Tag: The Bridge PAI

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Living

LIVING Picks: Week of December 20-26

Show your creative spirit by decorating graham cracker gingerbread houses at the Virginia Discovery Museum.

FAMILY

Gingerbread house making
Thursday, December 21

Show your creative spirit by decorating graham cracker gingerbread houses. $15 (includes museum admission for one child and one adult), 4pm. Virginia Discovery Museum, 524 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 977-1025.

NONPROFIT

Gift Forest
Through December 24

Holiday pop-up market features designers, makers and artists from across the area. Free entry, various hours. The Bridge PAI, 209 Monticello Rd. 984-5669.

FOOD & DRINK

Campfire caroling
Friday, December 22

Musician Jan Smith leads guests in singing carols around the campfire. Free, 6-8pm. Devils Backbone Brewing Company, 200 Mosbys Run, Roseland. 361-1001.

HEALTH & WELLNESS

New Year’s Day 5K
Monday, January 1

The Charlottesville Track Club hosts this run that benefits the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Virginia. $25-35, 11am. 5405 Wesley Chapel Rd., Free Union. cvilletrackclub.org

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Arts

Aaron Farrington finds new magic in a bygone photo process

Aaron Farrington’s portrait studio will open at McGuffey Art Center on November 29. Portraits from his “People of Charlottesville” series (like “Evan” above and “Rodney” below) will be on display during the Holiday Group Show at McGuffey in December. Courtesy of the artist

Aaron Farrington fell for photography in high school after his grandfather died. “My mom inherited his camera, so I inherited her camera and started taking pictures,” he says. Farrington became interested in making movies, too, and enrolled in a New York film school. But thanks to the expense, he dropped out and wrote a novel because, he says with his wry humor, “I wanted to do something cheaper.”

Farrington made his way to Charlottesville in 1997. “Moving here was great because it was cheap back then and it was easy to leave and come back,” he says. Inspiration came into focus on a road trip to Alaska and Los Angeles. Taking photographs along the way, Farrington returned with a lot of film to develop. “I learned how to do that and I was hooked,” he says.

Two years ago, he began shooting wet-plate photographs with a 1910 camera he found on eBay. Actually, he says, “The camera found me.” Wet-plate photography was invented by Frederick Scott Archer in 1851. It predates film and instead captures photographs on glass or aluminum plates. First Farrington sensitizes the plate by coating it with a mixture of a soluble iodide and collodion (cellulose nitrate) solution. Then he shoots the photo, which requires removing and replacing the lens cap because the camera doesn’t have a shutter. Using the portable dark box he built, he has to develop the photo before the plate dries. All of this happens in the span of 10 to 15 minutes. “It’s like a Polaroid,” he says. “Instant gratification…sometimes no gratification at all. It can be tricky.”

“Rodney.” Courtesy of the artist

Before purchasing the camera online, Farrington spent a summer shooting digital photos on the road with the Dave Matthews Band. He’d return to Charlottesville after two to three shows with about 5,000 photos to edit, but he found himself unhappy with this prospect.

“I didn’t get interested in photography because I wanted to sit in front of a computer,” he says. He recalls Nick Nichols (National Geographic photographer and founder of the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph) saying to him when digital photography was beginning to take off, “The world is round in digital.” But Farrington has resisted this idea. “Creative constraints, I think, are good,” he says. “They can help focus us.” Now that photo editing software can give you any effect you want, he says, “It makes it seem maybe just a little less magic, and less a feeling of accomplishment.”

Farrington, who is opening a wet plate portrait studio at McGuffey Art Center this month, says the process appeals to him for a couple other reasons. One, he’s shy and it gives him something to talk about with his portrait subjects. “And the process is really fun to watch,” he says. “After you develop the plate in the dark box and bring it out into the light, it’s kind of a strange, milky negative image. You pour the fixer on it and slowly it turns into a positive and it just looks like magic and alchemy.” Another thing that makes it unique, Farrington says, is “it’s only sensitive to the blue end of the light spectrum. It means that people with really blue eyes end up with light or almost white-looking eyes.”

