Current Studio Access Residents
The Visual Arts Center of Richmond’s Studio Access Residency is designed to support emerging and established visual artists as they develop new ideas and to foster artistic exploration by providing free access to VisArts’ 17 communal studio spaces.
Allegra Codamon
Allegra Codamon is a mixed media, visual artist whose practice challenges mainstream capitalist values of consumption, productivity, and individualism. In an era where we have the world at our fingertips, she pursues art forms that have largely been replaced by manufacturing and treats the process as a mode of reflection and intuition-building. She draws inspiration from nature’s meandering and ephemeral characteristics, often focusing on micro-details easily overlooked in a landscape.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/allegracodesigns/
Ambrose Hernandez Godoy
Ambrose Hernandez Godoy is a multinational and multidisciplinary artist born in Mexico City and residing in Richmond, Virginia. They work using themes of sarcastic body horror, Zapotec culture and mythology, queerness as a form of resistance, and the monstrous feminine. Their work takes form in technicolored assemblages of chimerical creatures, objects of sexual pleasure, and amalgamations of both. They have an interest in material as a sentient collaborator, working with the materials rather than against them, embracing the mistakes that may occur. Working mostly with second hand and reused materials considered waste, functions as an exploration of maximalist excess and how (over)consumption extends to people with marginalized identities being treated as discardable. When using new materials, the choice to use “forever” synthetics, usually plastics, is to further the concept that man-made materials will outlast the natural world. The hyper-maximalist sculptures are a nod to their belief in the superabundance of pre-existing materials and their own existence out lasting our own as humans, as well as the Chicano artistic sensibility of rasquachismo.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chilangothic/
C.A.P. Ward
C.A.P. Ward is a queer, black illustrator and cartoonist working on heartfelt stories centering diverse characters. Their work often incorporates natural imagery and vibrant colors to build emotions into the environments of their narratives. When they aren’t drawing, Ward is often found taking pictures of fungus or longboarding around the illustrious potholes of the east coast.
Website: http://artcward.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cevarra/
Cassie Sheedy
Cassie Sheedy is a multimedia artist whose practice follows coincidence and embraces inconsistency. Their work combines stories with object-props or artifacts that may “publish” prose. Humor and sentimentality are central in their work, as well as the narrative behind an object’s development and discovery. Along with sculptural heirlooms, they are working on a dark-comedy about superstition, farming, and the concept of luck in objects, materials, and activities.
Website: cassheedy.com
Elliot Weaver
Elliot Weaver is a photo-based visual artist working and experimenting with a number of analog mediums to translate foreign emotions and themes. Enthralled to have access to VisArts’ numerous studios, he hopes to utilize as many of them as possible to innovate new ideas and connect with the community.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skellyot/
Gabrielle Thomas
Gabriel Thomas is a recent graduate from William & Mary and majored in Art and Art History with a concentration in studio art. Gabriel’s primary mediums are ceramics and darkroom photography and she is currently developing a body of work that focuses on the patterns of growth and death throughout life; the flowing and transforming of energies. In other words, spiritual weathering; the process that happens naturally as we age and our life experiences shape us.