Eze Amos' "Witnessing Resistance" is on display at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center through September 16. Photo: Eze Amos.
Looking back: Photojournalist Eze Amos took more than 9,000 photographs on August 12, 2017. Now, five years later, he is sharing what he experienced and witnessed during and after the alt-right rally in his exhibition, “Witnessing Resistance.” Featuring 18 images taken between 2016 and 2017, the show is narrated by Amos, and it acts as a requiem that honors those who were not deterred by fear, but moved into the streets and guided by love.
Through 9/16. Free, all day. Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, 233 Fourth St. NW. jeffschoolheritagecenter.org
Bruce Holsinger and Corban Addison. Supplied photos.
Read on: Looking for some summer book recs? New page-turners from Bruce Holsinger and Corban Addison are sure to boost your beach reading experience. On Thursday, UVA professor Holsinger celebrates the release of his fourth novel, The Displacements, a suspenseful tale of privilege lost in the wake of natural catastrophe. Friday, hear from Addison about Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial—an account of a small rural community in North Carolina fighting against one of the world’s most powerful companies. “Wastelands is a story I wish I had written,” says John Grisham.
Thursday 7/7 and Friday 7/8. Free, 7pm. New Dominion Bookshop, 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. ndbookshop.com
With Crimes of the Future, starring Léa Seydoux, Viggo Mortensen, and Kristen Stewart, director David Cronenberg makes a graphic return to form. Photo: Neon.
For fans of writer/director David Cronenberg’s films, his newest, Crimes of the Future, is cause for celebration. It’s 100 percent unadulterated Cronenberg, and marks a return to the sub-genre he essentially invented: body horror—unsettling excursions into human biology in revolt against itself. And for those unversed in Cronenberg, this will be a thought-provoking, observant, shocking, funny, and rewarding experience.
Set in a run-down future, the film focuses on performance artists whose specialty is physically altering themselves in front of audiences. Among them, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) develops entirely new organs that his performing partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) surgically removes. As Tenser prepares for more groundbreaking shows, he works undercover with a detective in the NVU—New Vice Unit—seeking out a dangerous cult intent on developing a unique breed of human.
If all this sounds surreal, it is, in the best possible sense. Although it’s not a masterpiece, this is Cronenberg’s finest, most peculiarly inventive film since his excellent Existenz. It feels like it was made decades beyond 2022, or was designed for another, humanlike species. Cronenberg aficionados will recognize echoes of his great works here, including Videodrome, The Brood, and The Fly. As in those films, he eschews preachiness and didacticism in Crimes of the Future, in favor of pointed observation. That’s not to say it’s cold or nihilistic—it’s neither—just that he doesn’t lecture his audience: He imaginatively extrapolates on current trends in his own unique, intense, and wryly witty voice. His latest is loaded with dark comedy and is distinctly Cronenbergian with expressions like “best original organ,” or “designer cancer.” And, in his inimitable way, if there’s a place the audience might consider too shocking, Cronenberg immediately goes there.
Crimes of the Future is a refreshing reminder of how wonderful it is to see a gifted director allowed to express his personal vision without dull studio interference. The film is devoid of pandering, and never insults its audience’s intelligence, successfully commenting on everything from humankind’s adaptability to the most hideous environments, to the pretentious side of performance art—better still, it actually leaves you thinking.
The cast has no weak links. Mortensen eloquently physicalizes Tenser’s torturous occupation and its physiological hazards. Kristin Stewart is hilarious as jittery bureaucrat Timlin, a kind of surgical groupie, and Don McKellar is very good as her boss, Yevgeny Nourish. (Odd names like these are another Cronenberg hallmark.) Also outstanding are Nadia Litz and Tanaya Beatty as the dryly funny repairwomen Router and Berst.
The unsung hero of Crimes of the Future, though, is Cronenberg’s longtime production designer Carol Spier, whose contributions to his movies are incalculably important. For decades, Spier has ingeniously shown the unshowable, to borrow one of the director’s phrases. Her ability to give his highly abnormal worlds believable form is the stuff of genius.
Crimes of the Future will likely appall viewers with weak stomachs. But Cronenberg’s violence and sexuality possess a sensibility, and that makes all the difference. Unlike so many outstanding horror filmmakers who slid into making junk in their elder years, 79-year-old Cronenberg’s chops—no pun intended—are strong. He still really delivers.
