Tag: Visual Art

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Arts Culture

June exhibitions

Russell Hart at McGuffey Art Center.

The Barn Swallow Artisan Gallery 796 Gillums Ridge Rd. “Listening to Artifacts,” new works in sculpture and collage by Kim Boggs. Through July 7. First Fridays reception at 5:30pm.

Botanical Fare Restaurant 421 E. Main St. Downtown Mall. “Then And Now,” a series of conceptual photographs by Cindy Stegmeier. Through June.

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third St. SE. In the Micro Gallery, “Nocturne,” Peter Eudenbach’s multidisciplinary exhibit explores relationships and poetic connections. Through June 28. First Fridays reception at 5pm.

The Connaughton Gallery McIntire School of Commerce, UVA Grounds. “Virginia is for Artists,” paintings and prints by Uzo Njoku. Through June 14.

Sarah Grace Cheek at Crozet Artisan Depot.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Wild Wonder” by Lucinda Rowe features intricate biological illustrations with a focus on birds and insects. Meet the artist June 15, 11am–1pm. “Object Study” by Sarah Grace Cheek displays reimagined adaptations of life through hand- and power-carving techniques. Through June. 

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Ebb & Flow,” exploring painter and mosaicist Eileen Butler’s journey through glass and paint. Through June. First Fridays reception at 5pm.

Dovetail Design and Cabinetry 1740 Broadway St., Suite 3. “TWEETS,” acrylic and watercolor works by Matalie Deane and Juliette Swenson. Through July.

FIREFLY Restaurant & Game Room 1304 E. Market St. Whimsical paintings by Oxana Balke. Through June 30. Opening reception June 6 at 6pm.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala.” Through July 14. “Patricia Michaels: Bringing Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives.” Through June 10. Fralin After 5 Tasting Notes, a pairing of art and wine. June 7, 5:30pm.

Infinite Repeats Studio 1740 Broadway St. “Stale Bread” by Torie Topor (@eirotropot) features prints and other mixed media. Through June 28. First Fridays reception, 7–9pm. 

Ix Art Park 522 Second St. SE. Art Mix at Ix, a fun night of painting, live music, projection art displays, and cocktails. Paint Swap Party, where artists switch canvases every 5 minutes. First Fridays, 7pm. 

Journey Group 418 Fourth St. NE. “PANGRAM: The Art of Letters,” featuring small works by dozens of artists. All sales benefit Literacy Volunteers. June 7, 5pm,

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of UVA 400 Worrell Dr. The Charlottesville Indigenous Art Takeover. “Shifting Ground: Prints by Indigenous Australian Artists from the Basil Hall Editions Workshop Proofs Collection,” curated by Jessyca Hutchens, featuring work by 22 Indigenous Australian artists. Through October 6. “Close to the Wind,” prints, installation, and mixed media works by Lisa Waup. Through June 30.  

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Passenger Manifest,” oil paintings, collage, and works on paper by Dean Dass. Through June 30. 

Martin Horn 210 Carlton Rd. Images from wildlife photographer Jacob Buck. First Fridays reception 5pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Smith Gallery, “In a Different Light,” pictorialist photographs by Russell Hart exploring ways humans occupy natural landscape from June 4-30. Artist talk June 16, 2–3pm. First Floor North and South Galleries, artworks by McGuffey Art Center Incubators from 2023–24. Second Floor Gallery North, “Miscellaneous Musings of a Manic Maker,” by Jill Kerttula. Second Floor Gallery South, Blake Hurt’s “Greek Landscapes.” Through June. First Fridays reception, 5:30–8pm. Y’art Sale June 8, 10am–2pm.

Anna Hogg at New City Arts.

New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. In the Welcome Gallery, “above [collecting] below [detaching] above,” a multimedia installation by Anna Hogg. Through June 27. First Fridays reception at 5pm, artist talk at 6pm. 

The PVCC Gallery V. Earl Dickinson Building, 501 College Dr. The 2024 Student Art Exhibition. Through September 7. 

Quirk Gallery 499 W. Main St. In “Care Less,” artist Seth Bauserman borrows the subject matter of his daughter’s drawings to explore the space between innocence and experience. Through July 28. First Fridays reception at 6pm.

Julia Kindred at Random Row Brewing Co.

Random Row Brewing Co. 608 Preston Ave. “Landscapes: Here and There,” oil paintings and pastel works by Julia Kindred. Through June. 

The Rotunda UVA Grounds In the Upper West Oval Room, the Charlottesville Indigenous Art Takeover. “Waŋupini: Clouds Of Remembrance And Return.” Through July 7.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the Main Gallery, “The Art of Collage” comprises works of 41 contemporary artists. In the Dové Gallery, “Paper Room,” a mixed-media and interactive exhibition by Jess Walters with Stephen Haske and Sarah Lawson. Through July 19. First Fridays events at 5:30pm.

Studio Ix 969 Second St. SE. “Journey From Grief To Art,” paintings by Colleen Rosenberry. Vivid and heartfelt representation of nature and the artist’s inner feelings about life and death. Through June. Artist’s Talk June 27, 5pm. First Fridays reception at 5pm.

The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Charlottesville 717 Rugby Rd. Photographs by David Shoch. Through June.

Images courtesy of galleries and/or artists.

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Culture

Getting real: CHS students join Robert Shetterly in truth-teller exhibition

"I choose to paint RBG because I have always looked up to her and the role she played in gaining many of the rights that women deserve. She is fearless, powerful, and competent, proving women can do anything men can do—and do it better too. She is able to navigate the broken system and stand up to it, exposing its flaws, which takes a lot of bravery and wisdom. She has given me the confidence to say that I am a feminist and have pride in that," says Lucy Armengol, a student at Charlottesville High School. Image courtesy the artist

By Charles Burns

arts@c-ville.com

In this age of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” there are few values more precious than complete honesty. Robert Shetterly, an American artist, realizes this more than most. Years ago, Shetterly embarked on an ambitious project: a portrait series of citizens committed to addressing pressing issues with the kind of remarkable candor and clear-eyed morality all too lacking in public policy and discussion, both then and today.