In an ongoing project, Farrington is documenting oral histories, shooting video portraits and making wet-plate portraits of Charlottesville residents in a series called “People of Charlottesville.” He recently exhibited some of the portraits at The Bridge, a selection of which will be on display during McGuffey’s Holiday Group Show in December. The series was born out of Farrington’s desire to record people’s stories in his own neighborhood. But his concept for the series expanded after the election, and again after August 12. “I wanted to celebrate who we are and what we are, for better or for worse,” he says.

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Arts

ARTS Pick: Think & Drink

The first installment of Think & Drink, a new series from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, features NPR reporter Lulu Miller reading from her upcoming book, Why Fish Don’t Exist. Staff photo

The first installment of Think & Drink, a new series from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, features NPR reporter Lulu Miller reading from her upcoming book, Why Fish Don’t Exist. Wes Swing accompanies her with his original compositions on the cello, followed by a Q&A on “the dangers of miscategorization, the infallibility of the human mind to make sense of the world, and how and why to loop a cello.”

Sunday, October 22. Free, 6pm. The Bridge PAI, 209 Monticello Rd. 984-5669.

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Arts

Paige Naylor leads a journey of awareness

Think you’ve heard it all? Paige Naylor will prove there’s more at one of her Deep Listening sessions at the Bridge. Photo courtesy subject

Sit down, find a comfortable position—lay down, if that’s more relaxing. Close your eyes.

Can you find the quiet place in your mind where there are no thoughts, no words, no images?

Can you remain in the quiet mind place by listening to all the sounds you can possibly hear, including the most distant sounds beyond the space you now occupy?

A dry leaf skitters across a brick wall. Birds chirp in the trees overhead. Something nearby—a squirrel?—makes a chuck-chuck-chuck call that’s answered by another chuck-chuck further away. A helicopter whop-whops in the distance. Tires stick to humid asphalt. Keys jingle, a car door suctions open, hinges squeak. People walk, talk —they’re close enough that you can hear the murmur of their voices, but far enough away that you can’t make out the words.

An insect whizzes by. A staccato breeze comes and goes; you feel it on your face but mostly you hear it in the trees. There’s the saliva sound your throat makes when you swallow. And the sound of your shirt brushing over your chest when you inhale, and the sound of the air moving in. Something small hits the ground with a tiny thump. The wool blanket beneath you scratches your thigh slightly as you shift around. The grass ripples. Your heart beats.

You realize what you hear, when you take the time to listen.

It’s easy to forget “that you could just sit down and listen to sounds and be fully in awe of them,” says Paige Naylor, a local musician and “deep listening” practitioner who has recently started monthly deep listening sessions—much like the one that prompted this writer to make all the observations above—at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative.

Deep Listening Series
The Bridge PAI
October 19

Naylor, who plays synthesizers and sings in electronic-atmospheric-psychedelic band Sweet Tooth, has long been intrigued by the intersection of music and psychology and the healing power of music.

Last November, Pauline Oliveros, the pioneering experimental electronic musician and composer who developed the deep listening philosophy in the 1970s, passed away at the age of 84, and Naylor, intrigued, began reading about the composer’s life and work and felt compelled to study it further.

Deep listening is “engaging in a practice of holistic listening, being aware of all the sounds in your environment…becoming aware of sounds, every sound that’s available to you, especially ones that you don’t normally pay attention to, and using that as healing, or to create community,” says Naylor, who is earning a certificate in deep listening through the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which merged with Oliveros’ own Deep Listening Institute in 2014.

Naylor’s sessions include sonic meditation, some gentle movement and, occasionally, dream exploration. Naylor uses some of Oliveros’ written guides, such as the “Sonic Images” meditation from Software for People, and sometimes she writes her own texts based on what she anticipates a group might need—for example, Naylor geared the August 17 session toward love, asking participants to ruminate on questions like “What does love sound like? Is it soft? Is it loud? Is it something that you notice?”