Aaron Eichorst at Second Street Gallery. All images courtesy of the galleries.
July Exhibitions
Botanical Fare 421 E. Main St. Downtown Mall. “My Water Garden,” photographs enhanced with acrylic paint on canvas by Betty Brubach. Through mid-July.
The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative 209 Monticello Rd. In “Tender Works,” Karina A. Monroy explores cyclical tensions between pain and love, hurt and healing, and mother and daughter through embroidery, painting, and drawing. Through July 31. First Friday opening 5:30pm.
Central Library 201 E. Market St. On the third floor, 34 pieces of artwork from Arc of the Piedmont’s The Arc Studio, a visual arts program providing an open studio environment for adult artists with developmental disabilities. Through July 31.
Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third St. SE. “Melange: Collage Works Across Time,” works by Chuck Scalin. Through July 29. First Friday reception at 5pm.
Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd. “Serenity in the Trees” features Alison Thomas’ digitally manipulated photographs. Through July. Meet the artist event on July 9 at 1pm.
Crozet Library 2020 Library Ave. Paintings by Dana Wheeles.
Frederick Nichols at Eastwood Farm and Winery.Sam Fisher at Live Arts.
C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “The Planets,” glass art and jewelry from Diana Branscome. Through July. First Friday meet the artist event at 5pm.
Eastwood Farm and Winery 2531 Scottsville Rd. “Into the Blue Ridge,” silkscreens and photos by Frederick Nichols. First Friday opening.
Grace Estate Winery 5273 Mt. Juliet Farm, Crozet. “Art at the Estate,” paintings by Beverley Ulrich. Through July.
Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Convergence,” works by Isabelle Abbot. Opens July 9.
Live Arts 123 E. Water St. “Sycamore Revelations,” watercolor on custom panels by Sam Fisher. Through July 31.
Andrew Sherogan at Top Knot Studio.Chuck Scalin at Chroma Projects.Isabelle Abbot at LYDM.
Loving Cup Vineyard & Winery 3340 Sutherland Rd., North Garden. “Pastel Viewpoints,” an exhibit by local artists group the Piedmont Pastelists. Through July 31.
McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Smith Gallery, “silent dialogues” by Polly Rebecca Breckenridge. In the first floor Hallway Gallery, works from residency artists. In the second floor Hallway Gallery, the summer member show. Through August 14. First Friday receptions.
New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. “I used to be” by Maya Kim. July 1 from 5-7:30pm.
Northside Library 705 Rio Rd. W. “Virginia’s Constitutions,” a traveling exhibition from the Library of Virginia. In the quiet room, acrylics by Victor M. Solomon, and on the art wall, oil paintings by Randy Baskerville. Through July 28.
PVCC Gallery V. Earl Dickinson Building, 501 College Dr. The Annual Student Exhibition features a curated selection of works by student artists from the latest academic year. Artistic media include painting, drawing, ceramics, graphic design, digital media, sculpture and more. Through September 9.
Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Main Gallery, “Subversive Media: Materiality & Power,” a group exhibition featuring 10 artists. In the Dové Gallery, “Summer’s Cauldron,” a solo exhibition by Aaron Eichorst. Through July 22.
Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital 500 Martha Jefferson Dr. On the second floor, “Serenity and Life,” oil paintings by Terry M. Coffey. Through August 8.
Shenandoah Valley Art Center 126 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. In the Cabell/Arehart Invitational Gallery, the annual exhibition by the Virginia Watercolor Society. Through August 27.
Studio Ix 969 Second St. SE. “As It Is Now” features painting and drawing by Tori Cherry depicting scenes of a new normal, post-autoimmune diagnosis. Through July 31. First Friday reception 5pm.
Terry Coffey at Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital.Tori Cherry at Studio Ix.Maya Kim at New City Arts.
Top Knot Studio 103 Fifth St. SE. “Whereabouts,” works by Andrew Sherogan. On display July-September.
Vault Virginia 300 E. Main St. “The Memories Won’t Fade Away,” a group exhibition featuring works by Brittany Fan, Lucy “Clare” Spooner, and Lauchlan Davis. Through July 15.
Visible Records 1740 Broadway St. “Points of Departure,” an exhibition by the Photographer’s Green Book featuring works from four core members—Jay Simple, Sydney Ellison, Ally Caple, and Zora J. Murff. Through August 27.