In the wake of 9/11 and the run-up to the Iraq War, Shetterly became increasingly appalled by the level of dishonesty coming from the U.S. government and the media. Feeling a moral imperative to highlight truth in a time defined by so much falsity, the career illustrator turned to painting.

“The only thing I could think to do was surround myself by painting portraits of people who made me feel much better about living here,” says Shetterly. He originally intended to paint 50 portraits for “Americans Who Tell the Truth,” but hit that goal in a few years and realized he was just getting started. “So I just kept going,” he says. The project is now at 245 portraits and counting.

In Charlottesville, however, the focus isn’t all on Shetterly. Art students at Charlottesville High School were asked to create their own portraits of figures they regard as truth-tellers, with the resulting paintings featured alongside some of Shetterly’s own work in “Youth Speaking Truth,” an exhibition that first hung in the lobby of the Martin Luther King Performing Arts Center at CHS and is now on view at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative. Subjects of the student-produced paintings were incredibly varied, ranging from Kobe Bryant to Bernie Sanders to Michelle Alexander to Timothée Chalamet. Some students even painted their parents. Shetterly contributed portraits of Claudette Colvin, a plaintiff in the lawsuit that ended bus segregation, Rachel Corrie, a young activist killed in the Gaza Strip, Maulian Dana, a tribal ambassador and human rights activist, and more.

Abigail Brisset, a sophomore at Charlottesville High School, chose to draw her mother for two reasons: her career in counseling and her Ethiopian heritage. As a counselor, Brisset’s mother is required to offer insight and honesty on an almost daily basis, forced to constantly be both generous and unflinching. “A lot of people trust her, and she speaks a lot of truth,” says Brisset. Her Ethiopian background also informs the way she approaches her interactions with anyone and everyone; according to Brisset, her mother is constantly late to events, in keeping with her culture, because “what’s happening in the moment is more important than where they have to be.” When chided, Brisset’s mother’s response is simple: “This is who I am.”

Richard Herman, a junior, painted Rachel Carson, a marine biologist whose 1962 book Silent Spring, and its explanation of the destructive effects humans have on the natural world, boosted the environmental conservation movement. “She was an important person to my great-grandmother,” says Herman, who first learned about Carson from his art teacher, then heard more about the writer’s influence from his grandmother.

Sophomore Belaynesh Downs-Reeve turned the tables and drew Shetterly himself. “He paints under-represented stories in history,” says Downs-Reeve, noting that this makes Shetterly a truth-teller in his own right.

CHS art teacher Jennifer Mildonian says the exhibit is important for numerous reasons. “This is a special exhibit because the students got to meet a professional artist who’s working in the world of art, but also the world has been so unbalanced that they’ve had some really good discussions about what it means to be a truth-teller, and so I think it’s been a process of digging deep a little bit to figure out what that means to them.”

During a recent reception for the CHS iteration of the show, Shetterly remarked that, “what we’re gradually identifying here, and what the students have helped to identify, is the community that we want to be part of, the values we want to live by. I mean, that was what got me going in the first place. I thought, ‘I can’t live in this country, that allows this kind of thing to happen. I’ve got to surround myself with people who make me feel good about the history of this country.’ And that’s why I started painting.”

Let’s hope that these talented student artists continue to follow Shetterly’s lead.

“Youth Speaking Truth” is an exhibition of 120 portraits by Charlottesville High School students alongside works from Robert Shetterly’s “Americans Who Tell the Truth” series. See it at The Bridge PAI this month.

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Culture

Blurring the senses: Artist-in-residence Nick Cave brings signature soundsuit to Ruffin Gallery

Renowned sculptor, professor, and community-builder Nick Cave is this spring’s Ruffin Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at UVA. His show, “Spot On,” is on view at Ruffin Gallery through March 31.

On a Saturday morning, artist Nick Cave and his partner Bob Faust sit with a group of 25 University of Virginia students.

“Who came straight from a club?” Cave jokingly asks as he surveys the group. Many are puffy-eyed and swigging coffee in an effort to wake up.

“This is Charlottesville. There aren’t any clubs here,” one student responds.

It’s day two of the first leg of Cave’s workshops, part of his residency at UVA. During these workshops, students across art disciplines collaborate in groups of five to respond to a prompt Cave and Faust designed, the centerpiece of which is a “2020” icon, with the second 20 flipped upside down. In April, the workshops will culminate in art exercises, installations, and presentations in locations of the students’ choosing across UVA’s Grounds.

“It’s important for students to invite their friends,” Cave says. “Who is this for? How do you get the people there, and what is your message? I’m interested in seeing what this student body wants to talk about, and how do we find common ground?” His voice moves in and out of being audible above the unpredictable din of “Spot On,” his current show at Ruffin Gallery.

On view through March 31, the show features three of the award-winning sculptor’s videos, “Blot,” “Bunny Boy,” and “Gestalt.” Each piece includes one or more of Cave’s signature soundsuits—ornate, full-body costumes that produce noises that are meditative yet jarring, rooted in nature though mechanical, and hauntingly beautiful.

“I chose video because I wanted to show choreography and collaboration, and how those set the stage,” says Cave. “How do we identify a space? What does that look like? How do we place ourselves within that context? That’s what the students are doing in our workshops.”

Cave created the first soundsuit in response to the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police. Though colorful, whimsical, and mythical, the suits originated from Cave’s feelings of fear and isolation in response to the globally televised incident of violence, racism, and police brutality.

“I felt like my identity and who I was as a human being was up for question,” he told The New York Times Magazine last October. “I felt like that could have been me. Once that incident occurred, I was existing very differently in the world. So many things were going through my head: How do I exist in a place that sees me as a threat?”

“Bunny Boy” speaks perhaps most poignantly to Cave’s exploration of identity, loneliness, and vulnerability. Viewers must enter a wooden structure that nearly covers the length of Ruffin Gallery and step into a dark interior to watch the film projected inside.

