The Oratorio Society of Virginia pairs two contrasting compositions of Latin mass in The Choral Mass: Old & New. First, Gioachino Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle, a large-scale work with “joyful flourishes and masterful counterpoint.” Then, Arvo Pärt’s Missa syllabica, an early example of the Estonian composer’s introspective and meditative musical style. Michael Slon directs, accompanied by several guest artists, including soprano Karli Forte, mezzo-soprano Melanie Ashkar, tenor Jamison Walker, and bass Jacob Surzyn.
Friday 5/5. $10-37, 8pm. St. Thomas Aquinas Church, 401 Alderman Rd. oratoriosociety.org
Jing Shui, organizer of Asia Weekend for All. Supplied photo.
The first Asia Weekend for All kicks off with a community celebration of Asian art and culture. Founder and organizer Jing Shui of JSVA Art says the intent of the event is to promote intercultural understanding and build strong relationships through art and culture, while having fun and getting to know more about each other. Activities include a live figure drawing session, brief talks about Asian art and culture with Shui and other guest artists, including Robert Bricker, Tori Cherry, Michael Williams, and more. Attendees can then enjoy Asian foods and beverages, and bid on artwork during the silent auction.
Saturday 5/6. Free, 10am–2pm. Studio 28, McGuffey Art Center, 201 Second St. NW. asiaweekendforall.com
Successful husband-and-wife duo Suz Slezak and David Wax of David Wax Museum drop their most radio-ready effort yet. You Must Change Your Life is a catchy, hook-heavy reimagining of David Wax Museum’s signature sound—a Latin-infused take on American folk. The record transitions seamlessly from quirky pop anthems, like the album’s title track, to more traditional Museum songs such as “Luanne,” the first single. The toe-tapping continues throughout the record’s 13-song tracklist.
Saturday 5/6. $18-20, 8pm. The Southern Café & Musical Hall, 103 First St. S. thesoutherncville.com
Rachel Beanland will discuss The House Is on Fire on May 6 at New Dominion Bookshop, in conversation with author Bruce Holsinger. Photo by Tania del Carmen Fernandez.
A deeply researched book, The House Is on Fire is Richmond-based author Rachel Beanland’s gorgeous new historical novel, constructed out of the archives and her own narrative license. Set in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811, the book traces four characters and their communities as they struggle in the aftermath of the historic fire that destroyed the Richmond Theater and resulted in the deaths of more than 70 people, including the governor. At the time, it was the largest disaster that had occurred in the United States, drawing national attention for the significant loss of life and far-reaching impact.
“I learned about the Richmond Theater fire on the very first day I arrived in Richmond, way back in 2007,” Beanland says. “I had flown in for a job interview and spent an afternoon driving around town with a realtor. As we were passing Monumental Church, the realtor pointed and said, ‘There used to be a theater there.’ He relayed the basic facts of the fire, and I remember being immediately taken with the story.”
But it wasn’t until 2020 when Beanland decided to write about it. “I had been in the early stages of writing another novel, which was going to require a lot of travel to get right, and when all air travel ceased, I started to get nervous,” she says. “I began thinking about novels I could set in my own backyard.”
This interest ultimately led Beanland to conduct research around the fire—through the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, among other sources—which she incorporates throughout the story in large and small ways, carefully balanced with intimately human stories of tragedy and resilience.
“People’s race, gender, and class had much to do with whether they lived or died that night,” she says. “So, as I thought about how I’d structure the novel, I knew I wanted to write characters whose stories encompassed these different points of view.”
The characters whose lives and struggles the author braids together are also drawn from and inspired by recorded history. Beanland says she decided to follow a 14-year-old stagehand, who played a role in setting the fire; a middle-aged widow of means, who is in the expensive (and hard-to-escape) box seats; a young, enslaved maid, who is sitting in the gallery, against her will; and a middle-aged, enslaved blacksmith, who runs to the building to help. ”For me, it is both a challenge and a treat to weave what I really did know about them into the larger, fictional narrative.”
In addition to these protagonists, the novel features a strong supporting cast of characters who are richly embodied by the author’s writing, as well as expert scene-setting in historic Richmond and surrounding areas that locals familiar with the area now will find especially interesting.
Embracing the language of the historical record and exploring the power of the pen, Beanland notes that she “played with syntax [and] … excerpted paragraphs from real inquest reports, newspaper articles, and fliers, so that readers have some sense of what the written word really sounded like two centuries ago.”
