Tag: Fine Arts

What does it mean to digitally broadcast the ‘experience’ of a tree? Is satire inherent in such an act?” These are just a couple of the questions that Charlottesville-based artist Peter Traub hopes you’ll contemplate while viewing “WoodEar” at UVA’s Ruffin Gallery.

The exhibit is a recent collaboration between composer and multimedia artist Traub; dance artist, choreographer, and lecturer Katie Schetlick; and visual artist Jennifer Lauren Smith, who works in video, photography, and performance. Originally commissioned in 2012, the project received National Endowment for the Arts funding for its premiere at the Pace Digital Gallery and was also exhibited at The Bridge PAI earlier this year. The current installation was funded by the UVA Arts Council, and Traub assured that “this is the largest version of ‘WoodEar’ to date and has been significantly expanded and revised.”

Incorporating video, sound, graphics, and photographs, “WoodEar” centers on real-time influences collected from a single, living tupelo tree. Discussing the project’s origins, Traub notes that “we are surrounded by networked devices, but our default mode is to think of them as a means toward greater productivity, economic advantage, and interconnectedness.” Sensors and an Arduino controller on the tree collect and stream real-time data about environmental changes—including light, temperature, and humidity—to a computer, where it can be combined with a live audio feed from micro-
phones also on the tree.

Traub agreed that this might be slightly intimidating for an art gallery exhibit. “I see one of my jobs as an electronic artist as being able to communicate in such a way that people who are new to it can feel that it is not beyond their capability to appreciate or understand,” he said. “At both Pace and The Bridge I met a number of people who didn’t quite know what to make of it at first, but were very interested and really wanted to know more—how it works, why I did it, where the art or composition is in the piece.”

The result is an immersive gallery installation that evolves in real-time to present multiple perspectives of digital and natural networks, drawing parallels between human and arboreal forms. “I wanted this show to be all about visual and sonic markers of summer. The sound recordings include a lot of birds, lawn mowers, crickets, cicadas, and other summer wildlife,” said Traub. Dance is fused with the project through “spritewood,” a video projection in which Schetlick’s motions are portrayed in a series of still photographs shot from fifteen feet in the air. Projected onto raw wood, Schetlick appears to be engrained in the wood itself. According to Smith, “From the outset, [Schetlick] focused on honest relationships between the human body and that of the tree, for instance, considering the changing shapes of a tree’s shade as stimuli for a dancer’s movement.”

A live dance performance with Schetlick and other dancers will be held during the opening reception for “WoodEar” on August 29 from 5:30-7:30pm in Ruffin Gallery. The opening provides an opportunity to meet the artists, but Traub also recommended that “if you can manage more visits to the piece over the course of the show, you should see it in different states. A warm sunny day will look and sound different from a cold overcast one.” The exhibit is on display through October 3.

The day after Labor Day, Ryan Trott will return to the classrooms and hallways where he teaches art to local elementary school students. Under his guidance, they’ll learn about masterworks and fine art techniques; he’ll lead them in exercises to spur imagination and develop creativity. And when asked how he spent his summer vacation, Trott will give them a glimpse into what it means to live life as an artist.

Whether snapping shots of colorful, abstract patterns to post to Instagram, recording a song and editing a music video, or making a drawing over a cup of coffee, Trott is an artist. He structures life to allow him to keep one foot in the creation of aesthetically engaging work and the other foot in the cultivation of artistic experimentation and playfulness. Which is to say, he makes great art and inspires other people to want to make great art.

With an undergraduate background in visual art and music production, Trott lived as a working artist and musician in New York City before pursuing his Master’s in Art Education at the City College of New York. “I realized I was really looking for a creatively fulfilling (semi-traditional) career,” he said. “I really connect to the young creative spirit and love working with children.” 

Landing in central Virginia post-graduation, Trott took a job at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. Reflecting on the time spent working with executive director Matthew Slaats, Trott said, “He has so much faith in making realistic positive change in a community and using the arts in an open way.” Trott is also skilled at this type of inclusivity, encouraging others to participate in art, whether they’re his students, friends, or complete strangers.