“You don’t know if you can enter this space,” Cave says. “It’s not saying that you can’t, but it’s not clear from this perspective. It asks us to think about expanses and how an audience enters and engages with the work.”

Inside, participants see a nearly 45-minute video of Cave wearing a furry fuchsia soundsuit with rabbit-like ears, floppy paws, and an exposed torso. He occupies an underworld dark space with just one harsh spotlight, while pawing at sounds (a dog barking or a lawnmower) of the “above world,” as Cave calls it. One can’t help but think of the ostracized protagonists of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, or the psychological thriller Donnie Darko.

“We can all identify with this,” says Cave. “We have all been in these spaces within our own internal dark selves. There’s a blurred sense of fantasy and seduction.”

Equally seductive is Cave’s “Blot,” a film that features a shape-shifting black soundsuit comprised of long strands of synthetic raffia. In movement, the raffia strands create a sound reminiscent of the ocean, as the Rorschach-like inkblot pushes and pulls against a reflected image of itself. Behind the scenes, the actor lurches and lunges into a wall; in post-production, Cave removed the wall and created a mirror image of the soundsuit. Cave shot “Blot” and “Gestalt” in one largely improvised take. Though he gives actors a loose statement of his intent for the video, the movements remain predominately unscripted.

“It’s about putting on the object and understanding how it’s moving,” Cave says of the performers who wear his soundsuits. “Are there any limitations and boundaries? What is in motion? How much does it weigh, what is the volume? What will it illustrate as I expand my body?”

While “Blot” lures viewers into a slow, meditative trance, “Gestalt” grabs participants by the shoulders and shakes them awake. Multiple soundsuits—one with buttons and an abacus face, another with a washboard face, and a third adorned with doilies—enter and exit the scene. They interact violently with one another, butt heads, throw one another to the ground, and drag themselves across the floor as the video speed jarringly toggles between fast and even faster. It comes from a place of being bullied, Cave explains, or feelings of being jailed by space and time.

“How do you create work that you have to stay and experience?” Cave asks. “I’ve been in a lot of museums and shows where I could be in there for 10 seconds and say, ‘Okay, I gotta go.’ How do you capture and secure one’s ability to take the time to commit to that experience?”

For Cave, the answer has been wearing his emotions literally on his sleeves (and head, heart, and the rest of his body).

Renowned sculptor, professor, and community-builder Nick Cave is this spring’s Ruffin Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at UVA. His show, “Spot On,” is on view at Ruffin Gallery through March 31.

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Culture

Flourishing feminism: “Bloom” unites artists around the women’s suffrage movement

“Bloom: In Honor of the Centennial Anniversary of Women’s Suffrage” features photography, paintings, sculpture, and mixed-media work from several artists and is on view at PVCC’s North Gallery through April 8. Courtesy of the artist

Mixed-media artist Diana Hale remembers the first time she entered a voting booth. She had just learned how to drive, but wasn’t yet old enough to vote, and transported an elderly relative who’d voted in every election for the past 75 years to the polls.

“There was a lot of effort involved in the trip,” says Hale. “It was a physically difficult thing to do, but it was so important for my family member. It’s easy for us to say, ‘Oh, I have a lot of work to do,’ or ‘I don’t have time to vote,’ but this experience gave me an appreciation for how important voting is.”

A note from Beryl Solla in PVCC’s North Gallery speaks to that familial responsibility to vote. Solla curated “Bloom: In Honor of the Centennial Anniversary of Women’s Suffrage,” which explores the notion that people bloom when they have a voice. The show features paintings, sculpture, photographs, and mixed-media work from Bolanle Adeboye, Stacey Evans, Aaron Eichorst, Lara Call Gastinger, John Grant, Sam Gray, Diana Hale, Lou Haney, Barbara Shenefield, and Annie Temmink, as well as a collaborative crayon drawing from Johnson Elementary School first grade students.

“Women were arrested, beaten, and tortured in an effort to stop this movement,” Solla’s welcome note reads. “In their honor, in our mothers’ and grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ honor, let’s all remember to vote.”

Of the past three presidential elections, 2016 marked the lowest voter turnout in the City of Charlottesville, with about two-thirds of total registered voters casting ballots. In the City’s 2017 non-November special elections and primaries, 27 percent of registered Democratic voters and 2 percent of registered Republican voters cast ballots.

“We forget that people died for these rights,” Hale says. “It’s embarrassing to think that this is how we respond, given that people sacrificed their lives for this.”

Temmink, whose “Temper” sculpture explores materiality and process, says she finds it easy to lose track of her place within the complex history of women’s suffrage and modern feminism. Two prints by Barbara Shenefield speak to that history and highlight well- and lesser-known female activists and cross-party politicians. “Bloom 1” boldly illustrates names of women fighting for equality prior to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in August 1920. “Bloom 2,” is a transparent version of her sister, with the names of contemporary feminists fading into bright florals reminiscent of Marimekko textiles and Pop Art silkscreens.

“We’re still working on equal rights,” says Shenefield. “It helps to know that good things take a lot of hard work and a lot of hands. It’s easy to get discouraged, especially when you’re young and can conceptualize a better future, but that’s a long, hard-fought fight.”

Evans’ “Fading Poppies” reflects on that passage of time and loss. Her print documents dying poppies in cold white light that casts dark shadows across the crinkled plant-life. The decaying petals become shapes, textures, and colors, vestiges of the once-living thing they adorned. In “Remembrance,” Eichorst meditates on what might have been, and commemorates the struggle, tears, and loss of the suffrage movement.

“Progress is not only in the fresh beginning of a new idea,” Evans says. “It’s about taking notice at every phase of life, whether it be growth or decay.”

Grant’s “Chalis” similarly removes the living aspect of its photographed flower petals, silhouetted against a black background. Although viewers see luscious oranges, pinks, and yellows, the roots and the green are gone.