When deep listening, “you’re opening yourself up to things that you wouldn’t normally, and channeling sound and using that for healing in any way that’s helpful for you,” she says. She notes that the practice can be particularly useful for musicians, as it guides them to be more thoughtful about the variety of sounds that can be incorporated into recordings or performance to achieve a certain feeling or atmosphere. It isn’t just for musicians, though—anyone can benefit from the practice. And you might begin to wonder about sounds you physically cannot hear, like what plants sound like when they grow, when they photosynthesize. You won’t look at your kitchen window succulents in the same way.

Do Try This At Home

After a period of deep introspection incited by the Vietnam War, experimental musician and composer Pauline Oliveros wrote a series of 25 text-based instructions intended to provoke creativity and thoughtfulness; she called them “Sonic Meditations.” One of her simpler sonic meditations, “Native,” says: “Take a walk at night, and walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”

“Anyone can do that,” Oliveros told Sound American magazine, “but attention is directed, and it’s directed to the soles of your feet. So, if in fact you actually do that, you’ll begin to listen in a way that’s probably different from how you usually do when you walk.”

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Arts

ARTS Pick: Hypnagogia Film Collective

The Hypnagogia Film Collective screens its nontraditional work at The Bridge on Tuesday. Courtesy image

Various techniques lend texture and drama to the works in the Hypnagogia Film Collective. Contributions by artists Angus Carter, Edmond Marchetti and Larry Simon, along with guest filmmakers, are “unified through the collective’s devotion to innovation and transcending concepts of what constitutes filmmaking.” The group’s experimental films use a variety of formats, including celluloid Super 8, digital, found footage and cell phone captures to create imprints not seen in traditional cinema.

Tuesday, September 26. Donations suggested, 7:30pm. The Bridge PAI, 209 Monticello Rd. 984-5669.

 

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Arts

Instrumental rejuvenation: Will Mullany builds a wall of sound at The Bridge

A small metal bucket. Segments of rough-hewn PVC and metal pipe. A coffee tin. A red British post box coin bank. A spool of piano wire. A tiny, wooden drawer. Light switches, control boards, dials, film cans, electrical sockets. Pliers. Wire cutters. Rings of tubing, spoons, forks, nails, springs. Motors, yarn, string. A matte silver Christmas tree cake pan, film cans. Speakers, a license plate. A nest of wires.

To most, these things would be trash, but to musician and artist Will Mullany, one of three artists in residence at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative this summer, it’s treasure—items found in dumpsters, in friends’ attics and under art studio tables are precious components for instruments that challenge how music is made.

There’s something satisfying about doing something with your body and having it come back into your ear, says Mullany, who wanted to create instruments that people can play without any formal training. You don’t have to finger a chord on a fretboard or bow a string to make music, to make pleasing and interesting sound, Mullany says.

“Tradition and culture are the boundaries [of sound]. The only thing keeping people from making different music is genre and our long-standing reliance on the tools that have been the default for hundreds and hundreds of years.” Will Mullany

When he first got into The Bridge studio, he looked around and thought: “What can I do with this space that I can’t do anywhere else? What’s the most transverse thing you can do with a wall in an art gallery?” Turn it into a musical instrument made from trash, that’s what.

One of the walls in the studio is essentially a soundboard and thus the perfect foundation for some kind of large-scale instrument. Inspired in part by a spool of piano wire, and using zither pins (tuning pegs) to anchor the strings and the bucket, coin bank, coffee tin and various sections of pipe as bridge elements, Mullany built a dulcimer straight onto the wall.

Strike one of the wall dulcimer’s strings with a piano hammer, and that string’s bridge element will transmit via a hidden contact mic, amplifying the vibrations of the soundboard.