The novel interrogates a number of the power structures at work in Richmond at this time, teasing out some of the structural oppressions and horrors faced by enslaved Black men, women, and children, as well as women, generally, who lacked agency and were utterly reliant on husbands and fathers to make legal and medical decisions for them.
“It should be noted that I was also writing this book during the Black Lives Matter protests, and watching them play out in Richmond was not just an emotional experience but an educational one,” says Beanland. “Here I was, doing research on the lives of enslaved people living in the city in 1811, and at times, it felt like I could draw a straight line between what was happening in the city in the early 19th century and what was happening in the summer of 2020.”
In the four storylines that intermingle across the book, the author goes to great lengths to empower her main characters—each of whom is oppressed because of their race or gender—by celebrating their values and ethics, in the cases of Gilbert and Jack, or by filling gaps in the historical record with their speculative heroic actions, in the cases of Sally and Cecily.
Combining the historic record with empathetic characters whose traumas feel painfully contemporary at times, Beanland has crafted a novel that is a fast-paced and enthralling prompt to consider how we act in the face of tragedy.
“Life, in general, felt very fragile [in 2020], and I couldn’t help but channel a lot of my fears and anxieties into these characters, who are living through their own terrible ordeal,” she says. “Calamities—of all kinds—have a way of stripping us bare, of showing us what is essential, and of bringing out the very best and the very worst in us.”
Josh Ritter will play from the new record, Spectral Lines, with his Royal City Band at the Jefferson Theater on Tuesday. Publicity photo.
It’s a sunny day in Amsterdam when Josh Ritter checks in with C-VILLE, taking a phone call while sitting along one of the city’s many canals. When reached in early April, the Americana tunesmith was on a solo tour in Europe, the country where he first found success, playing with the likes of Joan Baez and Glen Hansard in the early 2000s.
A restless creative, Ritter juggles his prolific musical output with painting and work as a best-selling novelist (his latest book, The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All, came out in 2021), but right now he’s focused on his new album. Spectral Lines. Released on April 28, Ritter’s 11th studio effort finds the poetic lyricist in a deeply reflective state, in songs that first took shape while the singer-songwriter was dealing with the loss of his mother and the uncertainty of early pandemic isolation.
But throughout the album’s 10 tracks, Ritter channels emotional turmoil into an empathetic look at the universal aspects of loneliness and existential uncertainty, and the accompanying music perfectly sets the mood. Working with producer Sam Kassirer, Ritter shapes the songs around celestial piano fills and waves of synth, resulting in atmospheric, free-flowing arrangements that move beyond the roots-based leanings of his earlier work. He’ll perform at the Jefferson on Tuesday, May 9.
C-VILLE: You asked fans to cover your new song “Honey, I Do” before they heard it, giving them the lyrics and basic sheet music, and then asking them to post videos of their interpretations. How did you come up with this unique idea?
Josh Ritter: I personally think when you have a verse you should be able to write it down and have it leap off the page. So I was interested in seeing what people could do with it, and I was blown away. People interpreted it in so many ways, but at the heart of it, it was just for fun.
Heartbreak is something we all feel to a certain degree at some points in our lives, and as a thesis for the whole record I was trying to share how I feel sometimes. I was reaching outwards and starting a conversation and also making a statement that in many ways we’re all the same.
Sonically, Spectral Lines has a mellow, atmospheric mood, with many songs flowing together. How did this musical direction take shape?
This record came together far differently than any other I’ve done. The seed was planted during the early days of the pandemic, so I didn’t know how we were going to record the songs. I wrote [fourth track] “For Your Soul” when I was back home in Idaho while my mom was dying, and at the time I had no way to get into a studio. I started to share the ideas with Sam Kassirer, who I hadn’t worked with as a producer in over 10 years. I knew he would be the only one who would get them, so in his hands they started to take shape.
We decided to work on small batches of songs and create them in a certain style. I wanted them to flow together like a walk down the hallway of my mind at that time. And I wanted to create something that represented that there had been a change in peoples’ lives.
How do you balance different areas of creativity—music, painting, writing prose?
Day to day, it’s what you can do with little chunks of time. When I’m home I’ll paint for a couple hours while the kids are at school, or I’ll write for 15 minutes. Then if I get deeper with an album or a novel, collaborators come in or I go where the work leads me. But those short times during the day are fun and really make me happy.