Bolanle Adeboye’s illuminated diptych “Sink and Swim” offers a different exploration of struggle and suffrage, progress and choice. The image mimics the experience of peering into an aquarium, as neon, anemone-like shapes mingle with bubbles, scratch patterns, and creeping florals. Adeboye created the piece in opposition to the idea that one’s success depends entirely on a solitary effort.

“It’s a comfort during overwhelming times to remind myself that movement and progress can occur in many directions and along different planes,” Adeboye says. “And perhaps most important, [to remember] none of us are really ever alone in our efforts. There is life and beauty and diversity blooming all around, all the time, even at the very bottom of the ocean.”

Blooming along the gallery’s windows are vibrant painted florals by Lou Haney, whose gouache panels “Floral A” and “Floral B” are also featured in the show. Haney’s window installation blurs the outside environment, and bounces lively reflections across the glass frames of artworks on the opposite wall. Haney calls her painting “psychedelic,” and influenced by the Pattern and Decoration feminist art movement.

Like Haney, Gray and Hale seek to reclaim practices stereotyped as trivial or unartistic. Gray’s “Women’s Work” honors the domestic work that ultimately nourishes society. And Hale’s postcards incorporate collaged embroidered elements that nearly escape the viewer’s eye. As with the minute, controlled, and elaborate details of Gastinger’s botanical watercolors, both artists carefully consider each element of their artworks. Every brushstroke or stitch has a purpose.

“With my embroidery, I think of my grandmother, who will be 101 in November,” says Hale. “She is very progressive and was a big force in the workplace.” Hale says her grandmother “harasses” her about embroidery as art. “My grandmother asks me, ‘What are you doing? I tried to get away from the domestic realm!’ Now, I get to create art of that realm on my own terms.”

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Arts

World of difference: ‘A Quick and Tragic Thaw’ chronicles the implications of a hotter Earth

“Plastic Projections” is one of the works on view in the climate change-focused “A Quick and Tragic Thaw” at UVA’s Ruffin Gallery through October 18. Courtesy of the artist

Escapism or activism? Should a work provide respite from pertinent problems, or is it art’s duty to provide commentary on these political and social issues? More and more, this seems to be the debate among artists and patrons.

While it’s limiting to think that the two approaches are mutually exclusive, the conversation surrounding them seems to have grown louder in recent years. The problems of the world have grown louder, too, not least the ever-approaching specter of climate change. How is escapist art possible when its subject concerns something that none of us can escape?

“A Quick and Tragic Thaw,” the latest exhibit at UVA’s Ruffin Gallery, seeks to find some middle ground. Co-creator Gabrielle Russomagno says the climate- themed collection of artwork is intended to be a “meditation on something that might feel like loss…regardless of pedagogy and political paradigms.”

Russomagno and her artistic partner Yvonne Love, have been concerned with climate change since their first collaboration over a decade ago, when the two created an exhibition on global warming. “A Quick and Tragic Thaw” certainly feels like the culmination of many years of work and thinking—their art was informed by the research of Howard Epstein, a UVA environmental science professor who studies the effects of climate change.

This added scholarly element compounds the sense of collaboration. Liza Pittard, visiting artist coordinator for the UVA Arts department, calls it “bridging the arts and sciences in an almost poetic way.” “UVA is a research institution,” she says. “How can we get other people involved?”

If the crowd present on the exhibit’s opening night is any indication, then “A Quick and Tragic Thaw” has already left a considerable impression. The single, cubelike room it occupies was overflowing with spectators.

The largest portion of the exhibition is a re-creation of Greenland’s shifting, shrinking glaciers done in black sand and porcelain—a stark dark and light that comprises much of the room’s color scheme. Love and Russomagno have given it the fitting label “Patterned Ground.” The porcelain analogues for ice contain intricate valleys and divots, and the black sand holds a network of delicate grooves. It’s eerily soothing to look at, hypnotic almost to the point that the viewer forgets the dire subject matter.

On the far wall, “Plastic Projections” provides a burst of color to the muted room. Present and future predicted maps of the Arctic are arrayed in an oblong shape, each of them on plastic that has been warped by heat into new forms. Close inspection is required to realize that they are maps at all—from a distance, they resemble flowers in the process of opening and closing.

This uneasy balance of extremes—finding beautiful ways to represent terrible things, almost to the point of obfuscation—is present in all of the exhibition’s artwork, and it brings to mind the ongoing debate of escapism versus engagement. Which is being practiced here? After all, Love and Russomagno’s work is not explicitly giving a call to action.

The abstract explaining “A Quick and Tragic Thaw,” says that the artworks are meant to “emphasize connections…between indisputable data and the conceit of how we choose to live.” The result is plainly gorgeous but only quietly upsetting, what Pittard calls a “passive political statement.”

Another juxtaposition here is the artists’ differing reasons for creating a series of works about climate change. Love, whose father was a naturalist, approaches it from a scientific view. “Observation was a huge part of my upbringing…I was hearing about the negative human impact on the environment from a very early age.”

Love’s observational skills have given her an intimate understanding of how humans can affect their surroundings. “I’m seeing the effects in my own backyard, and it’s been really scary.”

Russomagno, by her own admission, is “totally urban.” She contrasts her upbringing to Love’s, saying that although she wasn’t surrounded by the natural world, she could still “notice if people were in despair, because I was surrounded by a bajillion of them.”

The result of these distinct points of view is a representation of climate change that not only connects the personal and political but also the universal. On the wall labeled “Transfer and Pierce,” a collection of drawings on carbon paper, the sketch of a single Arctic individual feels perfectly in place next to large-scale renderings of his home.

Love and Russomagno recognize that this is a problem that affects all of us. They wanted to avoid the “screaming, politicized voices,” as Russomagno puts it, and reach something more transcendent. “There’s something about loss and beauty combined that I think stirs everyone’s soul,” she says. “Maybe if the conversation through art activates that in someone, then we’ve done our work.”

“Plastic Projections” is one of the works on view in the climate change-focused “A Quick and Tragic Thaw” at UVA’s Ruffin Gallery through October 18.