Vitae Spirits Distillery 101 E. Water St. Photographs of vernacular architecture and innate cultural landscape context by Gary Okerlund. Through July.
For her show “Second Nature,” Krista Townsend worked with acrylics on paintings such as “Ferns and Moss,” and boosted the vibrancy with florescent color. Photo courtesy of the artist.
With three shows scheduled for 2022, Krista Townsend found herself in an enviable position as an artist. But she had a problem: She needed work to exhibit. “I realized I had to speed up my process,” says Townsend, who’d primarily worked with oil paint. “I decided to explore using acrylic paint to block in the composition and then work on top of that with oil.”
Working with acrylics entailed a bit of a learning curve as Townsend adjusted to the new medium. Along the way, she discovered that the shorter drying time gave her an advantage. “It was really satisfying to make those marks and then be able to come back quite soon afterwards and work on top of them,” she says. “I soon realized I was sticking with the acrylics longer before putting the oils on top and I just kind of fell in love with them.”
Initially worried that the colors wouldn’t be the same as oil, she ended up being pleasantly surprised. “I love the vibrancy of acrylic colors,” she says. “Especially pinks and reds. I’ve always struggled with getting the reds to sing the way I see them in nature. I also love that I can thin the paint with water and create drips and translucent areas without using toxic oil paint thinners.” Townsend even branched into fluorescent colors, not available in oil. “I bought a few and started to play around with them using them as the underpainting. So, then they were on my palette and I started mixing them with other colors. Some of those purples I can come up with are so vibrant and so much fun. I’ve moved away from using fluorescent colors on their own, but I mix them with other colors to punch up the vibration and make the colors come alive.”
When standing in a room of Townsend’s work at Charlottesville’s new Phaeton Gallery, there’s certainly an abundance of color and texture, but there’s also a potent immediacy. You feel it in the physical way Townsend paints, revealed by the remarkably animated gestural marks, but it’s also there in the way nature is presented. Townsend has a deep relationship with nature, taking daily walks in the woods and meadows surrounding Charlottesville.
On these walks, she absorbs the sights, smells, and feelings of being outdoors in wild places. She takes photographs as reminders of where she’s been and what she’s seen, but mostly she paints her sensory responses to what she’s experienced.
There are so many splendid details in “Ferns and Moss,” an the acrylic on canvas—the wonderfully expressive zigzagging lines of the fern fronds, the mix of moss and plants drooping over windfall and rocks, and the twiggy nest-like accumulation in the lower right. The eye is drawn to bright globs of orange and red paint—a mixture of florescent magenta with cadmium yellow and cadmium red light—of the rotting trunk and branch near the center of the composition. Townsend uses black to great effect here to both describe the dark shadows beneath the plants and to set them off. She effectively brings the woods to you, providing not only a beguiling sylvan vignette, but also inspiring a sense memory of the feel and smell of moist woodsy air.
“Managed Wild Flowers, Early Fall,” an acrylic on canvas, features a muted palette. The painting seems to be composed of separate horizontal zones. Dashes and blobs of paint form the grass and delicate flowers along the bottom. Just above, things get really interesting with a riotous interplay of stalky vegetation and maroon flowers. Above this, a flat expanse of olivey ochre reads like a field of tawny grass. Beyond it, scrawls of greens, browns, and tans describe a tree line set before narrower bands of green, blue, turquoise, and gray that represent another field, distant mountains and sky.
“New Growth” (oil on canvas) depicts an area in Glacier National Park following a controlled burn. The scene could be bleak, but Townsend’s use of color and gesture imbues it with vitality. The bright green at the bottom, signifying the new growth, adds just the right counterpoint to the more subdued palette of the burned area. Townsend finds beauty and drama there with slashes of orange foliage and skeletal charred trees silhouetted against the background.
With “Field of Flowers and Trees” (oil on canvas), Townsend has relinquished all but the scantest narrative elements. There’s much to admire in this glorious work: the color, the texture, the extraordinarily inventive brushwork that captures the exuberance of painting. There’s something captivating about the repeated vertical lines running along the lower part of the painting, representing the stems of flowers, but also providing a pleasing staccato rhythm. Townsend maintains the visual excitement with the fierce tangle of slashes and streaks that constitute the greenery at the top.
