Author: Elizabeth Derby

On May 9, Brice Brown and Alan Shockley celebrated their 10th anniversary. And theirs was truly a perfect union, if only for one night.

Their collaborative work, “Glass and Bridle, Pomegranate and Pears: On the Viability and Transience of a Free and Perfect Union,” unveiled at Adventure Farm on Saturday. The one-night-only exhibition was the centerpiece of The Commission, a multimedia celebration held by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), a working retreat for national and international artists.

Artists are accepted into VCCA’s competitive program for anywhere from two weeks to two months, during which time they receive private studio space and bedrooms, three meals a day and the freedom to work uninterrupted by daily life.

Brown and Shockley met almost a decade ago when they both held residencies at VCCA.

“An artists residency program is like camp. You might have forced socialization with other weirdo artists, which sometimes works well and sometimes doesn’t,” Brown said in an interview with C-VILLE. “I met Alan at lunch. We started talking and, you know, you do that whole ‘Where are you from? What do you do?’ bullshit, and once you get past that you sort of hit it off.” They had similar interests and hatched the idea to collaborate at some point in the future.

In 2007, Brown was given the opportunity to launch a show in the VertexList gallery in Brooklyn, so he and Shockley developed an installation called “Selling the Sound of My Voice.”

“Brice created 88 1′ x 1′ tiles,” Shockley wrote to C-VILLE. “He used a limited palette of themes that repeated in different combinations and colors, and I created a musical piece that had a frame layer of sound plus 88 additional layers that played in the gallery. Each layer corresponded to a specific tile.”

They collaborated remotely, working through themes as Brown sent new images and Shockley experimented with different sound families, recording auctioneers, a fragment from Schubert, overtone singing and the noise of “a strange hand-cranked ‘wheezing’ toy I had found in a discount shop.”

During the exhibition, they gave each tile a cheap price and removed a corresponding layer of sound whenever a painting sold. “The more commercially successful it was, the more it would cease to exist,” Brown said.

Following the success of “Selling the Sound of My Voice,” the pair looked for another chance to collaborate. When one of them saw the VCCA’s call for submissions to The Commission 2015, they decided to give it a shot.

“I did some reading about the site for the project (originally designated as Free Union),” Shockley wrote. “I really liked the story of the town—originally named after a freed slave blacksmith. The site of the Free Union Church gave the town its second name and was constructed by four different congregations who pooled resources and all worshiped there.”

The artists swapped ideas on how to incorporate this historical background into an installation within the existing natural environment of The Commission.

Brown developed 8’x 4′ modular panels to organize the outdoor space like a maze that visitors could walk through. Riffing on notions of blacksmithing, he conceived of wooden frames charred black in the Shou-sugi-ban style, a Japanese art of burning timber, with colorful textile overlays. For these prints, he manipulated images from The Batsford Colour Book of Roses, which he called “this random book I found printed in this amazing way where color is a little off,” and combined them with 19th century etchings of alchemical processes to reference human manipulations of landscape as well as the transformational passage of time.

Shockley worked with natural sounds from the region including recordings of native birds, frogs and insects, as well as water and wind, and composed additional material to fit the modules. “For these,” he wrote, “I’ve taken several 18th- or early 19th century shape note hymns (ones likely to have been performed at the founding of Free Union), and created new works by applying various reductive processes to the original materials.”

In the final exhibition, Shockley’s sounds emanated from small wireless speakers hidden within the walls that Brown built.

As for the show’s intriguing, if unwieldy, title, Shockley explained that the first half  “references the tradition of still life painting, where titles are often formed of simple lists of the objects depicted,” though in this case, Brown said, the items are not actually in the show itself.

“On the Viability and Transience of a Free and Perfect Union” is less conceptual. It not only references Free Union’s historical beginnings but the nature of art, The Commission and the pair’s collaboration itself. As Brown put it, “we only come together for this one transient moment, and we try to make it viable.”

You’re standing in the middle of an open gallery floor, surrounded by white walls hung with prints, paintings, photos and the occasional freestanding sculpture. Works appear to be clustered around intentional themes like color, medium or subject, but nothing is labeled.