You worked with the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir on his solo album Blue Mountain. What did you take away from that experience?
He’s a truly generous artist and an inspiration. I got a chance to send him what I consider some cowboy songs that I had written, and he was really receptive. When I was working on those, I was imagining him in a Western movie. He was a kindred spirit in doing what he wants to do and following his wanderlust.
You’re releasing your 11th album dating back to 1999. How has songwriting changed for you in the past decade-plus?
Writing of any kind is hard to discern. You just put things down and move on. I can’t describe it from my own angle. I just know I feel an electricity and love writing. I’ve felt that way ever since I was 16 or 17 and realized I could share my own stories and play guitar and sing what I actually felt. That still remains the most profound experience.
Margaret Embree at McGuffey. All images courtesy of the galleries.
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library 2450 Old Ivy Rd. “Women Making Books” explores women’s contributions to English and North American bookmaking from the mid-18th to the 21st centuries, “Visions of Progress,” and other permanent exhibitions.
Cavallo Gallery & Custom Framing 117 S. Main St., Gordonsville. Original works on paper and canvas by central Virginia artist Megan Davies. Through May.
Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third St. SE. “You Have to Break Your Heart Until It Opens,” works by sculptor Sophie Gibson and painter and collage artist Amie Oliver. Through May 26. First Fridays opening.
The Connaughton Gallery Rouss & Robertson Halls, UVA Grounds. “Healing Nature,” acrylic on canvas and oil on canvas by Henry Wingate and Rick Morrow. Through June 15.
Create Gallery InBio, 700 Harris St., Ste. 102. “BozArts for Literacy” features work from Betty Brubach, Julia Kindred, Brita Lineberger, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Ellen Moore Osborne, and Shirley to benefit Literacy Volunteers. Through June.
Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Full Bloom,” pottery by Stuart Howe and “Meanderings, Exploration in Acrylics and Pastels,” paintings by Mae Stoll. Through May. Meet the artists May 13 at 1pm.
Mae Stoll at Crozet Artisan Depot.
C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Going With The Flow,” jeweler Natalie Darling’s new collection. Through May. First Fridays demonstration at 5pm.
The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd., UVA Grounds. New exhibitions include “Look Three Ways: Maya Painted Pottery,” “Processing Abstraction,” “N’dakinna Landscapes Acknowledged,” and “Radioactive Inactives: Patrick Nagatani & Andrée Tracey.”
Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Axis Mundi,” new work by New York-based artists Dorothy Robinson, Kurt Steger, and Meg Hitchcock. Through June 15. Reception May 13, 4pm.
Dorothy Robinson at Les Yeux Du Monde.
Loving Cup Vineyard & Winery 3340 Sutherland Rd., North Garden. “Vineyards and Springtime” showcases oils and acrylics by Julia Kindred and Matalie Deane, respectively. Through May 28. First Fridays opening.
McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Smith Gallery, “Cadence,” mixed-media paintings by Margaret Embree. In the first floor hallway galleries, art from Innisfree Village. In the second floor hallway gallery, the All High Schools Art Show features work from Charlottesville area high school students. In the Associate Gallery, “Green,” works from associate artists. Through Ma 28.
Vivien Wong at McGuffey.
New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. “Fever Creek,” an exhibition of prints by Jackson Taylor. Through May 25. First Fridays opening and artist talk.
Phaeton Gallery 114 Old Preston Ave. “Hope Olson: Art From the Garden,” a solo exhibition showcasing acrylic on canvas and mixed-media works. Through May 20. Opens April 14.
PVCC Gallery V. Earl Dickinson Building, 501 College Dr. In the North and South galleries, the 2023 Student Exhibition. On May 5, the PVCC Pottery Club’s Bowls and Bunuelos Fundraiser. Choose a handmade bowl and get a sweet Mexican fritter.
Quirk Gallery 499 W. Main St. “Trial & Error,” mixed-media works by Frank Phillips. Through June 18.
Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Dové gallery, “House Jungle,” paintings by Brittany Fan. In the main gallery, “Mirabilia naturae (Wonders of Nature),” works by Lara Call Gastinger, Giselle Gautreau, Elizabeth Perdue. Through May 19.
Studio Ix 969 Second St. SE. “GARDENS + VISTAS,” two bodies of recent work by Anna Hillard Bryant. Through May 28. First Fridays opening.
Anna Hillard Bryant at Studio Ix.
