funny Farm,” featuring paintings by Sarah Sweet. 5-7pm.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Beyond Dreaming: The Rise of Indigenous Australian Art in the United States,” revealing the ways in which, since 1988, Indigenous Australian artists have forged one of the most globally significant art movements of our time; and “Repositories of Recognition,” an installation by Carol McGregor constructed from linen tea towels and natural possum skins.

FF Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. An exhibition of Jessie Coles’ latest still-life paintings that are anything but still. 1-5pm.

Live Arts 123 E. Water St. “Conversations in Wood & Paint,” featuring new work from sculptor Alan Box Levine and painter Jennifer Esser.

FF McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Recent Works in Oil,” paintings by Megan Elizabeth Read that explore vulnerability, solitude and paralysis in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Traces from Nature,” featuring prints on fiber and paper by Lotta Helleberg and drawings on clayboard by Erica Lohan, in the Lower Hall North; “Faces and Figures: Life Studies in the Studio,” an exhibition of works by Kerney Rhoden in the Lower Hall South Gallery; and in the Upper Hall North and South Galleries, an eclectic mixed-media show of art by students from local area high schools. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF Milli Coffee Roasters 400 Preston Ave. Ste. 150. “Sacred Lamentations,” featuring lino block prints by Toby Westberry that attempt to provoke thought on the complexities of human ethics. 6-8pm.

Moon Maiden’s Delights 112 W. Main St. “Moths: From the Archives” by Maryanna Williams, featuring slightly fantastical renderings of moths.

FF Music Resource Center 105 Ridge St. An exhibition of Dave Moore’s enamel, acrylic and mixed-media paintings on wood panel. 5-7pm.

FF New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. An exhibition of watercolor paintings by Leenie Black. 5-7:30pm.

Piedmont Virginia Community College V. Earl Dickinson Building 501 College Dr. An exhibition of graphic design, ceramics, sculpture, painting and more by PVCC students.

Robertson Hall John P. and Stephanie F. Connaughton Gallery, UVA. “Scene and Unseen,” featuring oil paintings by Harry Miller and watermedia works by Karen Rosasco.

FF Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the main gallery, “Monument,” an exhibition of landscape/cityscape paint collages by Erik Benson; in the Dové Gallery, “Mom Brain,” featuring graphite paintings by Melissa Cooke Benson; and in The Backroom @SSG, a show of sculpture by Lily Erb. 5:30-7:30pm.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. “Nostalgia,” a show of acrylic paintings by Joan Menard that evoke sentimental memories. Opens May 5.

FF Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Mother Mother,” a group show in which 14 female artists explore the idea of “mother” through photography, collage, installation, sound, video, painting, illustration, performance, sculpture and book art. 5-7pm.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist 717 Rugby Rd. An exhibition of abstract paintings by Karen Conners.

FF Top Knot Studio 103 Fifth St. SE. “In the Land Where Poppies Bloom,” an exhibition by Golara Haghtalab featuring acrylic, spray paint and watercolor works on canvas that explore feelings of childhood nostalgia. 6-9pm.

FF VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. “Visit The City Zoo at VMDO,” an exhibition of mixed-media makerspace projects by Venable Elementary School third-graders. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “In the Homeland We’ve Never Seen,” featuring paintings on paper and hand-colored multi-plate etchings by Murad Khan Mumtaz. 5-7:30pm.

Westminster Canterbury of the Blue Ridge 250 Pantops Mountain Rd. “The Skies Have It: Sunrises and Sunsets of Virginia,” featuring work by Randy Baskerville.

FF Yellow Cardinal Gallery 301 E. Market St. “Color into Spring,” an exhibition of work celebrating spring after a long winter. 4-7pm.

FF First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions.

Categories
Arts

Motherhood is at the center of Studio IX’s May exhibition

“Leaking Madonna” by elin o’Hara slavick is on display in “Mother Mother” at Studio IX through May 27. The opening reception is on Friday, May 4. Courtesy of the artist

When you imagine a mother, what do you picture?

A woman up to her elbows in soapy dishwasher with a baby strapped to her chest or a toddler clinging to her ankle? A woman who wheels and deals like a boss until she sprints off to daycare? Or do you think of your own mother? The mothers you know? Our universal longing for mother-love?

“It’s different for everybody,” says Ashley Florence, the curator of the group show “Mother Mother” at Studio IX. “We can’t limit ourselves into thinking that the idea of ‘mother’ says dirty dishes and screaming child. Because it’s just so much bigger than that.”