Though The Bridge job came to an end when he was offered his current teaching position, Trott remains an active presence at the local arts nonprofit and recently started a new program there, titled Free Draw. Consider it a monthly invitation to let your creative quirks hang out while chatting with other doodlers, emerging artists, and folks who just like the smell of colored pencils.

“Free Draw came about as a way to keep an instructional art idea going in a more loose, open environment, with adult artists,” said Trott. “It connects to the idea that anyone can create art; the activities that we do are open and creatively encouraging and supportive.” The next Free Draw takes place on Thursday, August 28 at 7pm.

At the first Free Draw in July, the space was filled with tables, scrap paper and sketchbooks, and an array of crayons, markers, and pencils. A group of curious participants filled the room and took part in Trott’s creative ice breakers and collaborative drawing projects. “As an artist, I am very interested in supporting and encouraging the art of others as well as my own work,” said Trott. “I love setting up projects and seeing what people come up with. It is really just as much fun for me to write projects as it is to draw or paint right now.” Artistic talent an afterthought, the focus of Free Draw is on the creation of a welcoming and supportive environment for people to make art. 

Trott is also part of the second annual Community Supported Art (CSA) program through The Bridge. Modeled on farm-to-table CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture), the program provides subscribers with limited-edition works from each of the selected artists—six works of art in total—plus a chance to meet the artists.

For his part, Trott will design a limited-edition activity book with creative projects for adults or children to make with easy-to-find materials. One of Trott’s drawings will accompany each activity and he hopes the book will inspire others to create art. “The project connects to my belief that anyone can make art (and be an artist) in their daily life, and that the creative spirit is something that everyone should make an effort to exercise.”

In addition to Trott, the featured artists in this year’s CSA are Zoe Cohen, Warren Craghead, Lily Erb, Joy Meyer, and Michael Powell. Subscriptions include handmade mugs crafted by Cohen, among other works. Craghead is a mixed media artist who will assemble a book of drawings related to Charlottesville walking paths and The Bridge’s upcoming Walk the City project. Drawing on her experience as a printmaker and sculptor, Erb will produce steel sculptures exploring natural forms. An abstract painter, Meyer will produce paper-based paintings with embroidered accents. Powell is a digital artist and sculptor who will incorporate these skills in the creation of figurative models from digitally manipulated images.

Thirty CSA subscriptions will be available beginning September 1 at $400 each. The fee supports The Bridge and provides participating artists with a stipend to cover time and materials and provides a rare opportunity for the micro-financing of limited-edition artwork by local artists.

As the CSA launches and his Free Draw program takes off, Ryan Trott remains dedicated to his goal for the new school year, saying that “I want to keep pushing things further into interesting territory, showing the students that art is really all around us and can affect every part of life.”

What was the last art project you made? Tell us about it in the comments section below.

Everybody’s an amateur photographer these days, using smartphone cameras and Instagram filters to create quick, easy, and brighter-than-life ‘art’. But in curator June Collmer’s latest exhibit, “The World of Printmaking,” she’s going to bat for a different aesthetic.

“It’s the lines,” the local photographer said in an interview at the Vinegar Hill Café in the Jefferson School City Center, where the group show of etchings, intaglios, lithographs, linoleum and screen prints hangs. “That’s why I like black and white photography so much—color distracts from the lines of a piece.”  

A onetime printmaker herself, Collmer’s attraction to subtle beauty reveals itself in the works of all seven artists. Featuring everyday subjects in muted colors, the prints and etchings reject easy image creation in favor of painstaking translation—the physical world into tactile likeness. 

Consider Nelson County printer Lana Lambert, who transfers sketches of local flora and fauna onto linoleum blocks. Using her industrial-era letterpress machine, she hand inks and presses each one of her works onto handmade paper.  