It’s the kind of thing found in a children’s museum—the pieces of pipe, the coffee tin, etc. are all movable—and their placement between the piano wire strings and the wall affects the sound that comes out. Move the bucket up a few inches and the sound completely changes. The string supported by the ring of metal pipe has a sitar-like sound, like something off The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

And Mullany hasn’t stopped at the wall dulcimer. There are wooden boxes with nails and springs that make horror movie noises via a contact microphone adhered to the inside of the box; there’s a digital synthesizer that has been manipulated into making weirdo sounds (and sometimes picking up a radio signal) when a nail or a screw is pushed into the socket of an electrical outlet mounted to the top of its film can case. There are multiple wind chimes made from wire, washers and railroad spikes, and coaxed into noise by the air or drumsticks, whatever you choose.

These instruments and the music they make is left partly up to chance: Mullany learns as he goes—he’s not a carpenter, luthier or electrician by trade.

“Tradition and culture are the boundaries” of sound, he says. “The only thing keeping people from making different music is genre and our long-standing reliance on the tools that have been the default for hundreds and hundreds of years.”

As for his workspace, Mullany knows what it looks like—he says he has a little bit of hoarder in him. The instruments in The Bridge installation are open for everyone to play, but oftentimes, Mullany says homemade instruments pile up around him unplayed. Before he moves to Richmond this fall, he wants to play all the instruments on a record, a sort of hoarder’s redemption, where he finally puts all that trash to use.

“Domestic Alchemy” officially opens at The Bridge on September 1, and visitors can see, hear and play what Mullany’s made. “It’s pretty immersive,” he says of the installation.

Visitors should keep in mind that sound produced by these instruments is “secondary” to the form-—his experimental instrument-making is all about how the instrument is played.

“With a physical object, you’re limited in a way that’s very freeing,” Mullany says. “When you have infinite choice [like with a highly programmed synthesizer or a guitar with a bunch of effects pedals] you’re paralyzed from fear that you’re not going to make the right choice. But then when all you have around you is garbage,” imagination and creativity are inevitable.

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Arts

Telemetry series at The Bridge takes off

Local musician and composer Paige Naylor performed at The Bridge PAI’s Telemetry experimental music series in April. The next show takes place on May 14. Photo by Travis Thatcher

Open-minded listeners looking for a new sound experience should head to The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on Sunday night for the Telemetry series. Developed by programming committee members Peter Bussigel, a composer and intermedia artist and professor in UVA’s music department, and Travis Thatcher, technical director of composition and computer technologies in that same department, the regular series is a place for music that Thatcher says is “often electronic but not necessarily always.”

The last two events “have been really successful, with [more than] 50 attendees,” says Thatcher.

Telemetry
May 14
The Bridge PAI

On Sunday, three local acts from UVA and Charlottesville, plus Curved Light out of Austin, Texas, will deliver performances of sound that challenge typical notions of musicianship and instrumentation. Here is an idea of what’s to be experienced, according to the artists themselves.

Curved Light

“I’ve always been attracted to ambient sound, but not necessarily its function in the background,” says Peter Tran, who along with Deirdre Smith creates psychedelic synth sound and vision as Curved Light. “I wanted to recontextualize [ambient sound] in a live context where an audience would be forced to engage, utilizing more direct textures and immersive visuals to create an expansive, psychedelic environment.” Audience members can expect “both intense visual and aural stimuli that explore the limitless possibilities of the modular synthesizer” from a Curved Light set, says Tran. It’s not something that’s easily categorized, and for that reason, “each concert is absolutely a journey.”

Travis Thatcher

Thatcher will perform what he says is “an ambient pastoral Berlin School sort of set.” (The Berlin School was a movement in 1970s West Berlin that explored the creative potential of the synthesizer through ambient sound often combined with sequenced runs of notes—think Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Ash Ra Tempel.)

For the set, he’ll play an original Oberheim Two Voice synthesizer that he’s restored in the past year. This particular instrument is a “relic,” Thatcher says, explaining that when the Two Voice appeared in 1975, it was the first commercially available polyphonic synthesizer, in that it could play two notes at once. While technology has advanced since 1975, the Oberheim changed the electronic music landscape for good. Plus, Thatcher adds, “I think it just sounds cool.”

Ghost Fortune

Ghost Fortune’s Ron Geromy thinks that chaos sounds good. “People’s expectations of such sounds are very different than other genres of electronic music, so it creates an interesting space to explore live,” he says.