Townsend’s paintings are the work of a supremely confident artist who is at the top of her game. In nature, she has found an endlessly inspiring muse that challenges her every day to use talent and intuition to interpret and convey the essence of what is there.
“Night Sky” stars Sissy Spacek and J.K. Simmons as an aging couple who discover a portal to a strange planet on their property. Photo: Amazon.
Director Juan Jose Campanella’s “Night Sky” grounds its fantastic premise heavily in the everyday. This is a venerable dramatic tradition, and an intelligent approach, especially when science fiction has become synonymous with space operas and action. Unfortunately, when the miraculous and the mundane collide in “Night Sky,” the mundane wins.
The series opens in rural Illinois, where elderly couple Franklin and Irene York (J.K. Simmons and Sissy Spacek) keep a secret chamber hidden on their property that spirits them light years away to an observation room on a barren planet. The two have been making the trip for so long that they are as blasé about it as taking a weekend hike. Meanwhile, in Argentina, single mom Stella (Julieta Zylberberg) guards a similar portal with almost religious devotion, keeping it hidden from her teenage daughter Toni (Rocio Hernandez).
When a mysterious young man (Chai Hansen) appears via the alien world, and upsets the couple’s equilibrium, these central narratives begin to intertwine with various subplots involving the Yorks’ granddaughter Denise (Kiah McKirnan) and their nosy neighbor Byron (Adam Bartley).
Spacek and Simmons are the show’s backbone, and do well with the scripts they’re given. Much of the story is told through the shifting emotions on their faces, and Spacek is vulnerable and a joy to watch work. Simmons is good throughout, but occasionally lays the folksiness on too thick. He shines in Franklin’s sternest moments.
A dramatic slow burn can be pure magic when done right, but “Night Sky” doesn’t pull it off. It’s an overly protracted version of a story that should have been told in under two hours. The writers noodle around with the potentially fascinating concept to the point that it loses most of its dramatic tension, like stretching a good “Twilight Zone’’ episode until it breaks.
“Night Sky” can’t be faulted for its depiction of small-town Americana, but it pushes the story’s everydayness in its first four episodes so hard that it subsumes anything engaging about the plot. The idea of using a science fiction series as a springboard for dealing with very real problems like senility, physical infirmity, and children predeceasing their parents is worthwhile. Unfortunately, the series overplayed its hand, banking on the elderly Yorks’ aging pains to play as deeply dramatic. This could have worked, if balanced properly, but too much of the series fixates on these details. The Argentina sequences are more successful because Stella’s character is so intensely duty bound to her mission.
The current fascination with multiverse stories and vicarious otherworldly escape routes is almost more interesting as a commentary on the present zeitgeist than it is as entertainment. It seems that after the last two years, a lot of people would love to uproot themselves from our time and space continuum and find a more benign one. Sadly, the one “Night Sky” presents isn’t worth the trip. Go outside and look at the real night sky: It’s much more magical than this series.
M.K. England reads from their work at New Dominion Bookshop on June 25. Supplied photo.
Love and laughter: You might know M.K. England from their YA fantasy and sci-fi novels—or maybe they helped you pick out your next read while they were working as a teen librarian at JMRL. The fandom expert was even entrusted with writing the official Guardians of the Galaxy prequel novel, and the seventh original Firefly novel. Now, they’re diving into the contemporary genre with The One True Me and You (written as Remi K. England), a funny story full of queer joy, love, and plenty of nerdy references. England will read from their work, followed by a discussion with moderator Emily Thiede.
Saturday 6/25. Free, 2pm. New Dominion Bookshop, 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. ndbookshop.com
Ix Art Park hosts its first Fae Festival on June 17-18. File photo.
Fare thee well: Hear ye, hear ye, ‘tis time for merriment and revelry galore, as the Fae Festival is nigh upon us. Meander through a medieval market, where vendors display their wares, and witness demos and workshops from Raptor Hill Falconry, The Amethyst Cauldron Witch Crafts, and more. Feast on a fine selection of food while enjoying live music and dance performances from An Lár, Vicky Lee, Ginnie Fae Fairy Dancer, and many more.
Friday 6/17–Saturday 6/18. $10-20, all day. Ix Art Park, 522 Second St. SE. ixartpark.org
Cade Wiberg used a musician fantasy video game to frame a book about his early adult years, and charted My Life According to Rock Band into the top 100 of the Amazon subcategories dating and friendship. Supplied photo.