Brooke Inman, a VCU adjunct instructor in painting and printmaking, likewise embraces the DIY approach. Her detailed prints balance white space and dogs, stones, and other commonplace objects.

Scottsville native Liz Cherry Jones uses a combination of silk screening and relief printing on paper and fabric in her ongoing series “Text and Textiles.” Each letter-pressed collage reflects components that recall colonial Americana, a time when wool was a work of art and technique triumphed speed.

Emily King also screen prints paper and fabrics, notably panels of traditional Japanese skirts. After studying abroad in Osaka, Japan, she recaptured memories as art, using Japanese letters and language and reprints of photos she bitmapped in Photoshop before printing. As she commented in her artist’s statement, “the rise of technology interjecting itself into art is a curious thing.”

Kelleyann Gordon combines art, tech, and nature with solar plates. Printed on glass or transparent acetate, original images are transferred to steel when a thin layer of photosensitive polymer hardens with exposure to UV light. Her piece “Salem Fair” showcases the process—one photograph, one etched solar plate, and one print—with three versions of a city densely packed around a Ferris wheel. 

Ellen Moore Osborne creates intaglios, prints made with plates that have been etched by tools like steel or diamond-tipped needles. In the case of “Deafened by the Divine,” “Ironworks,” and “Idle Times,” she used nitric acid to etch images onto zinc metal sheets, then inked, buffed, and printed the resulting transfers by hand.

Rachel Singel’s intaglios are more abstract and almost vertigo-inducing. Every inch of her dense swirls—which look like twining branches of birds’ nests or cross sections of the world’s oldest tree—were etched by hand. 

“People forget that you can use a small block that costs basically nothing and come up with something beautiful that can be reprinted,” Collmer said. She hopes exhibit visitors will imagine what’s possible right in their own backyards, not only in the use of everyday materials and subjects to inspire art, but in visiting the Jefferson School City Center as well.

During Collmer’s outreach, she visited nearby neighborhoods, going door-to-door in a way that, like her exhibit, invokes nostalgia for a simpler time. “People in the community have been very open, and that’s been a wonderful part of curating this,” she said. “Just getting to know people.”

“The World of Printmaking” will be on display at the Jefferson School City Center through August 31. 

You don’t often see sculptors in the library at work on invisible projects, but Justin Poe is an exception.

“When I started out, I did these 2″ x 3″ wide sculptures, and I carried everything around in my backpack,” said the Charlottesville-based artist. “I worked in public, in libraries and restaurants, and got a lot of real-time feedback. I just started working smaller and smaller, and it got to the point where people stopped asking because they couldn’t see it.”

The Florida native and 2012 graduate of Guilford College in North Carolina creates “detailed small-scale architectural landscapes.” His miniature houses, apartment buildings, and cabins anchor to natural surfaces and found objects like moss-capped stones and hermit crab shells.

“The smallest house I ever made was a size of a grain of salt,” Poe said. To display that piece, he mounted the house to a quarter-inch nail head and created a little forest around it.

He framed the work with a magnifying lens for viewers, though he didn’t use one himself. “I wanted to reach the epitome of working without a microscope or magnifying glass,” he explained.

So how the hell does he make such tiny, intricate objects?

Practice, apparently. Poe said he’s gotten to the point “where I don’t need tweezers, even. I shave a toothpick to a small point, touch it to glue, dab most of the glue off, and use that to adhere pieces together. That way I get no friction from tweezers.”

Patience is another key. To make his smallest houses, Poe applies a layer of paint to a surface, carves off the edges with an X-acto knife, applies another layer, carves again, and so on. It’s a process he described as “kind of like 3D printing, but manual.”

He’s always liked to look at things in fine detail. “Like moss on a rock, I’m instantly drawn into that,” he said. “It’s a little self-contained world.”

Poe got his start as a technical theater major with a focus in set design. His interest in miniature structures piqued when he began making small-scale models of sets.

