Visual Art Center of Richmond

Cultivating creativity since 1963

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Exhibitions

The galleries at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond always have something special to see. Be sure to join us on opening night for each new exhibition--our openings are a Richmond tradition.

Gallery Hours:

MONDAY-FRIDAY 11-7,
SATURDAY 10-4,
SUNDAY 1-4

The galleries are free and open to the public. Get directions.

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Virgil Marti: Ah! Sunflower

March 6 — May 11, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 6, 7 — 9 pm

Opening with a public reception March 6, Virgil Marti: Ah! Sunflower presents an installation by Philadelphia-based artist Virgil Marti. Marti bridges art and domestic decoration in his immersive environments of color, light and texture. Featuring a new wallpaper design, a fanciful chandelier, and richly upholstered seating among other components, Marti's installation evokes an opulent interior while also addressing the centuries-old theme of vanitas, or life's transience. The exhibition also features six innovative designs from Wallpaper LAB, which collaborates with contemporary artists to produce limited-edition wallpaper.

This two-part exhibition, taking place concurrently with the 2008 Southern Graphics Council Conference in Richmond March 26-29, explores artist-designed wallpapers as an extension of printmaking. "Since 1966, when Andy Warhol covered the Leo Castelli Gallery with his now famous pink-and-yellow Cow wallpaper, other artists have expanded the formal and conceptual possibilities of this functional medium in unexpected ways," explains Ashley Kistler, VACR curator.

Marti has included wallpaper, often designed for a specific site, as a major component of the room-sized installations that he has created over the past decade. "I like the idea of producing material that can be expanded or contacted to fit a room," he notes, "so that the architecture becomes the frame." This sentiment is likely shared by the six artists whose vastly different wallpaper designs make up a second installation.

Marti's installation includes a room suggestive of the daytime and one that concerns the nocturnal. "A circular couch links the two rooms, almost like a sundial, upholstered in fabrics that move from a lighter palette to colors associated with twilight and dusk," the artist says, noting that the tones and patterns might be variously read as more typically feminine or masculine. "Oppositions are established that aren't necessarily hard and fast but that kind of blur into one another, allowing incongruous things to go together," he adds.

Other works in the installation incorporate casts of bones arranged in decorative patterns. "From a distance, you might see them as pretty floral patterns; they take on a darker tinge when you realize what they're composed of," he comments. Marti says that he is interested in taking images that have been removed from nature, similar to the decorative use of natural forms in Art Nouveau objects. He recycles them yet again, taking secondhand material through another iteration or re-hybridization.

Wallpaper LAB, a publisher of limited-edition artist-designed wallpaper, was founded by Ron Keyson two years ago in New York. Keyson collaborates with painters, sculptors and video artists to translate their ideas into designs that relate visually and conceptually to their other works. This installation features six of the 17 wallpapers that Wallpaper LAB has thus far produced, by A.J. Bocchino, Christopher Daniels, Douglas Gordon, Markus Linnenbrink, Fred Tomaselli and Phoebe Washburn.

Bocchino collects headlines from The New York Times and uses them as data for systems that generate complex networks and forms, organizing them chronologically and color-coding them by subject. Gordon's wallpaper is derived from his three-channel video installation, Play Dead: Real Time (2003), for which he used cameras to record an elephant repeatedly rising to its feet from a prone position in an otherwise empty exhibition space. The video and the wallpaper provide alternate experiences of the passage of time, a central theme in Gordon's work. Washburn uses industrial, commercial and consumer waste, tapping into "larger omnipresent and persistent systems driven by industry and consumerism," she says.

Virgil Marti was born in 1962 in St. Louis. He earned his BFA (1984) from the School of the Arts, Washington University, and his MFA (1990) from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. He is the recipient of three fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (2005, 2003, 1997), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1997), a Pew Fellowship (1995) and an Art Matters Fellowship (1995). Marti resides in Philadelphia, where he has served for many years as a master printer and project coordinator at the Fabric Workshop and Museum.

Marti has exhibited extensively since the early 1990s. Among many other group exhibitions, his work was featured in La Biennale de Montréal (2007); Whitney Biennial 2004 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; On the Wall: Wallpaper and Tableaux at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence (2003); and Apocalyptic Wallpaper at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (1997). His recent collaborative projects and solo shows include Directions: Virgil Marti / Pae White at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (2007); Crazy Quilt: Virgil Marti's Selected Works at The Design Center, Philadelphia University (2006); The Flowers of Romance at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2003); and Grow Room at Participant, Inc., New York (2002).

Opening with a reception at 7-9 p.m. on March 6, the exhibition remains on view through May 11, 2008. The Center presents a free Gallery Talk with the artist on Saturday, March 29, 4-5 p.m., and will host a printmaking open house 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., featuring demonstrations of screen and relief printing techniques as well as some activities visitors can take part in. Faculty and student work will be on display inside and outside the printmaking studio. All events are free and open to the public.

VACR exhibitions are supported in part by a generous grant from the Gwathmey Memorial Trust, the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Affiliate support for the Visual Arts Center of Richmond is provided by investors in the Arts Fund. Production assistance for “Virgil Marti: Ah! Sunflower” was provided by the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia.