Visual Art Center of Richmond

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.

Elizabeth King: The Sizes of Things in the Mind’s Eye

December 7, 2007 – February 17, 2008

Opening Reception

Friday, December 7, 6 – 8 pm

This nationally traveling mid-career survey of work by the Richmond-based sculptor will inaugurate the center’s new True F. Luck Gallery, which was created as part of the Center’s extensive 2007 renovation.

Organized in association with the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, the exhibition will offer audiences an unprecedented opportunity to explore the artistic evolution and singular innovations of one of the region’s most outstanding and influential artists. King’s work has not been seen in any depth in the Richmond area for nearly two decades, which makes this show an even more eagerly anticipated event. The project will be documented in a fully illustrated catalogue.

King often combines her meticulously wrought figurative sculptures with stop-frame film animation in installations that blur the boundary between actual and virtual space. Intimate in scale and distinguished by a level of craft that solicits close viewing, this work reflects her interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and the puppet, and literature’s host of legends in which the inanimate or artificial figure comes to life.

The exhibition will present approximately 65 sculptures, film animations, installation pieces, drawings and photographs produced since the late 1970s, on loan from private and several public collections and from the artist herself. It will feature such seminal works as Pupil, lent by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., as well as her latest pieces, including Bartlett’s Hand, a carved wooden sculpture with movable joints that hypnotically comes to life in an accompanying animated film. Supplementing these works will be other objects from King’s studio – her glass-eye collection, wax studies of facial expressions, plaster life casts and optical devices, for example – that illuminate process and intent.

After its premiere at the VACR, which continues through Feb. 17, 2008, the exhibition will tour to several venues beyond the state, bringing overdue national attention to this extraordinary artist. It will travel to Dartmouth College in spring 2008, in conjunction with King’s residency there, continuing on through early 2009 to the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University in Providence, R.I.; the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Neb.; and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, S.C.

Born in 1950 in Ann Arbor, Mich., Elizabeth King received BFA and MFA degrees in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1985, she joined the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University, where she currently serves as School of the Arts Research Professor in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media.

Awards recognizing King’s accomplishments include a 2006 Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2002-03 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1996-97 Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, now called the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, at Harvard University. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Last year, King’s work was the subject of a solo show at New York’s Kent Gallery. She has also recently participated in the group exhibitions Brides of Frankenstein at the San Jose Museum of Art, Beyond Real: Surrealist Photography and Sculpture from Bay Area Collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Faster Than the Eye at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and Endless Love at DC Moore Gallery in New York. Her film animation, What Happened, made with Richard Kizu-Blair, was screened last November at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of the program Black Maria Film Festival: The Legacy of the Short Film. Later this year, she will be represented in the exhibition All the More Real, curated by painter Eric Fischl for the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y.

Time for Design

October 27 – December 10, 2006

Opening Reception
Friday, October 27, 6 – 8 pm

Featuring Graphic Design: Bizarre Market Collective, Rob Carter, David Colley, Christopher Hibben, and John Malinoski; Fashion Design: Kristin Caskey, Ignatius Creegan & Rod Givens, Karl Green, and Bryony Renouf; Architecture & Interior Design: 3North Architects, Donna & Robert Dunay, Edwin Pease, Christopher Rea, and Camden Whitehead.

Curated by fashion designer Kristin Caskey, graphic designer John Malinoski, and architect Camden Whitehead in association with VACR curator Ashley Kistler, this exhibition explores the evolution of design solutions and the intersections of various design disciplines through an in-depth look at intention, concept, process, outcome, and client relations. The array of works selected for the show focuses primarily on projects by local designers and also connects to the upcoming renovation of the VACR, scheduled to begin in early 2007. For the curators, a primary motivation in organizing the show is to raise consciousness for design in Richmond, informing a broader public of its challenges and its potential for catalyzing change.

Garden

September 8 – October 15, 2006

Opening reception
Friday, September 8, 6 – 8 pm

Featuring work by Reed Anderson, Polly Apfelbaum, Roberley Bell, Nancy Blum, Imi Hwangbo, Kirsten Kindler, Kurt Lightner, Rob de Mar, Roxy Paine, Alyson Shotz, Jennifer Steinkamp, Yoshihiro Suda, and Yuken Teruya

This exhibition includes work by thirteen artists, both well-known and emerging, who employ a lush, often over-the-top decorative aesthetic and labor-intensive processes in their treatment of imagery drawn from nature. Besides turning the center’s galleries into their own sort of garden, the show explores various themes relating to the garden as a site of meditation, commemoration, refuge, delight, and wonderment. From exuberant, Pop-inflected images to intricately crafted, contemplative pieces, these diverse works cover a broad emotional and psychological terrain.

Among the works featured in the exhibition are Polly Apfelbaum’s lively cartoon flowers rendered on dyed fabric, Roberley Bell’s sculptural “flower blobs” in which the artificial holds sway, and Jennifer Steinkamp’s projected computer animation of dahlias that move fluidly in unison as if being blown by a breeze. Using a wide range of media to explore a mediated view of nature, Alyson Shotz makes digital prints of imaginary flora, as well as hand-wrought sculptures of plants that incorporate quirky elements like feeding tubes.

Nancy Blum explodes the scale of voluptuous botanical motifs in her monumental drawing, while Rob de Mar creates a miniaturized fantasyscape with the little flock-coated islands that punctuate his sculpture. From hyper-realistic to abstract images, the exhibition not only includes Roxy Paine’s meticulous renditions of fungi and Yoshihiro Suda’s precisely carved sculptures of weeds, but also Imi Hwangbo’s obsessively constructed Mylar reliefs based on the floral imagery of traditional Korean wrapping cloths.

In this selection of works, paper re-emerges as a material fraught with expressive potential. Subjected to processes both additive and subtractive, it is cut, folded, layered, punctured, stenciled, and painted by artists Reed Anderson, Kurt Lightner, Kirsten Kindler, and Yuken Teruya to create densely patterned drawings, intricately layered collages, elaborate installation pieces, and delicate sculptures.

On Site / Artists’ Projects: Shigeo Kawashima

Opening Reception for the Artist
Friday, June 2, 6 – 8 pm

These events are free and open to the public.

At the invitation of the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, sculptor Shigeo Kawashima arrives in mid-May from his home in Kanagawa, Japan, to spend three weeks at the center as a resident artist. Intricately weaving strips of fresh-cut bamboo, Kawashima will construct a monumental sculpture that he has conceived specifically for the VACR’s galleries. The exhibition also includes a selection of Kawashima’s small-scale maquettes, for which he has become internationally known.

Kawashima’s residency follows the VACR’s 2004 exhibition, Contemporary Japanese Bamboo Arts, which introduced his work along with that of 30 other Japanese artists to audiences in central Virginia. His exhibition is also the sixth installment of On Site / Artists’ Projects. This annual series supports the creation of site-specific works that stretch traditional boundaries and expectations, giving both artist and audience new challenges and opportunities for interaction.

Although Kawashima’s early training was tradition-based, he later pursued a path as an independent artist instead of joining a professional craft-arts organization. Born in 1958 in Tokyo, he was in his twenties when he began teaching at the Beppu Occupational School. Because of his youth, his students did not take him seriously until he challenged them to a competition to see who could split bamboo the fastest and most accurately.

According to Robert Coffland, a specialist on Japanese bamboo arts and director of the TAI Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kawashima’s sense of artistic experimentation was inspired by Shono Shounsai, Japan’s first Living National Treasure in the bamboo arts, who was a major advocate of the sculptural possibilities of bamboo. “Kawashima’s creativity and his deftness at mastering new techniques,” Coffland notes, “have established his reputation as a leader in the next wave of bamboo sculptors.”

In the 1990s, Kawashima began making large-scale bamboo sculptures in natural and urban settings. Characterized by graceful curvilinear forms and dramatic surfaces, these unprecedented works have led to several recent site commissions in this country. Over the last decade, his small sculptures have entered more than 30 collections throughout Japan, Europe, and the United States, including the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, and have been included in a dozen shows featuring new work by emerging contemporary artists.

On Site / Artists’ Projects: Shigeo Kawashima is made possible by a generous grant from the Japan Foundation. Additional support has been provided by BB&T, Joe & Junko Liesfeld, and Jay & Junko Quesenberry. The VACR also thanks Robert Coffland and his staff at TAI Gallery for their kind assistance with this project.

Stained & Scattered: Glass Works by Judith Schaechter & Jack Wax

April 7 – May 21, 2006

Opening Reception: Friday, April 7, 6 – 8 pm

In this exhibition, contrasting approaches by two highly respected, nationally known artists underscore the expressive versatility of glass.

Displayed in light boxes, Judith Schaechter’s meticulously crafted stained-glass narratives evoke the age-old tradition of ecclesiastical glass while also drawing inspiration from a range of contemporary sources. Like her medieval predecessors, Schaechter manipulates the intrinsic beauty of her medium and infuses each piece with a kaleidoscopic array of sumptuous color and vibrant pattern. Against these fantastic backdrops, eccentric characters endure various tribulations, prompting one viewer to describe her compositions as “psychoanalytic allegories of a modern woman’s teeming subconscious.”

Based in Philadelphia, Schaechter is a 2005 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been shown extensively throughout the US, including the 2002 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and a 2004 solo exhibition that traveled nationally to four museums. She is represented by Claire Oliver Gallery in New York.

Jack Wax, by contrast, uses glass as a sculptural medium - sometimes in combination with other materials - to create abstract works with a contemplative presence. While Wax fabricates discrete wall-mounted and freestanding forms that often refer to the human body or bodily systems, he also makes expansive installation pieces by assembling a multitude of small component parts. For this exhibition, he has conceived two such multipart, site-specific works in which experimentation with subtle variations of color plays an increasingly prominent role.

In 2002, after teaching in several American universities and for six years in Japan, Wax joined the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts, where he heads the glass program. Among other projects, he recently completed commissions for Markel Corporation and Philip Morris USA. He is represented by Reynolds Gallery in Richmond.

Carrie Mae Weems: To Be Continued

February 3 – March 19, 2006

Opening Reception: Friday, February 3, 6 – 8 pm

Since developing her first photographic series in the early 1980s, artist Carrie Mae Weems has continued her investigation of “trying to understand something about the human spirit, how it operates, where it goes awry, how to address it, how to look at it, how to unravel it.” Storytelling, she also says, is a fundamental aspect of her work, “a way to best express the human condition.”

Combining photographs with written text, audio recordings, or other media, often in room-sized installations, Weems’ artful stories probe what shapes our perception of race, class, and gender, and our understanding of memory, tradition, and history. This exhibition presents the artist’s well known Kitchen Table Series, a domestic drama exploring a full range of encounters set around the kitchen table, enacted through photographic tableaux and narrative text. In her ongoing investigation of identity, Weems counters these gritty struggles of daily life and love with the lush, dreamlike imagery of her recent May Days Long Forgotten, which incorporates a video projection in addition to photographs.

A resident of Syracuse, New York, Weems has participated in many solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including a mid-career survey organized and toured by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. Her work is represented in major museum collections nationwide. She recently received the prestigious Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, as well as the Distinguished Photographers Award from Women in Photography International.

The exhibition was organized by the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, where it was seen this past fall. It is accompanied by a 65-page catalogue, available at the center’s front desk for $25.00.