“I kind of realized that if I’d been doing something larger, people would be less inclined to buy it as rapidly,” he said.

His forays into small sculpture confirmed his belief that people tended to value small-scale intricacy more than large-scale intricacy. In other words, it’s easier to identify (and therefore applaud) time-consuming techniques over complicated concepts.

“I hate when people look at my work and think they can do the same things, though I fall prey to that too,” he said. “Working really small-scale blows that notion out of the water. That’s a huge benefit to working smaller and smaller over time.”

After graduation, Poe went back to Guilford for a fourth year in sculpture. Inspired by Willard Wigan, a micro-sculptor whose work is small enough to pass through the eye of a needle, Poe pursued the theme of detailed small-scale architectural landscapes in his thesis. In Charlottesville he works with sculptor and contractor Jason Roberson and plans to apply to UVA’s graduate School of Architecture.

Working with toothpicks, cardboard from boxes, and “whatever is free and immediately available,” Poe encourages viewers to reframe their understanding of what it means to be “life-sized.” As a personal practice, this shift in perception has greatly colored the artist’s worldview.

“When you focus in on this really small scale your eyes have to adjust,” he said. “They become so adjusted everything else looks blurry. It enters you into this Zen-like state. When you’re focused on this one small spot, the rest of the world disappears.”

First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many Downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. Listings are compiled in collaboration with Piedmont Council for the Arts. To list an exhibit, please send information two weeks before opening to arts@c-ville.com.

First Fridays: August 1, 2014.

C’Ville Arts Cooperative 118 E. Main St. “Branching Out,” new works by Flame Bilyue. 6-8pm.

The Garage 250 First St. N. “Minor Mutations,” watercolor, pen and ink drawings by Kaki Dimock. 5-8pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. Summer members group show. 5:30-7:30pm.

S. C. Studio 214 W. Water St. “Mostly Water Street,” works by Randy Smith that feature local flavors on Water Street. 5-8pm.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St. “Elephants Back by Popular Demand,” featuring Lindsley Matthews, Beth Hamerschlag and Erwin Baumfalk. 6-8pm.

Telegraph Art & Comics 110 4th St. NE. “Retrofit Comics Showcase,” a spotlight on Retrofit Comics out of Philadelphia. 5-10pm.

Vinegar Hill Cafe at the Jefferson School City Center 233 4th St. NW. “The World of Printmaking,” a group show featuring etchings, intaglios, lithographs, linoleum and screen prints. 5:30-8pm.

Warm Springs Gallery 105 Third St. NE. “Summer Afternoon,” paintings by Megan Lightell, Kurt Moyer, Jane Schmidt and collographs by Nina Muys. 6-8pm.

WriterHouse 508 Dale Avenue. “Reflections in Clay,” works by Scott Supraner. 5:30-7:30pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “VSA Annual Art Show,” collaborative exhibit with artwork from VSA members.

Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia 155 Rugby Rd. “Portraying the Golden Age,” “Reflections and Undercurrents,” “Postwar British Prints” and “Vinland: Recent Work by Cindy Bernard.”

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Art and Country” and “We Are Tiwi.”

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Near Walnut Creek,” paintings by John Borden Evans. 

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Open Threads,” mixed media sculpture and ceramics by Rebekah Wostrel in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Photographs,” work by Ron Evans and “A Retrospective of the Art of Skip Willis” in the Lower Hall Galleries; “Now and Then: A Retrospective,” work by Polly Breckenridge and “New Watercolors of Plants and Flowers” by Marcia Mitchell in the Upper Hall Galleries.

The Niche in the Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library at UVA Bayly Dr. “Stop & Go,” a series of animations curated by stop-motion artist Sarah Klein.

Pigment 1229 Harris St. #13. “Parvum,” mixed media sculpture by Justin Poe.

 “I don’t really like going on trips,” said Laura Snyder, standing among half-painted maps and other travel miscellany in her second-floor studio at The Haven. “When I go somewhere I like to be able to just stay. I’m a one-way ticket kind of girl.”