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Arts

It’s complicated: The exquisite perils of Peter Allen’s self-discovery

Pencil art and collaged poetry reveal the tortuous allure of soul searching in “Un-becoming Peter Allen” at McGuffey Art Center through August 18. “Albedo” is one of the works included in Allen’s third solo show since joining McGuffey in 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

A confession: I’m not adequately prepared to discuss Peter Allen’s “Un-becoming” show at McGuffey Art Center with the level of insight both the artist and his art deserve.

I certainly spent plenty of preparatory time and afforded the exhibition my contemplative attention. No, this is just a shortcoming of my own faculties—the same dearth that surely plagues the stupefied majority of Allen’s audiences. For there exists a gap of confounding distance between the viewer and the disarmingly tight collection of striking, illuminating, and unflinching personal visions alighting the walls of the Sarah B. Smith Gallery. For seven pieces, there is much to digest and decode.

I’ll liken my feeling of ineptitude to those moments when, reading an article, you pause to look up some referenced concept with which you’re unfamiliar; then, two minutes later, you find yourself on Wikipedia reading its definition for the fifth time, starting to question if it’s actually written in English, convinced that you know less after this fruitless endeavor than when you started, and cursing yourself for having dicked around so much during formative middle school math and science classes.

This is the overwhelming effect of Allen’s brilliance in visual art and poetry. To my great satisfaction, the artist’s statement and the ideas he’s shared about his creations demonstrate profound meaning. See, for a dummy like me, it’s a little intimidating.

Allen, a McGuffey member since 2011, says that his penciled paper and canvas pieces contend with “the nature of the self and the pressures of context.” His autobiographical discoveries invite viewers to consider their own identities, too. This lofty impulse is advanced through an upcycling of public domain, commercial, and personal images, recontextualized in graphite. He then couples his visuals with hand-cut, stenciled letters on a grid, spelling out his poetry in vertical streaks without space between the lines, often mirroring itself in a backward orientation. Though difficult to read, Allen accurately notes that his texts, which harbor some likely unintentional resemblance to Gee Vaucher’s protest art for anarcho-punk band Crass, look “at once ancient and modern.”

These bi-media pieces require us to consider the meaning of the words, as well as the images. There is little doubt that a casual Friday night art crawl won’t suffice, nor will the half-buzzed gallery stroll-through that might otherwise do the job for art proffered without paired poems. This takes time. Muttering your knee-jerk Rorschach test appraisals to the person next to you won’t cut it here.

Check out the titles—even they demand explanation: “Sequela,” “Scotoma,” “Albedo,” “Anamorph.” The good news is that, for three dollars, you can get a chapbook of sorts, where conventional presentations of Allen’s poetry are served with definitions of the unfamiliar language he’s chosen for his works’ names. Honestly, his verse provides more shocking imagery than his visuals, ornamented with terrors like deformed spider parent domination, town-crushing giants from childhood, and a recurring theme of relatives performing mutilations on each other.

The sinister elements that arise in his penciled canvases are more muted: an arrogant bather tilting aggressively in the surf, the confrontational gaze of a man among a gaggle of unhappy children, a stunned Red Riding Hood scrutinizing a contented wolf dozing in her grandmother’s clothing.

The show’s first piece, “Sequela,” features a type of self-portrait bust bisected by a vertical stream of text; the subject wears an unsettling white paper mask with holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth. The mask itself hangs on the backside of the wall above the poem, “Vault.” The three-part text tells of wandering into a dense forest, referencing wolves and birds, animals that reappear in the aforementioned fable piece “Albedo,” and the perched bird of “Anamorph.” It’s an intricate pattern of meaning that no brief review has space enough to explore.

Viewers of Allen’s third solo McGuffey show will be taken by the explosive monochromatic beauty of “Zoetrope,” which extends across multiple panels, snaking around two walls. Allen says the idea for the work originated 40 years earlier, when as a college student, he would shoot photos on the train to New York for museum visits. It concerns his idea of time and space interacting as parts of the same illusion that obscures the viewers’ sense of location and ability to interpret what’s being observed. “Zoetrope”’s silhouettes, cloud bursts, rays of sunlight, windows, reflections, and waves of smoke make it impossible to tell.

Though Allen leaves us ample instructions for understanding his influences, ideas, and objectives, following him for the entire journey takes chutzpah. But, for those of us willing to take on the challenge, the rewards are many.

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Arts

Life aquatic

“Requiem for a Reef” is one of the works on view in Tina Curtis’ “Radiolaria & Reef” at Second Street Gallery’s Dové Gallery through June 19. Image courtesy of artist

Do you know where your oxygen comes from?

Trees, shrubs, grass, sure. But scientists estimate that at least half (and maybe even up to 85 percent) of all oxygen on planet Earth comes from phytoplankton, one-celled plants that live on the surface of the ocean, gobble up ocean nutrients and sunlight, then photosynthesize, producing oxygen.

Phytoplankton are so tiny, the human eye can only see them via microscope. And, through July 19, abstracted in paint in Tina Curtis’ “Radiolaria & Reef,” on view in the Dové Gallery at Second Street Gallery.

“With this body of work, the inspiration for me was the living abstractions in our world’s delicate oceanic ecosystems,” says Curtis—the small things that make up the vast ocean, systems such as the siliceous ooze (sediment made up of the mineral skeletons of tiny protozoa called radiolaria) on the deep ocean floor, and coral reefs, which depend on the branch-like, silica-bodied phytoplankton (a “signature” in all of Curtis’ works) for food.

Some of the pieces, such as “Osaka” and “Okinawa” celebrate the extraordinary beauty of these ecosystems, but for Curtis, celebrating that life-sustaining beauty wasn’t quite enough. Human activities such as dynamite fishing in combination with global warming have destroyed more than a quarter of the ocean’s documented reef systems. “I was motivated to bring awareness of our ocean’s plight not by simply painting pretty pictures but by depicting such events as coral bleaching and dead and dying reef systems,” she says, pointing specifically to the pieces titled “Requiem for a Reef” and “Grey Barrier Reef.”

