By Megan Z. Shearin | September 1, 2010
Common everyday places and things that are often overlooked now have new meaning and purpose when given their own space.
Virginia Wesleyan College launches its second year of exhibitions with PlaceSpace, on display and open to the public now through December 15 in the Neil Britton Art Gallery. An artists’ reception will be held at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 9.
Featuring contemporary sculpture, photography, painting and installation, the exhibit questions themes of place and space highlighting featuring artists: Naomi Falk and Jayson Lowery, faculty members at The College of William & Mary; Ed Pollard, staff member at the Chrysler Museum; and Solomon Isekeije, Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.
“This exhibit has a direct relationship to the First Year Experience course that all incoming freshmen take,” said Associate Professor of Art and Curator of Exhibitions John Rudel. “In the liberal arts tradition, this exhibit ties in with the overall theme of “what is community,” which is the central topic freshmen students are discussing.”PlaceSpace on display now through December 15 in the Neil Britton Art Gallery. Free and open to the public. An artists’ reception will be held at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 9.
Photographer Ed Pollard displays more than half a dozen chromogenic prints, ranging from a desolated beach house (We Used to Vacation), to adults sunbathing by a camper in a yard full of dead, brown grass (It Was a Long Hot Summer). Multicolored beach buckets are spread out across the concrete with the imprint of freshly drenched water, giving the viewer a cooling sensation in the midst of summer heat.
“My photographs focus on common everyday places, searching for beauty in the midst of the unexceptional and the desolate,” said Pollard. “Deploying the objective, almost deadpan approach, I want the details found in a space, within the architecture of the human landscape, to monumentalize the ordinary and engage you with a quite place.”
A series of four metal foil reliefs comprise Solomon Isekeije’s mixed media display. The reliefs have the feeling of Egyptian Hieroglyphics and the metal shines in the light, changing from a bronzy gold to a mint green. Graphical figures such as fish, boats, the sun and trees can be found accentuated throughout Water Regatta.
Perhaps the most unusual display is Naomi Falk’s Holding My Breath. For this interactive exhibit, Falk invites viewers to blow into a brown paper bag, twist the top and add it to a growing pile of bags full of breaths. She also employs a variety of media, including fence posts, concrete, plywood, casters and artificial grass in Where You Go, There You Are.
“I hope to provoke a subtly skewed awareness of the ordinary, and to deepen an understanding of physical and psychological relationships to space,” she noted.
Rounding out the exhibition are Jayson Lowery’s 3-D sculptures made from cast iron and marble. His three-part After Thought series invokes a deep exploration of the anatomy of objects and how they fit together in space and place.
About the Neil Britton Art Gallery
Opened in February 2009, the Neil Britton Art Gallery has the mission of exhibiting artworks and artifacts that promote thought provoking discourse and encourage a culture of inquiry at Virginia Wesleyan College. The gallery also provides a first class venue for the annual Senior Thesis Exhibition that showcases the artwork of senior art majors.
Measuring 1,200 square feet with a closed floor plan, the gallery is a welcoming space for classroom instruction and exhibition openings with minimal disruption. The ceiling of the gallery is exposed and the floor is sealed concrete, accentuating the aesthetic neutrality of the space and highlighting the artists' work. A combination of glazed windows and frameless glass doors allow daylight through to and acoustic separation from the Library.
For more information, contact John Rudel at 757.455.3257 or jrudel@vwu.edu.