As a Charlottesville-based photographer, Florence sees the theme come up often in her work. “Not necessarily just motherhood, but my mother, and being mothered, and what is transmitted through that relationship. It’s something all of us, men and women alike, have experienced.”

But the subject, she says, feels fairly taboo in the art world. Unless it’s rendered in a smart enough way, “the basic experience of motherhood, or the mother in its everyday-ness,” she says, tends to get ignored.

The oversight prompted Florence to conceive a group show featuring female artists in her network, and so “Mother Mother” was born.

Fourteen women explore the idea of mother across a range of mediums, from sculpture, painting and illustration to photography, video, performance and collage. Contributors include Lenka Clayton, Sarah Boyts Yoder, elin o’Hara slavick, Jina Valentine, Tracy Spencer Stonestreet, Laura Dillon Rogers, Lisa Ryan, Allyson Mellberg Taylor, Meredith McKown, Ashley Florence, Sage Latane Hastert, Amanda Monroe Finn, Holly Bass and Jamila Felton.

“These artists have really approached it in so many intelligent and sensitive ways. There’s this tenderness, and connection, and humanity, but there’s also tenacity, and split personality, and there’s violence when it goes wrong,” Florence says. “The commonality really is the polarity and the vastness, because it’s not an identifiable, nameable, easy-to-talk-about-able subject.”

The experience of motherhood ranges as widely as the show’s themes.

Nervous limitation is the center of Clayton’s video project, which follows her in different environments. She lets her son walk away from her until she gets nervous, then runs after him and literally measures the distance she can be from him.

In “The Split,” Boyts Yoder explores the everyday duality of being a mother. “You have the person that you were before you had kids. That person doesn’t go away,” Florence says. “Then you have the person that you are with your kids. You’re split between personalities, split between feelings and split between pure joy and pure terror at the same time.”

In a different video, queer mother Spencer Stonestreet demonstrates the burden of being expected to be a traditional Southern woman. Her work features a mother dragging furniture and housewares for three miles through a southern landscape.

“There’s heaviness that is present in some of the work, but there’s also lightness,” Florence says. “It comes around the whole idea of mother, that there’s this weight we bear, and there’s the lightness of being.”

A mother herself, the curator of the show identifies with many of the feelings expressed by the artists. “Once you become a mother, you realize that a lot of your fears and a lot of your hopes are exactly the same as everybody else’s. You’re really having a lot of the same feelings as the next person.”

However, her contribution to “Mother Mother” doesn’t focus on her own motherhood. Instead, she’s showing work about her mother: two chromogenic prints with etched glass, each with a piece of writing on it. The first reads: “I told mommy I’m going to have a black baby when I grow up.” On the second: “She said just wait for your grandfather to die.”

“For me, that piece is about my innocence being interrupted by racism and racist thought,” Florence says. “How language is part of that, and how we transmit ideas into our children’s minds through our mouths and our language.”

Dillon Rogers also hints at the subtle influence of mothers with a series of photographs that overlay images of herself and her children. The subjects are nude, though “you can’t really see much of anything except the form,” Florence says.

“In one image, [Rogers’] body is totally in focus and very present. In the other one, she’s like a mist. And it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s totally it. When you think of the growing relationship you had with your mother, she was a person, but she also wasn’t.

“Because mothers are human, but they’re also not human. They’re something more than that.”

Categories
Arts

Metal band Salvaticus finds beauty in the order of things

Salvaticus plays a farewell-for-now show at Magnolia House on Saturday, May 5. Photo by Tristan Williams

It’s the day after Earth Day, and Kevin Ardrey, Brian Weaver and Carter Felder —three of the four members of local black metal band Salvaticus—sit on a worn wooden bench under an open-air roofed shelter at Ivy Creek Natural Area. The dogwoods and redbuds have bloomed, clouds move through the blue sky and a breeze shakes pollen from the trees while birds twitter.

It seems purposeful that Salvaticus—a band that takes its name from a derivative of the Latin word “silviticus,” meaning wild, or untamed—would ask to convene at a nature center to discuss its music, which concentrates (and comments) on the relationship between human civilization and the natural world.

Salvaticus got its start in spring 2010, when guitarist Weaver and drummer Ardrey decided to break off from another band and do their own thing. If music is a language, Ardrey says, he and Weaver speak “the exact same dialect”—black metal—and they found it easy to communicate creatively. Over the years, they’ve added other musicians who speak that tongue, including Felder, also a guitarist, and current bassist Ben Kidd.