Ron Geromy, a UVA student, explores that space with noisy patterns of interference created between the soundwaves of rather fragile homemade synthesizers. He makes his own synths by printing a 3-D shell and soldering buttons, switches and knobs to a Schmitt trigger chip—it’s an easy circuit to make, Ron Geromy says, one that “produces a very pleasant square wave.”

On the edges of those systems, he has “discovered a lot of very beautiful, transient sounds produced by the feedback overloading [the] mixer and speakers, that once pursued further, disappear. These could be tones, or textures, or even just rhythmic patterns created by clipping,” he says. “But none of them can be sustained for too long.”

“People’s expectations of such sounds are very different than other genres of electronic music, so it creates an interesting space to explore live.” Ron Geromy

Molasses

Molasses, Will Mullany’s solo drum performance project, developed out of what Mullany says is “a dissatisfaction with the alienating and detached nature of a lot of live electronic music. To the uninitiated, a lot of electronic performances can be hard to relate to, merely because the mechanism of the sound production is hidden away in synths, effects boxes and computers.”

With a performance built around a drum kit that Mullany has augmented with sensors, microphones and digital elements that capture sound from the drum kit then “mess it up and spit it out anew,” Mullany aims to give more physicality to digital sound. He says he’ll likely use other sound-making gizmos he’s found or made, too.

Molasses is “a pretty transparent ploy to summate my formerly incompatible interests in digital and analog sound processing, DIY instrument building, avant-garde rock and free-improv,” says Mullany, adding that he won’t decide the exact setup until the night of the show. “I’m going to play drums and things are going to come out of the speakers and beyond that, I’m not sure what else is going to happen,” he says.

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Arts

Multimedia show at the Bridge provides voice and vision

“Empowering Women of Color” runs through February 24 at the Bridge, with a music and performance event to benefit SARA on February 16. Photo by Emmanuel Ndenguebi

Using photography, film, oil, acrylics and embroidery, “Empowering Women of Color” showcases women both as creators of, and prominent subjects in, art. “It came together in a natural, organic way,” says artist and organizer Emma Brodeur who graduated from UVA in 2015. Six months ago she was embroidering a portrait on a friend’s jacket and she started thinking about how the very presence of women of color in art was a statement about visibility. As a white woman, she says, “I couldn’t fully speak to the issue”—but the group show evolved and is currently open at The Bridge PAI through February 24.

Two of the artists Brodeur asked to exhibit are former UVA classmates—Golara Haghtalab and Kemi Layeni. Originally from Hampton, Virginia, Layeni is a fourth-year who will graduate in May with a double major in English and studio art, and a minor in African and African-American studies. She has worked in photography and film, as well as composing light and sound installations. “Instead of picking a medium and sticking with it,” she says, “I have to listen to what the project is saying to me and try to find the best way to give it life.”

Her contribution to the show is a short film called American Beauty in which Layeni, who is also an actor, alters her appearance to align with white standards of beauty. “I focused on my childhood experience and the desire to be beautiful, which I equated to being white,” she says. Given that “art institutions have a history of exclusion,” Layeni says, the concept of this exhibition is “like saying yes to our existence.” The piece of art she always returns to, she says, is Manet’s “Olympia,” in which a nude white woman reclines and a clothed black woman, either a servant or slave, stands in the background. “If I don’t paint myself or put myself in the forefront, who will?” Layeni says. “I am saying ‘yes’ to my life and my experiences.”

Friend and fellow artist Brodeur has also put Layeni in the forefront in the form of an oil and embroidered portrait named “Kemi.” Until the gallery opening, Layeni had not yet seen her portrait. “In a way, seeing your own representation, or someone who looks like you, is important in legitimizing your experiences,” she says. In the portrait, Layeni stands alone, a camera hanging from a strap around her neck. But Brodeur based the portrait on a photograph in which Layeni stands beside Leslie McFadden, the mother of Michael Brown—the teenager slain by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. By a twist of fate, Layeni met McFadden at the iconic St. Louis Gateway Arch when she was in Missouri in 2015 taking photographs and interviewing residents in Brown’s neighborhood for an art project on police brutality. In the background of the portrait, Brodeur embroidered oversized lotus leaves springing up behind Layeni. The lotus is a symbol of rebirth and strength, Brodeur says.