The book deal for My Life According to Rock Band traces back to a Christmas morning 15 years ago.
Charlottesville native Cade Wiberg unwrapped his favorite video game ever on December 25, 2007. The young gamer had played and enjoyed Guitar Hero, Rock Band’s predecessor, but it had always felt like a solitary pursuit.
When Wiberg and his younger sister picked up their plastic guitar and drums, and plugged into Rock Band for the first time that Christmas Day, the experience was something more.
“Rock Band was, like, the first all-inclusive music game,” Wiberg says. “With Guitar Hero, people would see those plastic guitars and think, ‘oh that’s just a video game.’”
Rock Band would become an obsession, with Wiberg chugging through every song on every release of the game, bonding with friends over their shared love of virtual rockin’, eventually picking up a real guitar, and dreaming of becoming a real rock star.
The obsession, if not the rock god aspirations, stayed with Wiberg throughout college, when he began dabbling in creative nonfiction writing, all the way up to now. (He still hosts monthly Rock Band nights at Reason Beer.) Wiberg’s writing first merged with music when he penned a short essay structured around The Beatles’ greatest hits album, 1, for a class at James Madison University. Writing a few autobiographical paragraphs inspired by each song on 1, Wiberg found a narrative style. With supportive feedback from his classmates and teacher, he decided to expand on the idea—Rock Band was the obvious structural hook.
Wiberg completed My Life According to Rock Band, which contains 58 stories about his life, in 2019. This time around, the stories riffed off the 45 standard and 13 bonus tracks featured on the original Rock Band game. There’s Wiberg’s opening chapter, “29 Fingers,” inspired by the Konks song of the same name, along with others like the Metallica-inspired “Enter Sandman” and Weezer-driven “Say It Ain’t So.” A Bon Jovi chapter, “Wanted Dead or Alive,” tells of two old friends growing apart even as they have their first beers together. And “I’m So Sick” finds a love-ill Wiberg first paranoid that he’s lost his girlfriend, then deciding she’s gonna be his girl after all, but all the while lacking the self-awareness to know the relationship is dead on arrival.
When Wiberg set out to publish My Life According to Rock Band, he turned to Jay Varner, the professor for whom he’d written his Beatles-inspired essay. On Varner’s advice, he sent his manuscript to 100 literary agents. They all rejected him. “They all said, ‘We would love it if you had published something,’” Wiberg says, understanding the irony. “They want you to be popular already.”
Then, he found Brandylane in Richmond. The publisher liked the story right away and gave Wiberg a co-publishing deal. Pre-sales went live in February this year, and partly on the strength of Wiberg’s reputation in the Rock Band community, the book sold well, breaking into the top-100 in two Amazon Books subcategories: dating and friendship.
“It’s basically a coming-of-age story and just entails all of those teenage things we went through: growing up, falling in love, drinking for the first time, striking out with girls,” Wiberg says. “It started as random journal entries and came together from there.”
Wiberg, who’ll read passages from the book on June 17 at New Dominion Bookshop, doesn’t know where My Life According to Rock Band will take him. He says he’s been writing short stories his whole life, but he doesn’t expect his new essay collection to let him quit his day job as a Violet Crown Cinema manager.
Wiberg does know that, between his short-form, Beatles-inspired essay and his first full-length book, he did a lot of growing up; he had more stories to tell. Maybe, if the first book does well while his own life story keeps a-rollin’, Wiberg will shred through a Rock Band-inspired trilogy. “I have toyed with the idea, but I haven’t done anything official,” he says.
Wiberg expects his love of Rock Band the game to continue. While a lot of folks rocked out to it for a few years in the wake of 2007’s plastic guitar high-water mark and then put it away, Wiberg keeps buying all the downloadable content he can and hosting his Rock Band parties.
“I never expected to be solely living off the income from the book forever or anything like that,” Wiberg says. “It’s just something I wanted to do. And it has been really cool.”
Rosemarie Fiore paints with smoke from one of her handmade tools. Fiore and Ana Rendich combine technique and emotion in a dual exhibition at Les Yeux du Monde through June 26. Photo courtesy of the artist.
For Hagan Tampellini, the current Les Yeux du Monde show felt right. “Modern Alchemy: Rosemarie Fiore & Ana Rendich” is the first exhibition conceived and curated by Tampellini, the gallery’s director and daughter of LYDM founder, the late Lyn Bolen Warren.