You may not realize you’re surrounded by a veritable who’s who of 20th century art. The absence of signs and didactic panels robs you of name recognition, so you might not recognize Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Cy Twombly and Wassily Kandinsky, among others. But here, eliminating expectations is exactly the point.

“You have to walk up and experience it. You’re interacting with the piece,” said Rebecca Schoenthal, interim curator at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia and co-curator of the museum’s latest exhibit, “What is a Line?”

“So much art history is rooted in the social history of art,” Schoenthal said, but this show, an unusual one for the Fralin, strips away historical suggestion and asks visitors to share intuitive experiences with each piece—and each other.

“The final exhibition shows work from about 1905 to 2007. That’s a century of work,” she said. It includes sculpture, drawing, photography and collage, a diverse expression of the many ways that different artists at different times have used lines to create compositions.

“During those 100 years, the art world had some of its most profound changes,” Schoenthal said, including new techniques and attitudes toward art making, not to mention two world wars. “The fact that we can look at those 100 years through artists and see how the artist’s relationship to line as a tool has been, regardless of the medium and current vogue in thinking at the time, makes for a really unique show.”

The show’s unusual setup and layout reflects its unique origins. Schoenthal explained that her co-curator Jennifer Farrell, associate curator of modern and contemporary prints and illustrated books at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and former curator of exhibitions and contemporary art at the Fralin, inaugurated the work on the show last fall.

“Jennifer originally went through the permanent collection at the Fralin and selected a large number of works from a wide range of artists, including those from the 20th and 21st century, in conjunction with members of the education department,” she said. Then the museum invited members of the public to collaborate.

Every week, the museum released electronic surveys that pitted various art works head to head. Web voters were shown several pairs of images, along with basic information like title, artist, date, medium and dimensions, then asked to choose their favorite in each pair.

Voters also left comments explaining their choices, which ranged from a desire to see the work in person to rhythm to gut feel. And, as one voter put it, “when in doubt, I voted for the underdog.”

Running tallies of each painting revealed certain runaway winners, like Andy Warhol’s “Martha Graham (Satyric Festival),” and several match-ups that barely claimed a winner. Over the course of six weeks, the curated pool was honed and winnowed and new options were brought into the mix.

Not every winner made it onto the gallery walls, however.

Schoenthal, who came on after the public voting process wrapped up, was tasked with putting together a “complete exhibition,” one that reflected the tastes of the public and aligned with the ethos of the Fralin because, she explained, “some people will never know there was this crowdsourced show.”

A teacher in UVA’s art history department and former curator of Second Street Gallery, Schoenthal focused on evocative juxtapositions. Knowing that some visitors would be voters, but others may not have seen the collection before, she included a range that could inspire or encourage viewers to draw their own connections.

By clustering the art thematically instead of chronologically, she echoed the absence of easy narrative faced by each online voter. And the final show “speaks to art as an enduring endeavor,” she said.

Through the lens of the line, viewers are asked to consider, question and analyze how artists use what Schoenthal calls “probably the most fundamental compositional element that artists are engaged with.”

Works include etched lines, drawn lines, found lines and an entire array of processes. Two Matisse lithographs, painted in two different decades with two different approaches to line, are hung one above the other. Two German expression artists take two very different approaches to woodcuts. A Sol LeWitt screenprint reveals diagonal lines and cross hatchings, an almost scientific breakdown of what a line can do or be. A Kara Walker silhouette meets a Berenice Abbott photograph of light dividing and refracting through a prism. Both, Schoenthal said, reflect “line captured by tool of the artist.”

The co-curator also leveraged one of Farrell’s inspirations, the Paul Klee statement that “a line is a dot that went for a walk.” The walls of “What is a Line?” include quotes from major artists throughout the 20th century “meant to encourage free association when you’re in the space.”

Viewers can share their ideas via a Web survey and iPads available in the gallery space. Those tablets also include thumbnails and information about every single work, including snapshots of the voting results, “so if you must know you can grab one on your way in,” Schoenthal said.

In a way, they seem necessary. “Having those iPads brings it back full circle,” she said, to a process that gives layered life to art: the involvement of the people and, of course, the intervention of the Internet.