Karen Mozee is self-taught: She creates portraits using acrylics, oil pastels and paint. She searches online through photographs for inspiration and, for her, it begins with a face. “Something in them grabs me,” she says. She combines elements from different images she sees and alters them to create an original image, the eyes especially distinct and expressive.

Another artist recommended the work of photographers Porcelyn Headen and Sarmistha Talukdar. When Talukdar isn’t creating multiple exposure photography or painting with oil and acrylic, she researches stem cells at VCU Medical Center. When she first moved to Richmond four years ago, she says, she saw artists “sharing their talent and work with the world, and it got me started getting my art out there.” The idea behind her multiple exposure photographs, she explains, is to “try to capture both the physical and the symbolic expression of a moment by blurring two different aspects.”

Talukdar’s series “Spirit of the Forest” combines images of the artist’s friend and exposures of leaves and tree branches as an exploration in environmental racism. In her oil and acrylic series “Nebula,” she overlaid one image over another on canvas, resulting in a sort of Rorschach test that represents the complexity of multiple expressions.

“Women of color definitely have their own voices, journey and perspective, which unfortunately gets lost, buried and sometimes even suppressed under other voices,” says Talukdar. For this reason, she says, she is grateful for the exhibition and the opportunity to see what other participating artists have to share with the world.

The sheer range of medium and style of expression in the show, Brodeur says, speaks to what they are trying to accomplish, to highlight individuality and visibility. “Because even though we have this broader concept of women of color,” she says, “it’s also very much advocating for each artist whose work is in that space.”

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Arts

First Fridays gallery listings: February 3

Kemi Layeni’s short film, American Beauty?, is part of the “Empowering Women of Color” exhibit on view this month at The Bridge PAI. Courtesy of the artist

First Fridays: February 3

When Kemi Layeni was a child, she asked her mother to do her hair “like the fishies,” to fit her thick, kinky hair into a sleek ponytail. “I so desperately wanted to be anyone but me,” Layeni says, “whether that meant trading in my kinks for blonde hair, changing my name, Oluwakemi, to something more palatable, like Anna, or taking my skin, which to me was the ugliest thing about me, and the thing I was most ashamed of, and having white skin. That was the essence of beauty to me, and I wanted to be beautiful.”

In her short film American Beauty?, Layeni exorcises the pain she felt as a child and as an adolescent. She stares straight into the camera as she cuts her hair and applies makeup.

“As an artist, the only thing I can truly offer people is…my vulnerability,” Layeni says, defining vulnerability as the ability to be wounded. She believes there’s great power in facing vulnerability and not running from it—if we address it, it can reveal powerful truths.

“When we view painful moments in the lives of people of color, we immediately feel pity for them,” she says. “We feel righteous in our sympathy. But there is a huge difference between sympathy and empathy, and there’s an even bigger difference between empathy and taking action. This isn’t just a film about a sad black girl who wishes she were white. No. It’s much deeper than that.”

GALLERY EXHIBITS

Art on the Trax 5784 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Up Close and Far Away,” featuring watercolors of botanicals, landscapes and feathers by Betty Gatewood. Opens Saturday, February 11.

FF The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative 209 Monticello Rd. “Empowering Women of Color,” an exhibition of work by Kemi Layeni, Golara Haghtalab, Porcelyn Headen, Emma Brodeur and Sarmistha Talukdar. 5:30pm.

FF C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St. “Paper Dreams: Contemporary Quilling,” featuring decorative designs made of thin strips of rolled paper by Deb Booth. 6-8pm.

FF Chroma Projects Gallery 112 W. Main St., Ste. 10. “Bindings,” featuring canvas strip hangings by Reni Gower; tissue paper and thread collage by Susan Crave Rosen and tapestry by Brielle DuFlon. 5-7pm.