“Many of the shows we’re having this year are ones my mother was in the process of planning, but this is new,” she says. “These two artists made so much sense to me. Their works communicate so well with each other in the gallery space.”
Fiore and Warren studied under groundbreaking art historian Lydia Gasman. “Rosemarie learned about Wolfgang Paalen and the fumage technique from Lydia,” says Tampellini. “Ana, another artist in my mother’s intellectual orbit, is someone whose work we’ve represented and championed for some time, so this show felt both true to our roots and a fitting way to usher in our next chapter.”
Fiore, who graduated from UVA, where she was awarded an Aunspaugh Fifth-Year Fellowship, creates paintings using colored smoke. She designs and builds tools (sculptures really) with resin, plaster, wood, metal, and other materials that hold smoke bomb canisters connected by a series of linked fuses. The tools allow Fiore to control the smoke that’s emitted when the bombs are ignited. She gives her over 200 tools/sculptures curious names: Burl, Quad Axel, or Shapeshifter, and decorates them individually so she can identify them when things are moving fast. The largest tool weighs 400 pounds, can hold 150 canisters, and requires a forklift to operate it. When lit, the smoke is expelled with great force from the containers. The artist has about two minutes to manipulate the tool across the canvas.
Fiore also uses acrylic paint, which she applies using silkscreen, partly to keep the surface as smooth as possible. This is a necessity, as smoke is very responsive to topography. The interplay between the two mediums gives the work dimensionality and helps achieve what Fiore calls “a sense of both motion and weightlessness.” The effect is clear in “Smoke Painting #71,” with its intersecting fractured shards that, with the swirls of smoke, create a spinning vortex.
“Smoke Painting #70” is a wild, exhilarating work that has so much going on it’s amazing Fiore manages to maintain control. Somehow the broad planes on the left, with their interesting blooms of paint and smoke, are balanced by the almost marbleized effect of the ground down surface on the right. At the center, yellow rays are interrupted by giant swirls of graffiti-like indigo smoke.
“Much of my smoke painting process is out of my control,” says Fiore, who compares it to lighting fireworks. “They’re all built differently and don’t perform the same way… It’s really about orchestrating chaos.”
According to Anne Carson in Grief Lessons, tragedy exists because we’re full of rage and we’re full of rage because we are full of grief. For Rendich, this resonates profoundly. “Grief has tremendous power,” she says. “It can paralyze and blind us from other possibilities. I see my works, which I think of as spaces, like open windows that bring in light. It’s light emerging from grief, grief that the viewer doesn’t see. It’s not because the grief has gone or has eroded, it’s because I cope with it by creating spaces of hope.
Originally from Argentina, Rendich grew up under a military dictatorship. In 1984, when she was 23, she and five other art students were summoned to an industrial complex on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. When they arrived, there was a line of family members of the “Disappeared,” the 30,000 civilian noncombatants who were kidnapped and murdered by the military following the 1976 coup d’état. Rendich spent three days listening to the families and trying to capture their loved ones on paper.
Rendich’s work is both spare and sumptuous. Her mixed-media panels, arranged in pairs and multiples, suggest minimalism, but possess a deep emotional element. Each panel is composed of layers of oil paint and resin. It’s how Rendich achieves her rich color and glossy surfaces.
Each layer of resin takes at least seven days to fully cure, and the oil can take from three days to two weeks, depending on the color and temperature of the room. One piece may take anywhere from one to three months to complete.
Rendich’s combinations cause the viewer to pause. You can see this in “Yellow and Red,” where the yellow, really a creamy white, is so unexpected next to the deep carmine. It makes you stop to consider it, thinking how unusual it is, and admiring the subtle boldness of the pairing.
Recently, Rendich introduced marks into her work. In “Radar II,” the green panel features a spiral that represents our going around and around, whether it’s school shootings or war. “Amapola” (Poppy), a large tondo adorned with frilly disks of Japanese paper, is about how we take something pure and make it dirty. In this case, the poppy flower is tainted by the heroin trade blighting South America.
In Rendich’s shiny surfaces we see reflected not only ourselves, but also our surroundings. We recognize both, and even though they look utterly different from reality, we get an inkling of what she means about changing grief into hope. As she builds the pieces up layer by layer, she turns the heartache she carries into beauty.