Every night for the month of April, art aficionados and Charlottesville locals Joseph Avery and Eleanor Muse have a new exhibit in their living room.

“Hans-Ulrich Obrist is a curator, a big guy in the art world, and I remember we read an article where he said the first show he’d ever done was in his kitchen,” said Avery in a recent interview. “He had people come into his apartment and led them into the kitchen, where they’d open up a cabinet that held the work.”

This domestic-turned-aesthetic approach to curatorship inspired Avery, a lawyer, and Muse, a UVA student, to try their hands at a residential-based exhibit. Throughout the month, they’ve welcomed visitors into their private home, hoping to underscore the communal and social aspects of what they’re calling the 30/30 Vision Art Festival.

“We didn’t have a big space, but we were thinking that local artists sort of need a place to show their work,” Avery said. “It seems like there’s a dearth of places in Charlottesville where people can share their ideas, their self-expression and engage with the community.” And, he added, “I liked the concept myself mainly because I wanted to see what everyone was doing.”

After a month of recruiting through Piedmont Council for the Arts, UVA Studio Arts majors and the odd Craigslist ad, Avery and Muse coordinated nearly 30 individual artists, the majority of whom live in or are connected to Charlottesville, to install a new exhibit for each 7pm opening. (They’re still looking for a few more artists, working in any medium or field, including theater and the performing arts.)

“The first night we wanted something race-related, something that would comment on social issues after the Martese Johnson incident,” Avery said. “Our opening exhibit was by a Mexican artist who hung a book called The Collapse of Criminal Justice on a clothesline strung across the room. He also hung photos on the walls of incidents of police brutality, including one of Eric Garner and one of Michael Brown as a way of discussing how we are exposed to these actual incidents, and how or if they affect us.”

The pointed intensity of 30/30 Vision exhibits change as quickly as their creators. “Tomorrow we have Meghan Bryant coming in, and she does animal-type drawings on scratch boards,” Avery said. “On Friday we’ll have a performance artist who is going to do four different characters while painting. And on April 24th, we’ll have Rachel Singel, who’s done a lot of intaglio and prints and has a series of beautiful bindings for books, give a small lecture and share some of her techniques.”

He went on to describe the work of fine artist and University of Mississippi professor Lou Haney, a recent transplant to Charlottes-
ville. Her work combines collage with acrylic painting, a system that literally layers interchangeable sheets of plastic over paintings of whimsical subjects like cake, against backdrops of color-filled canvas. “We went to her studio in Belmont, and it just fits with the exhibit,” Avery said. “She’s just experimenting with everything.”

His palpable delight reveals the driving force behind 30/30 Vision’s diversity: the curiosity of its curators. Their exploratory interest in art creates an environment almost like a book club, if the club leaders were avid readers who inadvertently became writers themselves.

“We do a decent amount of traveling to D.C. and New York to keep up with what’s happening at the galleries,” Avery said. “When I’m viewing art, I can read it passively and get a few things out of it, or I can slow down and actively read it. If you really engage and try to untangle what the artist is saying, it’s like reading an essay.”

The pair kept a notebook in which they wrote down ideas for paintings, though they didn’t make art at the time. “We’d see something at a show, have a thought, and write it down,” Avery said. “But a few years back we said, ‘Let’s start executing.’ We thought it would take a year to get through all our ideas, but now we’ve got a bigger notebook and we’re only a tenth of the way through it.”

Now, he said, they paint, primarily with oils, and sometimes sculpt, typically in support of their painting. “The process is similar again to writing as opposed to reading,” he said. “It’s working through or maybe just working off of these ideas.”

“When you’re making art, you’re constantly making decisions, choosing what you bring in and leave out,” Muse said. “As you do it you start to learn what other artists have done and see the decisions they have made.”

Those convolutions of discovery and exploration are the reason they invite strangers into their living room and found themselves drawn to art in the first place.

“I don’t know how it started really,” Muse said of painting. “I’d come away with an idea and it just seemed like an interesting way to express it. It was a way to engage with an idea that I hadn’t tried before.”

To see the artists in the 30/30 Vision Art Festival, visit 700 Grove Avenue at 7pm any evening in April. To submit your own art for inclusion, inquire at 30.30artsfestival@gmail.com.