There’s something captivating about the expressiveness of black metal, they say. There are many subgenres of heavy metal: fast and aggressive (thrash metal, speed metal, power metal); bone-crunchingly heavy and crushing (death metal); slow and somber (doom metal). Black metal, Weaver explains, is more dynamic—it can be fast, aggressive and devastating at some points; slow, subtle and mellow at others, conveying positivity and negativity, hope and fear, all at once.

Ardrey, Weaver and Felder compare black metal to classical music, which they all listen to and love. “Classical music and black metal tickle the same nerve for me,” says Ardrey. “I listen to both for similar reasons: They spur thought; they’re more intellectual musical pursuits than mainstream pop music. I like music that makes me think and ponder and feel, not just with my mind but with my heart. I like music that takes you on a journey.”

And while not all black metal bands explore that dynamism, Salvaticus does, and it’s evident on the band’s forthcoming album, Ordo Naturalis (“Natural Order”).

A vinyl release is pending, but the band sold cassettes on its recent tour, which concludes with a show at Magnolia House this Saturday. It’ll be Salvaticus’ last Charlottesville show for a while, as Ardrey and Weaver are moving to Olympia, Washington, this summer, though they still plan to write and record with Felder and Kidd.

Ordo Naturalis builds thematically on the band’s 2014 debut, Hidden Manna, an ode to the connections between mankind and nature. Ordo Naturalis addresses the conflict between the two, specifically mankind’s failure to live in harmony with the natural world.

There’s “Collapse,” a vigorous track that incorporates one-off variations of melodies and riffs within a typical A-B-A-B structure, and the raw, aggressive “Inflict,” with lyrics about the pointlessness of modern consumerism, how humans mistreat one another as much as they mistreat nature.

Ardrey, Weaver and Felder credit much of the group’s thematic growth to Luke Smith, the band’s vocalist, lyricist and bass player who died in January 2017, not long after recording his parts for Ordo Naturalis. Smith was the youngest member of the band, and Felder says “he still had that youthful anger that was needed to awaken” people.

On the record, Smith is audibly “upset and pissed off, and has just had it with life and with humans in general,” says Ardrey.

Not long before his death, Smith started putting a mic behind Ardrey’s drum kit during practices for their other band, Blooddrunk Trolls. “It seemed impossible at first,” Ardrey says of drumming and scream-singing at the same time (it is difficult), and he didn’t understand why Smith kept encouraging him to do so.

“It’s almost like he set you up or something,” says Felder, because after Smith died, Ardrey took on the duties of lead vocalist, learning not only Smith’s lyrics but his delivery of them.

“Every time we get together and play the songs, I’m channeling him and trying to do him justice. It’s his memory,” says Ardrey.

Ordo Naturalis is on the surface “a pretty angry record,” says Felder, but there’s more to it than that. “In some of the [instrumentation], you have the hope.”

It’s true, Weaver says, pointing at some nearby robins hopping across the grass—there are even bird sounds and spring peepers on “Ages of Ages,” the record’s penultimate song and the thematic climax of the album, a mellow, somber imagining of the state of the Earth after mankind’s extinction, as the natural world begins to regenerate.

Salvaticus has had to undergo its own regeneration over the last year and a half, relying on black metal as a conduit to a complete, realistic emotional and intellectual journey.

“We’re just trying to do what comes natural to us,” says Weaver, and along the way “convey a message that we think is worthwhile, express a truth that we believe in. Hopefully that resonates with people.”

Categories
News

Rob Jiranek out as Daily Progress publisher

A little more than two years ago, former C-VILLE Weekly co-owner Rob Jiranek was named publisher of the Daily Progress. Today, the announcement of a new publisher and Jiranek’s abrupt departure “to pursue other opportunities” caught many at the Progress by surprise.

“I don’t have any comment,” says BH Media Regional Vice President Terry Jamerson when she was reached in Roanoke, where she’s publisher of the Roanoke Times, and asked about how long the management change had been in the works. “I don’t think it would be appropriate.”

Jamerson directed a reporter to the press release on the Progress website, which names Peter Yates, a Woodberry Forest grad like Jiranek, as the new publisher.