FF City Clay 700 Harris St., Ste. 104 “Lively Pots,” featuring pottery by Waynesboro potter Jake Johnson. 5:30-7pm.

FF CREATE Gallery 700 Harris St.  “FASEB BioART: The Beauty and Excitement of Biological Research,” featuring prize-winning images from scientists across the country. 5-7pm.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. A display of works by Innisfree Weavery and Woodshop artisans. Opens Saturday, February 11.

Deese Hall 4133 Earlysville Rd., Earlysville. An exhibit featuring paintings inspired by nature from Deborah Rose Guterbock along with figurative paintings and comics illustrations from Aaron Arthur Irvine Miller. Opens Sunday, February 4.

FF Fellini’s #9 200 Market St. “Inspired in Crozet,” featuring acrylic paintings on canvas by Janet Pearlman. 5:30-7pm.

The Fralin Museum at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “The Gift of Knowing: The Art of Dorothea Rockburne”; “Ann Gale: Portraits”; “New Acquisitions: Photography,” featuring work from Danny Lyon, Shirin Neshat and Eadweard Muybridge; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.

Java Java Café 421 E. Main St. “Traces,” a series of mixed media abstract miniatures inspired by artist Yasmin Bussiere’s journey to the Middle East.

FF Kardinal Hall 722 Preston Ave. “River and Mountain,” featuring work by Linda Staiger. 4:30-6:30pm.

Kluge-Ruhe Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Body Ornaments,” objects by indigenous Australian ceramic artist Janet Fieldhouse.

FF Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “New Paintings by Ellen Hathaway,” featuring acrylic and mixed-media works. 1-5pm.

FF McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Absence/Presence” featuring  sculptural mixed media drawings and book arts by Julia Merkel in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Flotsam” by L. Michelle Geiger and other artists in the Lower Hall North and South; “ART 4 ALZ” featuring work completed by persons with memory impairment and their care partners in the Upper Hall North and South. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Memoria y Creencias Culturales/Memory and Cultural Beliefs,” featuring the work of José Bedia, a contemporary Cuban painter who explores cultural preservation through the research and collection of indigenous and African art, and adapts those forms in the visual language of his paintings and large-scale installations. 5:30-7:30pm.

Shenandoah Valley Fine Art Center 26 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. An exhibit featuring the work of visual arts students from the Shenandoah Valley Governor’s School.

FF Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St. “Seasonal Paintings,” featuring watercolor and pastel works by Trilbie Ferrell Knapp. 6-8pm.

FF Studio IX 969 Second St. SE “IRC World Art Exhibit,” featuring drawings by 33 refugees from eight countries living in the Charlottesville area. 5-7pm.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church 717 Rugby Rd. “Angels and Still Life,” featuring paintings by Anne de Latour Hopper. Opens Sunday, February 5.

FF Top Knot Studio 103 Fifth St. “The Renewal Series,” featuring paintings by Wolfgang Hermann that allow the viewer to explore an inner landscape, dream and open forgotten memories. 5:30-7pm.

FF VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. An exhibit featuring graphite and white-pencil drawings by Todd Dagget. 5:30pm.

FF Welcome Gallery at New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. “Not Made In China,” featuring paintings by Steve Taylor. 5-7:30pm.

FF WVTF & Radio IQ Studio Gallery 218 W. Water St. “Following Longitudes and Latitudes,” featuring gouache and oil paintings by Elizabeth Schoyer. 5-7pm.

Woodberry Forest School 898 Woodberry Forest Rd., Woodberry Forest. “Exploraciones,” featuring work by Colombian-born artist Diego Sanchez, who takes an intuitive approach to painting.