“I remember being at my mom’s house when I saw these two silhouettes she had done of my brother and I when we were toddlers,” said Charlottesville-based photographer Rich Tarbell. “Her house is full of quilts and artwork that have rotated over the decades, but those were always there somewhere. They struck me as timeless.”

Tarbell, known for his backstage concert snaps and silhouettes of Charlottesville Lady Arm Wrestlers, opens an exhibition called “Moonlight Silhouettes,” with photography featuring Moonlight Circus aerialists, on April 10 at The Garage.

“I’d been going to CLAW events since day one,” he said. And when performance photographer Billy Hunt switched his focus to videotaping the CLAW documentary, Tarbell became his de facto stand-in and expanded the coverage beyond stage shots. “I got the idea for each event to do a quick portrait of each wrestler, not just an in-action shot of the matches or the crowd,” he said. “I tried to do a backstage in the garage of the Blue Moon Diner, and I was literally trying to carve myself a little 8’x 8′ space, just a tiny area where I could come up with these clever portraits for each wrestler or the ref.”

As he prepared to shoot his fourth set of unique portraits that year, Tarbell was fresh out of ideas. Until he saw the silhouettes.

“The characters themselves make amazing profiles when they’re in costume,” he said. Tarbell produced a full show of them under the pseudonym Olon Pills, hanging them for a month at Blue Moon Diner.

“It really resonated with people more than I thought,” he said. “I thought it was kind of a joke. I was trying to do something that matched the CLAW attitude of fun but thoughtful art, and people really loved them.”

A long-time guitarist, Tarbell began his photography career when he sold an old guitar on eBay and bought a camera. “It started as a thing I did to support my friends, like, ‘Here’s this band I like and you should like too,’ but as I got into it I was given more access to interesting things,” he said.

He described his “romantic rock ‘n’ roll notion” of backstage and tour bus camaraderie.

“I’ve been backstage and set up shots where I knew a scene was coming in terms of the band coming off stage,” he said. “As an audience member you don’t see that when they go backstage they are covered in sweat and exhausted and they take a few minutes to set their brains straight even though they do it 200 days of the year or so. Those moments are when you realize that you’re in their office, and their world is a little different.”

Tarbell said that sense of camaraderie is the common denominator between his creative projects. “It’s a collaborative process with me and my friends,” he said of “Moonlight Silhouettes.”

After the success of his CLAW show, he hatched the idea of large silhouettes and brought the concept to his friends in Moonlight Circus. “They started running with it in terms of performance and hairstyle—you know, the things that make a big difference,” he said.

When shooting the troupe’s Halloween performance live proved difficult due to movement, he pitched the idea of shooting stills in warehouse space at the Ix Art Park. “One of the aerialists is an art teacher, and she embraced the whole concept and the collaboration immediately,” he said. He had the performers’ input on “everything from the poses to the hairstyles to the silks and curtains we used to create the contrast effects.”

After the first session of shots, Tarbell took a few weeks to test printing methods and consult with other artists, and then held a second session.

Ultimately he chose to print several shots on high gloss aluminum and several more with the lenticular printing method, which gives an image an illusion of depth and the ability to change or move as it’s viewed from different angles.

“I just crossed my fingers and hoped,” he said. “I think it went differently than I thought it might, but probably better than I could have imagined.”

Three years ago, no one knew what to expect when homebuilder and former City Council candidate Paul Beyer laid plans for a festival celebrating the birth of Thomas “Tom Tom” Jefferson.

Now in its fourth year, the Tom Tom Founders Festival makes sense. It’s a week-long mash-up of local art, innovation and music designed to get everyone talking. And it’s bigger than ever thanks in part to deepened investment from UVA, 384 participants and a $50,000 grant from the Virginia Tourism Board that matches one marketing dollar to every $2 spent in 2014 and 2015.

Like most artists, Malena Magnolia has been drawing and painting for as long as she can remember. But unlike the galleries and fine art materials most dream about in childhood, she now creates assemblages of mud and dirt on concrete sidewalks and the sides of buildings.