A New City Arts’ artist-in-residence, Snyder was in the midst of preparing her upcoming mixed media exhibit “Souvenir.”  Her “meditation on how memory operates” features objects from the artist’s years in Latin America including gold-washed botanical prints, colorful drawings of abstract swirls, and paper maps overlaid with intricate blue brush strokes.

Though she’s originally from Charlottesville, Snyder hasn’t lived in town for more than a few months since she left for undergraduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. She travelled to Mexico several times, following her intuition to new experiences and eventually receiving her Masters in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. After two years in Colombia—“a place I went because of another person”—she looked for a reason to return to the States. 

“I’ve lived so many places where I’m not in contact with those people any more. There are experiences that maybe they happened, maybe they didn’t,” she said. “Who was I? I spoke a different language. I’m a chameleon, so I totally adopt the accent and am never around other Americans. It makes you question a lot of things.”

Snyder’s graduate thesis focused on cartography in the arts, but her post-travel experience demanded a different level of introspection. She obsessively patterned maps, for example, to obscure their functionality, using blue paint to recall physical distances and the horizons that separate truth from fiction.

“This work is a lot about the value we put on images. We instill meaning in objects when living in other countries because that’s what we do,” she said, pointing to several vials of seashells arranged like zoological specimens along the windowsill. 

As a whole, “Souvenir” functions as a “counter atlas,” each drawing and map a page from an explorer’s journal. But unlike the work of colonial naturalists, she said, her discoveries were necessarily fictionalized.

“Think of Humboldt in the early 1600s. He was all over the Latin American continent, and he detailed all these things he found, these plants and these animals,” she said. “I kind of think I’m doing the same thing with my memories, but I’m not creating knowledge. I’m creating something different.”

Picking up a blue-tinted photograph layered with repetitive patterns of gold, Snyder said, “These are from a place outside of Bogotá, an ecosystem called a páramo, that was a refuge place for me.” She photographed flora in the páramo’s shallow lakes and used paint to merge this personal experience with a Colombian legend. “It’s true that the indigenous people would make offerings of gold in certain high altitude lakes. [There is] a myth that there was so much gold in one lake that the Spanish, English, and Germans tried to empty water out by various means.”

Memory and myth converge inside the explorer, too. “I connected to offering statues, figures that have a hole in the center to put offerings,” Snyder said. Her abstract drawings reflect her body as the seat of all experience. “Drawing like that is a thing I’ve always done in journals while I travel. I’ve decided that if you were to cross section me, this is what I have inside. All this layering of lines.”

A reception for Snyder’s exhibit “Souvenir” opens on Friday at WVTF and Radio IQ Gallery. The show runs through July.

After an extensive renovation, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection has unveiled two new exhibitions in its redesigned galleries. “Art and Country,” on view for the next year, provides a crystallization of Aboriginal art through the framing of basic questions. The exhibition’s design will remain while the work will be rotated out yearly so that treasures from the permanent collection can each have their moment in the spotlight. “We want visitors who come to Kluge-Ruhe to walk away with some definite knowledge,” said director Margo Smith. “We were concerned that before this redesign, some very basic questions were still unanswered when visitors left. So we decided to boil things down to a couple of really simple ones: What is Aboriginal Art about? What is the Dreaming?”

The latter, a difficult concept for the uninitiated to grasp, is explained by Smith. “The Dreaming is the accumulated knowledge a group has about the ancestral past, present, and future and how it intersects with human activity,” she said. “It is learned and sometimes, new information is revealed in dreams, but otherwise is unrelated to dream states. Life and death are intertwined with the Dreaming. It is kind of the underlying true nature of the universe. One man told me if he took off all of his clothes and walked into the desert, he would walk into the Dreaming—thus it is distinct from everyday life but exists alongside it.”