Vault Virginia 300 E. Main St. “Tom Chambers and Fax Ayres: Everything is Extraordinary,” photographs using theater and light to describe the fantastical. Through May 16. First Fridays opening.
Visible Records hosts a poetry reading on May 6 featuring Irène Mathieu and Lauren Alleyne, in celebration of Mathieu’s new poetry collection, milk tongue. Supplied photo.
Poet, pediatrician, and public health researcher Irène Mathieu follows her three award-winning poetry collections with milk tongue, a new book of poetry.
Referencing the milky covering that can occur on an infant’s tongue after feeding, milk tongue is a collection that explores parenthood, family, and the intricacies of existence in this world, filled with Mathieu’s precise, embodied language. In “second attempt at going home,” Mathieu muses:
…here is one way to go home:
find your brother, find a bench (any),
pull the yarn out of each other’s throats until
your language finds its hooves again,
hear your common gallop over the land.
Playful with form, ranging from traditional Japanese haibun style to more experimental forms, Mathieu remains attentive to the physical space of the page, and committed to examining what it means to be human in the wild, in the world, as we experience climate collapse and other crises amidst the distinct pleasures and routines of being alive. In “clockmelt,” she writes:
…faith is the
knowledge that this precise loneliness will
circle back around at regular intervals
divinable only by the rain that starts at midnight.
in a midnight assemblé on my retinas, the future
& irredeemable past blaze in and out of focus
like this year’s three hundred wildfires—controlled only
by the winds.
In “Labor Day,” she considers:
it’s hard work remembering to be human,
and that’s what we’re here to celebrate today, with chlorine & grill
at the edge of a wild we crave.
In advance of her upcoming book launch for milk tongue at Visible Records on May 6, we spoke with Mathieu about the forthcoming collection:
C-VILLE: In what ways has motherhood influenced or changed your writing practice, in addition to influencing some of the themes you explore in this collection?
Irène Mathieu: The poems in milk tongue were all written before I became a mother, but my writing practice hasn’t changed all that much since my daughter was born. My job as a physician doesn’t leave much time for large stretches of uninterrupted writing, so my practice has always been to jot things down in the margins of my days, and to delve into the work during small windows of time. Logistically speaking, motherhood has simply increased the intensity of that pressured way of writing. Although I wasn’t a parent when I wrote milk tongue (there are a couple of poems in it that I wrote while pregnant), this book very much arose from a sort of pre-parenting psychic space. That is, the book is evidence of my grappling with the ethics surrounding some of the mundane desires of adulthood, including the desire to have children, while living in a society in which inequality and separation from the greater-than-human world are foundational conditions.
What led you to the different styles and forms that show up in this book? Are there any that were completely new to you?
Haibun is a Japanese form that I came across early on in the writing of milk tongue. Traditionally these poems describe a journey, and they consist of a prose poem punctuated by a haiku-like stanza that contains some sort of key insight. A lot of my poetry is inspired by travel, but I was also thinking about the metaphorical journey that is adulting, so I found myself returning to haibun as a way to explore these themes. Other than the haibun, I was mostly experimenting with forms and styles I created as I was writing. I was really interested in how the way a poem is physically laid out on the page can add to its layers of meaning, and to the experience of reading it. I love that in this sense poetry also can be a visual form of art!
How does language meet the challenges of grappling with our warming days, diverging selves, and unreliable histories and futures? How does it fall short?
For me, language is a transformational medium. That is, through writing I discover what I need to (un)learn and how I need to grow in order to make more useful contributions to the world. Penawahpskek lawyer and activist Sherri Mitchell says that 80 percent of social change is visioning and creating the world we want, and I think writing is a tool to do that kind of imagining. Mitchell also has said, “[T]his rising tension [and] anxiety that people are feeling is not necessarily evidence that something is wrong, but perhaps is evidence that something is being righted within us.” Writing gives me a way to explore the tension I feel at this moment in history, and to figure out what is being righted within myself. When the language falls short of doing this work, for me it’s a sign of imaginational failure, and the remedy is generally to listen more—to ancestors, elders, young people, plants, and non-human animals around me—in order to feed my imagination.
Giselle Gautreau's “Virginia Nocturne with Fireflies.” Image courtesy of the gallery.