“I want to make art that is accessible to everyday people, not just folks who have an art background,” she said in a recent interview. “There is a very small demographic who attend galleries. To reach more people, it makes sense to put it on the street. And the fact that it washes away over time is a perk because it’s not permanently altering something and is environmentally friendly.”

Reaching as many people as possible is at the heart of Magnolia’s mission to share messages of social justice and foster change through her work. Her interest in art “that affects people on a deeper level” began at Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she was introduced to feminism during her freshman year. Raised Mormon, Magnolia said that feminist theory “made sense to me. My religious background was restricting and didn’t see me as an equal, and I’m not the kind of person who takes that.”

At first, she applied feminist concepts personally, “exploring gender with myself and what it means to be a powerful woman in charge, or just in charge of her life.” Now, she said, she sees feminism as the intersection of conversation and action—an ideology to be lived as well as talked about. She described the connection between gender-based and sexual violence, its ties to race and class, and how she makes art to empower as many people as possible.

When Magnolia creates a new piece, she develops a stencil and uses mud instead of spray paint to fill it, then leaves the final product right there on the street. She usually hears about a new work’s reception through word of mouth.

“Not all of my art is blatantly political—sometimes I use these floral designs,” she said. “People might stop as I’m putting it up and say ‘Oh, that’s really cool.’ If there’s any sort of political rhetoric or text about women’s lib, I get a lot more pushback, but that’s only within a couple of minutes. The work that’s more blatant, that’s usually the work that gets added to or defaced.”

She described a college project in which she made a mud stencil of an average-sized, curvy woman and the words “There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s society that’s f&@*ed.” “I put that up on canvas, and someone else made a stencil over the top that put a McDonald’s icon on her butt and then wrote ‘But the scale doesn’t lie, fatty,’” she said.

Magnolia said she welcomes this type of interaction. “Usually when people deface my work it proves why the work is necessary,” she said. “I just leave it. It’s interesting. That’s part of the beauty of street art—my work isn’t a commodity—anyone can deface it or interact with it. I don’t get paid for it, but I don’t care. I think that’s a beautiful thing.”

Magnolia’s latest work revolves around a project she’s leading through The Bridge PAI. “No More Violence: A Community In Recovery And The Struggle For Safety” is an ongoing series of community-led artistic projects designed to address and challenge sexual violence in our area.

Based on the statistic that every 107 seconds, someone is sexually assaulted in the U.S., Magnolia created 107 Seconds, an event in which she mounted onto the back of her truck a mud stencil that read “Stop rape, believe survivors,” then drove around the UVA campus 107 times—once for every passing second—clocking a total of 14 hours of road time. She also spent a day photographing 80 people holding this same sign around Grounds.

“No More Violence” projects include a series of safe space discussions about the ways these events have affected the community, what must be done to alter a culture of rape, and workshops led by Magnolia for anyone who wants to create their own stencils to combat sexual violence.

“Most people who came to these meetings are survivors of sexual assault, and as I’ve led these workshops more people have come to me in confidence. It’s overwhelming and heartbreaking how common it is.”

The Bridge PAI will host an exhibit made by the community, plus a stencil that “traces the roots of sexual violence back to valley hunting and Thomas Jefferson,” Magnolia said. “I don’t think anything in the present is separate from its history. I’m doing a 5′ long mud stencil of Sally Hemings in front of Monticello, focusing on her as a survivor and not focusing on Thomas Jefferson, which is what we always see in Charlottesville.”

During the exhibition, The Bridge will also offer a space in its gallery as a “therapy wall” with assorted markers, paints and brushes for people to anonymously (or not) share quotes, feelings or thoughts about their experiences.

“This series uses art to engage with history, to challenge the current system as it deals with sexual assault, to take back our community and public domain, and to act as a vehicle of healing,” Magnolia said. “It gives voices to survivors who will no longer be silenced.”

“I feel like an old soul in general. If I’m shopping, I’d rather buy something old and upcycle it or do something that appreciates the value of what it used to be,” said Charlottesville- based alternative photographer Cary Oliva. “Things were just more beautiful back in the day.”

The intrigue of age surfaces in the majority of Oliva’s work. Her alternative photography manipulates instant film formats to create ghostly, watercolor-like images with textural imperfections and light flares. Image transfers and emulsion lifts, her primary methods of photo art, interrupt the development process to achieve a washed-out patina in contemporary photographs (think local farmland or a palm tree-strewn beach).