The Dreaming is the overarching theme of the majority of the work in the Kluge-Ruhe collection coming as it does from more remote communities. While the artwork is contemporary, it draws on long-standing ideas and traditions that are an integral part of various Aboriginal cultures. Not all Aboriginal art deals with the Dreaming, but “country” and people’s relationship to it (a vital aspect of the Dreaming) informs it all. And it’s not just the land; country for Aboriginal peoples includes the sky, water, and air. For its indigenous people, Australia is comprised of many countries with distinct cultural groups and traditions and identification with one’s country is profound, extending even to those descendants from urban areas. 

“We are Tiwi,” a loaned exhibition, focuses on the artistic tradition of the inhabitants of the Melville and Bathurst islands off the coast north of Darwin. Their traditions focus on two ceremonies: the Pukumani, which relates to death, and the Kulama, which centers on fertility and male initiation. 

The Pukumani mortuary rituals are based on a story about Tiwi’s original ancestors, which Smith describes as “a tale involving adultery and the origination of death among humans. When the ancestor Purukapali went hunting, his wife left their son in the shade of a tree and met his brother for a tryst. The sun shifted and the baby died from exposure. The wife’s lover, who was the moon man, offered to bring the baby back to life after three days but Purukapali refused, and walked into the sea with the body of his son.

In the Tiwi culture, huge Pukumani poles depicting the narrative about the Dreaming ancestors, interspersed with geometric motifs, are erected around grave sites. These continue to be used today even though many of the inhabitants have converted to Christianity. There are no poles on exhibit, but one can spot the paintings that derive from this tradition by their rectilinear quality.

A traditional part of image making for Tiwi and something that has been reincorporated into art is the use of a comb called the Pwoja that is carved from ironwood and used with traditional ochre pigments taken from the earth that are mixed with a fixative. 

Looking at the work, one is struck by how it’s almost a surrogate for “country,” composed as it is from the very terrain. Together with the wood comb, the natural ochre pigments taken from the cliffs make potent reference to the living landscape.

Artists use the comb to make a line of dots creating a really beautiful effect. For instance, looking at the work of Pedro Wonaeamirri, a master of the technique, you can see how he has applied the pwoja with different impressions and different amounts of pigment creating a wonderful rippling line. While his are elegant, restrained works, Sandra Puruntatameri really goes to town with the pwoja on “Jilamara Design” creating a bona fide piece of Aboriginal Op Art.

At the other end of the spectrum, Kulama’s three days and nights of body painting, held when wild yams ripen just after the rainy season, celebrates life. This is a joyful time and the works are more exuberant and less circumspect than the Pukumani pieces. Conrad Tipungwuti’s “Kulama Ceremony” seems as if it’s going to burst forth from the canvas, and Susan Wanji Wanji’s “Kulama Design,” though more restrained, is dramatic in its complexity. 

It’s fascinating to learn the story behind the works and see them. They present a point of view so different from our own and yet they reach out and draw us in. If you can’t get there during the day, Kluge-Ruhe hosts “Night at the Museum” on their lawn (which boasts one of the best views in town) on the third Thursday of the month. There’s a live band, food truck rally, and craft beer. And the museum is open.

It’s that time of year again when dazzling photographs of exotic wildlife hang from the willow oaks running along the Downtown Mall. Dubbed “TREES,” the exhibition of large, double-sided images is the most visible and popular aspect of LOOK3, the nonprofit organization that celebrates the vision of extraordinary photographers, ignites critical conversations about the subjects the photography presents, and fosters the next generation.

This year, the focus of “TREES” is National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore’s “Photo Ark.” Sartore has devoted his life to publicizing the crisis of species endangerment and the importance of conserving biodiversity; as he points out, in saving these creatures, we are really saving ourselves. Sartore’s lushly beautiful, sometimes playful, always magical photographs allow the viewer to closely examine these captive species, many of which would have gone extinct without the heroic efforts of zoos and aquariums. Sartore will speak about this work and its implications on June 18 at the Paramount. The photographs will remain in place through July 8.