The moment you enter Second Street Gallery, you appreciate the variety of techniques featured in “Mirabilia naturae (Wonders of Nature)”—the precise, elegant line of Lara Call Gastinger’s works of paper; the poetic, emotive quality of Giselle Gautreau’s paintings; and the velvety tones and photographic verisimilitude of Elizabeth Perdue’s palladium prints. Each medium and style has its own formal and evocative allure, while also being ideally suited to capture and convey nature, a subject with which these artists are deeply engaged.
The differing approaches work very well in concert throughout the show, and specifically in the grid arrangement of 30 6″x 6″ squares that form a joint, site-specific piece. “We wanted a way to represent a cohesiveness in the show and came up with this idea of one gridded part of the wall that would embody all three of our styles together,” says Gastinger. “We love it. It shows everything from the detailed work of mine to the dreamy photographs of Elizabeth, and then the moody landscapes of Giselle.”
The individual works that make up Gastinger’s “Seeing Plants: A Year in Virginia (January-December),” feature florae as they appear during a given month. Her graphically symmetric arrangement of specimens is derived from the illustrated botanical plates of German scientist Ernst Haeckel. Gastinger uses the dry brush watercolor technique (a small amount of paint—without water—is used with a brush) to produce the extraordinary precision. Just look at her wispy paradise flower in “Seeing Plants,” or the thin hair-like filaments on the fiddlehead fern stems in “Emerging Ferns.” In this and the aforementioned series, Gastinger limits her palette to sepia, which produces varying tones of gray. In other works, she introduces color. Throughout, you marvel at Gastinger’s ability to artfully join scientific veracity with a finely tuned sensitivity to the myriad aesthetic qualities of her subjects.
Lara Call Gastinger’s “Big Leaf Magnolia.” Image courtesy of the gallery.
In her contemplative encaustic paintings, Gautreau uses tonal values to create mood. She downplays detail in these softly edged, atmospheric works, keeping her palette muted and focusing on dusk or twilight when shadows grow and light is diffused. The multiple layers of oil and encaustic that Gautreau employs expand the visual depth while augmenting qualities of luminosity.
In “Virginia Nocturne with Fireflies,” the insects of the title appear as pinpricks of brilliant bluish light against a backdrop of inky conifers. Hazy silvery light from the moon illuminates the sky and shines on a small glade in the foreground, creating the effect of a spotlit stage. Here, a patch of springy clumps of grass with worn areas of dirt is conjured out of lush brushstrokes in vivid green and yellow. A simple composition, the piece evokes childhood memories of the ineffable magic of lightening bugs and moonlight in a summer garden.
“With landscapes, there’s a point where the viewer might connect with them and feel some familiarity with something,” says Gautreau. “But if I get too specific, unless it’s something they have a personal connection to, they lose interest. So, I walk that line between making work that’s rooted in something specific, while also leaving it open to interpretation.”
Palladium printing is an old process, prized for its beautiful effects and archival resilience. Traditionally, large-format cameras are used because the technique requires the negative to be the same size as the image. Perdue uses a Calumet camera with either 8″ x 10″ or 4″ x 5″ negatives. When she’s ready to print, after first processing her film, Perdue paints an emulsion containing palladium salts and a light sensitizer onto watercolor paper. After it dries, she lays the negative on top to make a contact print. She then places this in a light box for exposure, with the addition of a developer. How long it stays in there depends on the desired effect, but it can range anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, or even more.
Elizabeth Perdue’s “Magnolia.” Image courtesy of the gallery.
“I love the tones, the gradations and the grays, and also the texture of the paper. None of it is digital,” says Perdue. “It’s all very tactile—very hands-on. It’s old school. I love that about it.” While palladium printing may be complicated, it’s also simple in the sense that the artist can be involved and in control of the entire process.
Perdue gathers her subject matter on walks, looking for things that “shine in their simplicity.” She selects just one stem or branch to photograph at a time, producing a form of portraiture. “I love celebrating the ephemeral quality of a single bloom, or shoot, and capturing it in a medium that is believed to last for up to a thousand years,” she says.
There’s an unmistakable elegiac quality to “Mirabilia naturae.” We see it in the desiccated magnolia leaf, the fragile fireflies facing collapse, and the somber grandeur of a lone magnolia bloom. It’s easy to revel in each approach, and also in the wonders they present, and it’s very hard to leave the gallery without being more mindful, observant, and appreciative of the ever-fascinating natural world.
Lara Call Gastinger, Giselle Gautreau, and Elizabeth Perdue are featured in “Mirabilia naturae (Wonders of Nature)” at Second Street Gallery through May 19.