A long-time devotee of Polaroid, which famously went bankrupt in 2009, Oliva routinely makes art out of leftovers. These days, she’s forced to negotiate a seriously curtailed supply of film, but her interest in vintage mediums for photography was piqued more than two decades ago.

“I moved to New York City [from Virginia] in the late ’90s and wanted to take pictures of everything,” she said. “I studied fine art in school, but photography felt impulsive, with an intuitive draw.” She quickly fell in love with the painterly effects achieved by alternative photography, and after deciding to teach herself the craft, “went thrift store shopping to find a camera.”

One of her favorite early art forms was Polaroid manipulation. “I absolutely loved that ’70s film, the kind you’d shake. If you kept it warm, you could manipulate the gel from the outside and create these little brightly colored paintings. I remember sitting in my car in the summer or, if it wasn’t warm enough outside, rigging the electric outlets so I’d have a little hotplate to keep the film warm.”

Eventually, Polaroid stopped producing that particular kind of film. By that point, though, Oliva had expanded her repertoire to include image transfers, which create subtle painting-esque imagery by disrupting film development.

Instant film, like the Polaroid 669 Oliva favors, functions as a reactive sandwich. Each piece has a positive and a negative side, and once a photographer takes her shot, the film gets pulled through rollers that squish positive and negative chemicals together, triggering the reaction that slowly develops the image’s colors.

Normally, Polaroid photographers let this film develop for several minutes, but Oliva pulls the print out before the image has a chance to finish and applies the negative, complete with its in-process inks, to a piece of treated paper where it finishes developing.

The result is an image transfer and “a one-time thing,” Oliva said. “I can’t take that negative and reuse it again. It’s not a transparency, it’s just the inks, so each transfer is an original. You can’t recreate it, but you can scan them, like I do, and bring them into Photoshop and make them into prints.”

The process takes an incredibly long time, Oliva said, and requires a number of delicate conditions to be met. Art paper must be treated with just the right amount of water, and the separation of positive and negative is exacting. To minimize the difficulties of working “in the field,” she uses a unique system that assembles old school parts.

Today, Oliva takes most of her images with slide film using her 35mm SLR film camera, though she also owns a 1960s vintage Polaroid camera that’s been rigged to accommodate a modern battery. She exposes the slide images onto the peel-apart film using a “portable darkroom.” In just a few seconds, she’s able to expose the slide onto the Polaroid film within the machine and then create an image transfer.

But no amount of innovation can slow the passage of time that’s steadily chipping away at Oliva’s most critical resource. “I can only buy [Polaroid 669 film] on eBay, and it’s all expired,” she said. “The final images are often too brown, and I’m not happy with it. There’s also a group called The Impossible Project that’s created film for SX-70 camera, and they market it as being the same,” she said. “But it doesn’t work the same way.”

Like most artists given limiting parameters, Oliva has creative solutions. “I’ve been teaching myself how to use Fujifilm. It’s new to me, but it’s still really old school,” she said. “I’ve saved a lot of images, the positives of images I’ve used before, and I’m reinventing them as emulsion lifts.”

To create an emulsion lift, she soaks the 3.25″ x 4.25″ positive in near-boiling water, then slowly takes a small brush and pushes the emulsion off from the backing paper. What’s left is a very delicate, onion skin-style image that she transfers into a vat of colder water, then lifts off the back onto another substrate, like metal, rocks or cloth.

“It has this very interesting, dreamy quality in a different way than anything else,” Oliva said. “An emulsion lift isn’t perfect. It’s just what’s left. The edges curl up, it gets wrinkled and it has movement and other elements you just don’t get in a transfer.”

In general, photographers rely on the accuracy of their film, but it’s the instability of her alternative forms that cements Oliva’s loyalty. She spent a week at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina refining these new processes, which she plans to teach in the spring.

“I’m on Instagram a lot lately using the hashtag #filmisnotdead,” she said. “This work helps me slow down and be more mindful about the things I do in life. I love sharing it. If people have never seen the process, they’re usually amazed.”