LOOK3 operates on a four-year cycle: three consecutive years of festivals followed by one year of LOOKbetween, a mentorship program targeted at international early-career photographers. Though the festival is on hiatus this year, “TREES” and the popular nighttime projection events remain.

LOOK3 can trace its roots to “Hot Shots,” an annual one-night extravaganza of projected images that National Geographic magazine Editor-at-Large Michael “Nick” Nichols held in his Berkeley, California loft beginning in 1982. When Nichols moved to the Charlottesville area he continued the tradition, eventually drawing 400-500 people to an al fresco night of slides at his home in Sugar Hollow in 2005. Inspired by the popularity of the event, Nichols, together with Jessica Nagle, Will Kerner, and Jon Golden founded the LOOK3 Festival of Photography. 

The purpose of LOOKbetween is to identify early-career photographers with exceptional skill, commitment, and vision—and to advance their growth by uniting them with leaders in the field. This year’s event includes James Wellford, a photography editor and curator based in New York who was the former international photo editor at Newsweek, Alice Gabriner, senior photo editor at National Geographic magazine, Yukiko Yamagata, associate director of the Documentary Photography Project at Open Society Foundations, and New York-based, British photographer Philip Toledano among a dozen others of equal stature.

The 75 emerging visionaries were drawn from a pool of over 230 candidates, and were nominated by 70 distinguished photography professionals worldwide. LOOKbetween attendees come from 22 countries and 15 U.S. states. “Our goal is to create an environment that supports exploration,” said LOOK3 Director, Victoria Hindley. “Helping attendees deepen craft while provoking new ways of seeing. In this way, we think of ‘inbetweeness’ as a rich territory for experimentation beyond boundaries.”

The group will congregate June 13-15 at Deep Rock Farm in White Hall, camping onsite, sharing meals, and presenting work under the stars. “With voices represented from all over the U.S. and as far as Tanzania, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Brazil, we expect and encourage a dynamic and diverse dialogue which we hope will build a community of photographers from all over the world,” said Hindley.

Deep Rock Farm provides a spectacular setting for the celebratory dinner party and projection events. These wildly popular evenings feature everything from fine art photography to international photojournalism to human interest stories from across the United States projected outdoors on a big screen. 

“Photography is a technology-driven art, and so it’s the nature of the craft to undergo radical transformations. From glass plates to film; from film to digital; and now the mobile phone is shifting the landscape of visual culture in untold ways given the unprecedented quantity of images it brings,” said Hindley. “In response, photographic practices are shifting in ways that make this a pivotal moment in history.”

If you go, you’re in for a treat, mingling with a crowd made up of people passionate about photography, and seeing some of the most relevant, provocative, and meaningful work being made today.

The goals of LOOKbetween are certainly ambitious, but Hindley’s background in visual culture with an emphasis on literature and photography, make her up to the challenge. For the last 15 years, Hindley has directed arts organizations and arts initiatives both in the States and abroad.

Before coming to Charlottesville, Hindley was based in Vienna, Austria for almost five years, developing initiatives such as the Shelter Project and the Right to the City and consulting for Soho in Ottakring, an artist-led platform that has had a powerful impact on the community. Spending summers in Berlin, she worked with Transart Institute (her graduate alma mater), teaching graduate seminars and advising graduate students.

Prior to that, Hindley managed the Fine Press Program, developing award-winning editions with Booker Prize author Salman Rushdie, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, and visionary architect William McDonough, while she directed a multiyear initiative with the International Institute of Modern Letters to combat censorship worldwide.

Through it all, Hindley has maintained her practice as an artist, working mainly with photography, installations, and the book form—and as often as she can, in collaboration with others around the world.

Part anthropologist, part pirate, Jesse Fiest hunts for treasure among knickknacks and leftovers. Using found and second hand materials, she creates whimsical sculptures in “Second Hand Fauna,” described as vegan taxidermy–which makes it pretty clear that no animals were harmed in the creation of this artwork.