Yates started his career at the Progress 33 years ago, and since 2000 has been the editor and general manager of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg. He was also president of the Page Shenandoah Newspaper Corporation. The sale of the family-owned News-Record and the Winchester Star to Ogden Newspapers was announced in March.

Jiranek was a co-owner of C-VILLE from 1995 to 2006. He left for the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, where he was vice president of sales and strategic planning. There, he introduced monetization of content in 2007, but sponsorships for news seemed to fall through after editors objected and other media outlets reported on the breaching of the traditionally impermeable wall between editorial and advertising.

Earlier this year at the Progress, the wall between advertising and news came down—literally—at its Rio Road office.

Jiranek, like most newspaper publishers, was dealing with dwindling circulation, which had dropped from 21,274 in 2012 to 14,693 in 2016. Last year, the Progress, which is owned by Warren Buffett’s BH Media, laid off three employees.

It’s also seen three editors during Jiranek’s brief tenure. Nick Mathews, who also left to pursue other opportunities, served as editor for 14 months through July 2016 and is now FOIA officer at UVA. He was succeeded by Wes Hester, who lasted about as long and also went to UVA as its deputy spokesperson. Aaron Richardson was named editor in January.

 

Categories
News

Booze bracelet: Cantwell’s public intoxication charge violates terms of bond

Crying Nazi Chris Cantwell bids an anti-Semitic adieu to Charlottesville. Photo by Eze Amos

“Drunk,” “loaded” and “liquored up” were all words used in Albemarle County Circuit Court to describe the state of “Crying Nazi” Chris Cantwell during his Loudoun County arrest last month that nearly landed the self-proclaimed racist back in the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.

At an April 25 hearing, Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert Tracci said good behavior was a condition of the $25,000 bond Cantwell was granted in December. He has been ordered to stay in Leesburg while he awaits his trial for allegedly pepper spraying two people at the August 11 torch-lit white supremacist rally on UVA Grounds.

The New Hampshire man was allegedly carrying a can of tactical pepper spray when he walked in front of traffic and was nearly struck by two vehicles. He was charged with public swearing and intoxication March 31 in Leesburg, according to Tracci.

Cantwell called it a “gross exaggeration,” and said he was walking from Bunker Sports Cafe to his residence, which is less than a mile away. He entered a 7-Eleven, and he claims he said, “Don’t buy cigarettes, stupid,” aloud to himself in front of police, and was arrested outside the store.

“Did he misbehave and get liquored up? Sure,” said his attorney, Elmer Woodard. “But that doesn’t mean he’s a threat to the public.”

Judge Cheryl Higgins found it to be a violation of his bond, and ordered Cantwell to wear an alcohol monitoring bracelet along with the GPS monitor he already wears. He may not consume any more alcohol while out on bond.

During the hearing, a police officer testified he was contacted by an FBI agent who believed Cantwell had exceeded the 22-mile radius he’s allowed to roam, but Jeff Lenert, a partner at Central Virginia Monitoring, testified that none of the data he collected in March showed Cantwell out of his permitted zone.

Tracci also argued that Cantwell was using social media to threaten and intimidate others, including the victims of his pending criminal case.

The prosecutor showed the judge a photo that Cantwell reposted on the web of a little girl who appeared to be protesting gun violence at the March for Our Lives, and who held a sign that said, “Am I next?” Cantwell’s online response? “One can hope.”

Another post referred to gassing “kikes and trannies.”

“I make jokes for a living,” Cantwell told the judge. “It’s what I do. I’m a professional entertainer.”

Woodard called Emily Gorcenski to the stand, who is a victim in the pepper spray accusation. He asked her to state her name and immediately excused her.

Higgins was quick to reprimand Woodard, and the attorney said he was simply proving that Gorcenski wasn’t too intimidated by Cantwell to come to his hearing.

Said Higgins, “Maybe because there are four bailiffs here.”

She ordered that Cantwell may not contact the victims in the case, refer to them on the web or use direct or indirect intimidation or threat tactics.

Woodard said the order infringed on Cantwell’s First Amendment rights and noted that Gorcenski is permitted to continue posting anything she wants about Cantwell. The attorney asked his client if there are also people who criticize him online.

Said Cantwell, “That would be the understatement of the century.”

Higgins also granted Tracci’s motion to quash Woodard’s request for all electronic data and conversations between the two victims in Cantwell’s case. The judge called it a “fishing expedition” and ordered the complainants to only provide the photos and videos they used to identify Cantwell as their attacker.

His trial is set for August 13.