Curtis hopes visitors to “Radiolaria & Reef” will understand that her work is meant to convey a “sense of calm” while also expressing a “sense of urgency” to act to save these systems that we have a place in, too. 

First Fridays: July 5

Chroma Projects Inside Vault Virginia, Third Street SE. “Raymond Berry: Pages from a Journal of Days,” featuring expressive landscape paintings. 5-7pm.

CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “The Best of the Best,” featuring work from the Charlottesville Camera Club. 5:30-7pm.

C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Pots for Purpose,” featuring functional and artful pottery by Trina Player. 6-8pm.

Eichner Studios Gallery 2035 Bond St. #120. The work of 11 local artists working in a variety of media. 6-8pm.

Fellini’s 200 Market St. “InnerEvolution,” a show of work by Lea Bodea. 5:30-7pm.

The Garage 100 E. Jefferson St. “Watershed,” featuring nostalgia-invoking watercolors by Ginger Oakes. 5-7pm.

McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “Un-Becoming Peter Allen,” a show of works in colored pencil and collage that explore the nature of identity; in the North and South and Downstairs Hall galleries, the McGuffey member artists summer group show. 5:30-7:30pm.

Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Aerial Colors,” featuring mixed-media pieces by Remmi Franklin. 6-8pm.

Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Six Pan: Smoked Paper and Wash Studies,” featuring work by Cidney Blaine Cher. 5:30-7:30pm.

VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. “Community Collective,” a show of works by a variety of artists, to benefit The Haven Day Shelter. 5-7pm.

 

Other July shows

Albemarle County Circuit Court 501 E. Jefferson St. An exhibition of work by members of the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild.

Annie Gould Gallery 109 S. Main St., Gordonsville. Work by Joan Griffin, Frances Dowdy, Anne de Latour Hopper, and 30 other artists, both local and national.

Carpediem Exhibit 1429 E. High St. An exhibition of Lillian Fitzgerald’s plein air paintings, Lily Erb’s sculptures exploring restraints, and Elizabeth Geiger’s paintings of familiar objects.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “The Art of Whimsy,” a show of mixed-media jewelry by Stephen Dalton. July 13, 1pm.

The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Pompeii Archive: Photographs by William Wylie,” through June 9; Vanessa German’s installation, “sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies,” through July 7; “The Print Series in Bruegel’s Netherlands: Dutch and Flemish Works from the Permanent Collection,” through July 7; “Of Women, By Women,” an exhibition curated by the university’s museum interns that explores the power inherent in the act of taking a photograph; “Asian Art from the Permanent and Select Private Collections”; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. Through July 13, “Simply: The Black Towns,” a series of images by Jamelle Bouie, New York Times columnist and political analyst for CBS News, of the remains of African American towns founded after Emancipation; and opening July 27, a show of 13 works by Ernest Withers, made between 1957 and 1968.

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Shane Pickett: Djinong Djina Boodja (Look At the Land that I Have Traveled),” featuring work by one of western Australia’s most significant contemporary Aboriginal artists;  “Beyond Dreamings: The Rise of Indigenous Australian Art in the United States,” through July 7; and “With Her Hands: Women’s Fiber Art from Gapuwiyak: The Louise Hamby Gift,” opening July 18.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Landscape Reimagined & Summer Sculpture Show,” featuring the work of 27 painters and 10 sculptors who take landscape as their subject or use their art to literally inhabit and intersect with nature.

Northside Library 705 W. Rio Rd. “Summertime: A Group Multimedia Art Exhibit” featuring work by the BozART Fine Art Collective.

Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. In the main gallery, “Lady Painters: Inspired by Joan Mitchell,” featuring paintings by Isabelle Abbot, Karen Blair, Janet Bruce, Molly Herman, Priscilla Long Whitlock, and two original works by American abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell; and in the Dové Gallery, “Radiolaria & Reef: Our Ocean’s Living Abstractions,” featuring paintings by Tina Curtis. Through July 19.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 122 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. The SVAC members’ annual judged show.

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist 717 Rugby Rd. “The Garden Show,” featuring the paintings of Tomas Manto. Opens July 7 at noon.

University of Virginia Health System Main Hospital Lobby 1215 Lee St. “In the Garden,” a show of watercolors by Marcia Mitchell.

Yellow Cardinal Gallery 301 E. Market St. “Looking Toward the Light,” paintings reflecting the joys of summer light by Karen Collins, Lizzie Dudley, Anne French, Jane Goodman, and Carol Ziemer. Opens July 12 at 5pm.

First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many area art galleries and exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. To list an exhibit, email arts@c-ville.com.

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Arts

Seeing new stories: Bolanle Adeboye lights up a moment in untitled show at Live Arts

Bolanle Adeboye combines original artwork and digital collage in a unique show of light boxes at Live Arts. Photo by Martyn Kyle

Our ability to look at art—to see color, shape, texture—comes from light.

We’ll spare you an in-depth science lesson, but most basically, light reflects off objects and into the eye. Cells in the retina (at the back of the eye) convert light into electrical impulses, which the optic nerve sends to the brain. The brain then produces the image we see.

“It all derives from light,” says visual artist Bolanle Adeboye. “I’m just fascinated by it.”

Adeboye is always painting light: the way it falls across a child’s cheek, the way it flickers in the night sky, how it traverses the surface of a bubble. And in her newest works, 11 light box paintings currently on view at Live Arts, light illuminates not just these paintings, but the path of her creative journey.

For this untitled series, Adeboye scanned a number of her original paintings and digitally collaged them together into new vignettes. She had the resulting images printed onto backlit film, a thin, transparent plastic material commonly used for those glowing fast-food menus and bus station advertisements. Once she had the prints, she slid them into light boxes—essentially low-profile flat panel ceiling lights ubiquitous in office buildings—for display on the second and third floors of Live Arts, between the large windows overlooking Water Street.

Those familiar with Adeboye’s work will see that many of her usual motifs—sunrises, sunsets, night skies, water, bubbles, forest scenes, flowers, trees, children—are present in this series, combined in new ways, to tell new stories.