Friday 6/13. Free, 5pm. Telegraph Gallery, 110 Fourth St., NE. 244-3210.

First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many Downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. Listings are compiled in collaboration with Piedmont Council for the Arts. To list an exhibit, please send information two weeks before opening to arts@c-ville.com.

First Fridays: June 6, 2014.

Blue Moon Diner 512 W Main St. “Shadowy People from a Shadow Planet: The CLAW Silhouettes” by Olon Pills. 5-7pm.

The Bridge PAI 209 Monticello Rd. “There Is A Crack In Everything, That’s How The Light Gets In,” photography installation by Megan Bent. 6-9pm.

City Clay 700 Harris St. Suite 104. “The Gift,” ceramics by Becky Garrity. 5-7:30pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Back Talking on the Mountain of God,” photography and poetry to celebrate the launch of a multimedia iBook poetry anthology. 5:30-7pm.

C’ville-ian Brewery 705 W. Main St. “Amiable Contrast,” works by photographer Cary Oliva and painter Dama Schneider. 5:30-7:30pm.

C’Ville Arts 118 E. Main St. “Extraordinary Inspirations in Polymer Clay,” wearable clay creations by Judith N. Ligon. 6-8pm.

Fellini’s #9 200 W. Market St. Black and white photography by Kelsey Chavers. 5:30-7pm.

The Garage 250 First St. N. “Patterning,” encaustic collaged paintings and prints by Julia Sharpe. 5-7:30pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Open Threads,” mixed media sculpture and ceramics by Rebekah Wostrel in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Photographs,” work by Ron Evans and “A Retrospective of the Art of Skip Willis” in the Lower Hall Galleries; “Now and Then: A Retrospective,” work by Polly Breckenridge and “New Watercolors of Plants and Flowers” by Marcia Mitchell in the Upper Hall Galleries. 5:30-7:30pm.

Mono Loco 200 Water Street W. “Seagrams Variation,” works in ceramic and acrylic by George Andrews. 5:30-7:30pm.

New Dominion Bookshop 404 E Main St. “Different Strokes,” watercolor paintings by Eloise Giles. 5:30-7:30pm.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Can’t Shake It,” multi-media and performance art by Avery Lawrence. 5:30-7:30pm.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St. “A Collection of Works,” featuring 14 artists from the Charlottesville-Albemarle Art Association. 6-8pm.

Telegraph 110 4th St. NE. Screen prints and original works by comic artist Meredith Gran. 5-10pm.

Top Knot Studio 103 5th Street SE. “Form and Freedom; Order and Chaos,” oil paintings by Wolfgang Hermann. 5:30-8pm.

Warm Springs Gallery 105 Third St. NE. “Man’s Best Friend, Cat or Dog?” featuring the work of 8 invited artists who explore the relationship between people and their pets. A benefit for the Albemarle SPCA. 6-8pm.

WriterHouse “We Are Not Our Work,” digital collages by Carolyn Capps. 5:30-7:30pm.

WVTF and Radio IQ Studio Gallery 216 W. Water St. New City Arts presents “You Are Here”, Charlottesville community map drawings facilitated by Mara Sprafkin and Laura Snyder. 5-7pm.

OTHER EXHIBITS

Angelo 220 E. Main St. “Landscape Sketches,” a collection of paintings by John A. Hancock.

Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia 155 Rugby Rd. “Jasper Johns: Early Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation,” “Portraying the Golden Age: Drawings from the Maida and George Abrams Collection,” and “Joseph Cornell and Surrealism.”

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “having-been-there” by Nici Cumpston.

The Local 824 Hinton Ave. “Vernal,” photography by Bill Mauzy.

Telegraph 110 Fourth Street NE.  “Second Hand Fauna,” vegan taxidermy by mixed media artist Jesse Fiest. Opening reception June 13, 5pm.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. Paintings by Donna Redmond. Opening reception June 1, 11am.