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

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Arts

The Bridge PAI celebrates 10 years with a retrospective show

The Bridge exhibition “Looking Forward While Looking Back” will run until October 29. Photo by Martyn Kyle

In the beginning there were two artists, Zack Worrell and Greg Antrim Kelly. They were moved by street art, graffiti, hip-hop, punk, philanthropy and community organizing as art. Then Worrell bought a building. “It was pretty raw,” Kelly says, remembering those first days in the space now known as The Bridge. It had unpainted concrete walls, “and we used clip lamps to light the first show,” he says. But the space manifested exactly what Worrell and Kelly had envisioned: an unintimidating, welcoming place for every person in the community.

“You don’t really need more than 400 square feet to do great things,” Kelly says. “A bigger, more formal space can scare people off, especially people we wanted to connect with.” The character of the place, he says, “is really just an extension of us as people. It didn’t require a lot of conscious thought.”

By 2006, they had a mission statement and a name. Now, a decade later, Kelly, along with Bernard Hankins, Ashley Florence and Tim Popa, have organized a retrospective exhibition called “Looking Forward While Looking Back” to commemorate the last 10 years of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative.

As director of The Bridge from 2006 to 2012 (and current curator for the gallery at Studio IX), Kelly curated more than half of the retrospective exhibition that covered his directorship. “The past has lived tucked away,” he says, in the form of handbills, posters and fliers in The Bridge’s archive. The show moves clockwise from the main entrance, highlighting benchmarks and programming both chronologically and thematically. Tables in the center of the room showcase printouts of the original mission statement, annotated to-do lists, Polaroids from community events and influential books. “I wanted to show the process and the things that informed it,” Kelly says, and he encourages visitors to interact with the materials.

“You never knew what to expect,” says former Bridge director Greg Antrim Kelly. There might be slam- dancing one night, an art show with Westhaven community members the next and former UVA president John Casteen sitting in the audience the following evening while his son reads from his latest book of poetry.

The exhibition also features a few select pieces of art that help “tell the narrative of the organization,” Kelly says. One of these is a broadside letterpress printing of a Wendell Berry poem, printed by Virginia Arts of the Book Center co-founder Josef Beery following the poet’s December 2009 visit. Another is a portrait collection of volunteers painted by Eliza Evans.

“What I’m focused on in the first eight years is letting the marketing stuff tell the story with art mixed in,” says Kelly. Florence and Hankins have curated the part that represents The Bridge’s programming from 2013 to 2016, under the directorship of Matthew Slaats (who left in July).

Reflecting on the early years with Worrell, before they had an organization and a name, Kelly says, “It felt vibrant, nascent. That’s my favorite part of anything: the beginning.” Through the visual display of marketing materials, Kelly has created a layering effect intended to represent the constant influx of energy that sustained them. He describes a night when they hosted a punk show and someone got elbowed in the nose. Blood ended up on the wall and they had to hang a show the next day. They hung a piece of art over the stain. “You never knew what to expect,” he says. There might be slam-dancing one night, an art show with Westhaven community members the next and former UVA president John Casteen sitting in the audience the following evening while his son reads from his latest book of poetry.

Kelly’s philosophy as director was “Curate people, not content,” which helped to cultivate an atmosphere of mutual trust between The Bridge and emerging artists. “It’s important for artists to have a space with a very low barrier for access and use, whether financial or the way it’s structured. The Bridge was always really good at that,” Kelly says. “There was an attitude of affirmation. People were encouraged to take risks and fail, to explore ideas. That’s a huge thing for young artists to have that kind of support.”

“Somehow the organization walked this line of being punk and professional at the same time,” he says. “Chaotic but also high-quality. The biggest thing was people felt welcome here.” To Kelly, punk doesn’t mean causing conflict. “It means not being beholden to whatever the norms are, especially if you don’t agree. Not being pinned down, boxed in, labeled or defined by anything other than the moment. That nascent energy as an artist is so much a part of my interest, my personality. How do you push buttons and shake things up out of love, to make things better?”

For Kelly, art has been the channel through which he connects people and makes things better. Through The Bridge, he and Worrell created a place where professional and emerging artists could feel free to express themselves, and connect with people in the city they might not otherwise encounter. “It wasn’t exclusive to art,” Kelly says. “It was more about experiences.”

Contact Raennah Lorne at arts@c-ville.com.