In “Park Kids,” a little girl spray paints a sign near a parking garage, a water tower looming large in the background. A little boy kneels on the ground near a sapling growing out of a crack in the pavement—has he planted it, or broken the pavement to make room for its growth? In their eyes, all it takes to turn a parking lot into a park is to “declare it,” says Adeboye. Spray paint the sign and nurture the tree, to make it so. “In real life, nothing is that simple, but the way kids approach problems simplifies them in a way that I think is beautiful, even if it’s not entirely practical,” she says. “And that’s what art is, pretty much.”

Children often create with boundless emotion and without self-consciousness, says Adeboye, and she finds that inspiring—painting children is her constant reminder to do the same.

One example is “Dawn Soon,” which Adeboye made in the wake of her friend (local sculptor) Gabe Allan’s death in March of this year. In it, a transparent, headless man walks alone at night down a thickly wooded path. Adeboye’s not sure why the man has no head—it just happened while she was making it—but she knows the piece is about losing oneself “to the big expanse.” There’s something foreboding and dark about it, she says, but there’s a lot of light, and lightness, too.

As Adeboye created these works—paintings digitized and essentially presented on screens—she says she thought a lot about 3D and special effects used in movies and television, how they “get more and more and more and more intense, with all the motion.” At first glance, the light boxes look like screens. A viewer might expect the moon in “The Players” to spin like a disco ball. Or for the bubbles in the “Sink and Swim” diptych to float to the surface outside the frame as the nearby clusters of neon flowers rock back and forth in the tide. The images are visually still, but we expect them to move, and Adeboye’s interested in that dissonance.

She wondered about the power of having one moment, rather than a whole series of moments, to tell a story. “It’s an exercise in forcing me to try and figure it out: If you’re only going to do one moment, it has to be the right moment,” she says.

And so Adeboye’s work lights up moments that stir plenty of intellectual and emotional movement, a phenomenon of light that is not exactly explicable by science.

What’s more, this experimental series has sparked new creative movement for the artist. Adeboye’s found that she likes working digitally. She can dial down the cyan and boost the magenta on a flower petal and decide whether she likes it or not before hitting delete, a freedom that’s practically impossible to explore in paint. But she can’t imagine leaving painting behind entirely.

“Ideally, I’d always want to ride the line between the two,” says Adeboye, adding that the light box pieces work precisely because the textures are created physically, with paint and the painting surface. The combination of digital and physical media opens up a rather free, very wide, playful world that Adeboye’s game to romp around.

“At this point, I’m just trusting that none of this stuff is a destination,” she says about the light boxes and what viewers might see in her future shows. “The path is so much longer.”

Bolanle Adeboye combines original artwork and digital collage in a unique show of light boxes at Live Arts. She’ll have a closing reception, with a performance by cellist (and Adeboye’s housemate) Wes Swing, on June 8.

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Restorative justice: Vanessa German’s art celebrates black lives

“There’s an incredible well of creativity that it takes to endure your humanity when it feels like you’re not in the right skin.” Vanessa German in Avery Court, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, 2016. Photo: Allen Phillips / Wadsworth Atheneum.

Vanessa German grew up in Los Angeles in a creative household, wearing clothes her artist mother made, writing stories, and crafting creations from the scrap materials her mom laid out on the dining room table for her and her siblings.

“We were makers as a way of life,” says German, the 2018 recipient of the $200,000 Don Tyson Prize, which recognizes “significant achievements in the field of American art.”

“My earliest memories of joy and knowing and understanding a sense of euphoria in being alive was through making things—the joy of gluing lace to cardboard and realizing I could make a separate reality in a story different than what existed in living reality. That is the way we came to know ourselves.”

She speaks on the phone from an artist residency in Mexico, where she is preparing a new body of work for a solo show, opening in Los Angeles in March. This new work is her special baby, she says, because it will be installed in the city “where I came to love the feeling of making art, the process of being in materials—being in a relationship with them and activating that relationship with intention.”

The as-yet-untitled new work is a series of sculptures and wall works constructed inside the frames of tennis rackets. “There is a point of classical mechanics,” German says, “that talks about the moment of inertia, the torque that it takes to bring something back to center.” The tennis rackets represent her experience of growing up black in L.A. “when hip-hop became hip-hop and AIDS became AIDS,” she says. Like her previous work, it reckons with mortality. But it also explores what it meant “to be alive in a culture of celebrity,” she says, in which Leonardo DiCaprio and other child stars were among her classmates and she learned to play tennis in Compton where Venus and Serena Williams practiced.

It’s about “what it was to be black in that environment and creative and sort of wild…how you make yourself as a black person…and what that is to find your center, the force of motion.”

After her exhibition opens in Los Angeles, German will come to Charlottesville for a week-long residency at The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA, where her sculpture and sound installation, “sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies,” opens this week.

She created this work, which premiered in 2017 at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh—where she has lived since 2001 —in response to the “ongoing deaths” and unsolved murders of black women and girls in Pittsburgh.

“I think of it as an act of restorative justice, a healing ceremony by sight,” she says.

Some of the sculptures in the installation are heads without bodies, solemn faces, and closed eyes, adorned with headpieces made of found objects, from tree branches to ceramic figurines. Other sculptures are vivaciously dressed bodies without heads, their expressive fingers pointing, flipping the bird, or forming fists.

She found some of the materials that compose the sculptures in her neighborhood of Homewood—in the alleyway near her house, on the street, in dumpsters—and some items people left on her porch. Once, a person left an entire box of shoes—large, glittery, funny, and beautiful shoes, she says, that were likely used in a drag performance.

She is particularly moved by the lives of black transgender women, and notes the prevalence of violence against them. “There’s an incredible well of creativity that it takes to endure your humanity when it feels like you’re not in the right skin,” German says.

Vanessa German, American, b. 1976. “sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies.”, 2017. Mixed-media installation. Image courtesy of the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. Photographed by Tom Little.

“sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies” can be read in two ways. The first is the experience of someone whose loved one has been murdered in the street and she cannot go to her because the body is cordoned off by police tape. The second is the interiority of trauma itself and the dissociation a person may experience from her own body in order to survive the experience.

“As a descendant of enslaved Africans,” German says, “the soul of my culture, the soul of my people, is you attend to a body in a very special way in the space they have died. The ways bodies are tended to in a Western capitalist, patriarchal culture contributes to the trauma.”

She recalls how the body of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, lay uncovered in the street. “This continued the horror, for his body to be treated like he wasn’t a person, like he wasn’t a boy just an hour before,” she says.

Yet there is something of triumph and celebration in her installation. With its vibrant colors and the sound of dance music and uplifting voices mixed among whispers, it is, German says, “a force that can galvanize the sense of terror and tragedy and simultaneously connect that tragedy with the beauty and miracle it was that our people lived and were whole, miraculous, stunning human beings.”

“sometimes.we.cannot.be.with.our.bodies” will be on view at The Fralin February 22-July 7. Vanessa German will be in residence at the museum March 25-29, and will give a public talk on March 28.

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Familiar and mysterious: John Grant explores the role of flowers in ‘Attraction’

John Grant’s “Attraction,” which includes the piece "Dahlia Mary Ann," seen here, is on view at Second Street Gallery through January 18. Image courtesy of the artist

On the cusp of winter, the garden behind John Grant and Stacey Evans’ home is a spectrum of browns, greens, bare trees, bamboo shoots, and naked stems. It’s all askew as the fading light of day shines orange through the spaces formerly occupied by verdant leaves and vibrant blooms.

Gardening season has passed, but it’s easy to imagine the trees bursting with green growth, beds full of tulips, ranunculus, zinnias, foxgloves, dahlias, roses, anemones (Evans’ favorite), poppies (Grant’s favorite), and whatever else they manage to grow.

The garden works out well: Evans likes to plant the flowers, and Grant likes to pick them. Grant also likes to make art with them. In fact, many of the blooms in “Attraction,” Grant’s show of larger-than-life botanical works now on view at Second Street Gallery through January 18, were plucked from this very garden.

Grant’s interest in visual art began in photography, when he served in the Navy during the Vietnam War (“I had a bad draft number,” he says). One of his fellow shipmen had a camera, and when they were in port, they’d disembark to photograph the sights, in Australia, New Zealand, Guam, Hong Kong, Taiwan, The Philippines, and Alaska—when they docked in Japan, Grant purchased a camera of his own.

After the Navy, a graphic design career led him to publishing (he co-owned Thomason Grant, which published children’s and photography books from local and nationally known writers and photographers), and then to a lengthy stint as vice president of creative for Crutchfield Corporation. During his 12 years at Crutchfield, technology changed drastically—and his attention turned to digital scanning.

Flamboyant, 2018, 38 x 38 inches; mounted sheet: 43 x 43 inches. Image courtesy the artist

“Somehow, I started scanning flowers,” says Grant.

Both of Grant’s parents were master gardeners, as were his paternal grandparents. His mother practiced Ikebana—the Japanese art of flower arranging—and he was always captivated by the colors, the textures, and the relationship between the flowers.

Grant found that the scans—he’d place the flower on the glass bed of the scanner and leave the cover open so the delicate bloom wasn’t crushed, then scan the flower at a high resolution and make a larger-than-life print of it—resonated with colleagues.

Eventually he began selling scans of “new and fresh-looking” flowers to stock photography company Getty Images, and they sold so well Grant was able to leave Crutchfield. One photograph, of a red and white ruffled tulip, was used on the cover of Stephanie Meyer’s mega-best-seller Twilight: New Moon. The more picture-perfect botanical scans he sold, the more he started to wonder: What is it about flowers?

“Some people have a truly visceral response to botanicals,” he says. We plant flowers in gardens and clip them from their stems to display in vases on our tables. We give them as gifts. We wear them on our clothes. We spray their essence on our skin. Grant says he can’t quite put his finger on the why, but he knows that attraction has something to do with it.

“The whole element of attraction in our lives is a really important thing to become aware of, because it may be very, very close to the core of our existence,” he says. “That we have that feeling of attraction, whether it’s for flowers or another person, or any kind of thing, if you start to think about what it feels like to be attracted, and pull it apart, it’s a really cool concept, a really deep subject that we gloss over.”

Viewers may be drawn to the pieces in “Attraction” for their size. All of the works are large, (some are more than three feet on each side), and afford a close look at each individual petal, stem, stamen, and bead of pollen. Some of the images—a white ranunculus with a jammy purple center, a white dahlia with a smear of pollen, a hot pink hybrid gerbera daisy—pop forth from black backgrounds, like planets floating in space, at once familiar and mysterious.

Anemones, 2018, 30 x 32 inches; mounted 37 x 35 inches. Image courtesy the artist

In some cases, Grant has pulled the flowers apart—removed the petals from a red tulip, or a foxglove, and rearranged them. Others (“Iris Ocean,” “Offering”) are more experimental, where Grant uses water, acetate, and paint to create different types of backgrounds and atmospheres.

“Magnolia in Repose,” which depicts a browning magnolia bloom on a stark black background, explores the beauty of dying blooms, sad and lovely in how the petals begin to curl in upon themselves.

All of the works highlight the singularity of the blooms, what Grant likes to call the “body language” of the individual flowers. How one seems a bit bashful, another proud. A grouping of two poppies might look like lovers, while five or six poppies together may look like they’re having a party. “Attraction” is not a show about perfection, says Grant. “I’m not into capturing a storybook flower.”

Grant’s botanicals are rather scientific, and they are also quite emotional—people tend to separate the two, says Grant, but there’s something to be said for combining close examination with emotion.

“It’s a way of taking things inside so that you can live with it, and so that you can understand your relationship to it more fully,” he says. “The more you observe, the more overpowered you are with that sort of magnitude of greatness of our being.”

John Grant’s “Attraction” is on view at Second Street Gallery through January 18.