Fall 2008 Season

Fall Solos 2008

Twice a year, the Arlington Arts Center surveys the Mid-Atlantic region, searching for the best in cutting edge contemporary art. For 2008, our exhibitions committee worked with two guest panelists: Notable D.C. collector Phillip Barlow, and independent curator Angela Jerardi. Together, we picked a group of artists who make challenging and distinctive work.

The nine artists in Fall Solos 2008 hail from Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, Alexandria, and points in-between. They follow widely divergent paths, using glass, found photographs, found logs and wooden dowels—and even traditional oil paint on linen. Yet these artists are all actively moving the broader art world conversation forward.

In making its selections, the panel seldom tries to cobble together a theme, or pick artists based on affinities in their respective bodies of work. The goal is quality and a range of approaches; the shows are called “Solos” because each gallery space in the building is meant to be considered as a self-contained, complete exhibit.

For Katie Creyts, fairy tales, instead of being mild entertainment for children, are actually rife with darker urges, sexual content, and the dread of biological transformation. The story of Cinderella seems to be especially ripe territory: In Carriage (2007), Creyts creates a strange hybrid, crossing the pumpkin that would become Cinderella’s horse-drawn carriage with her ball gown—to create a surreal maternity outfit. In Petticoat (2007), woodland birds stitch together a dress with the sorts of trash and shiny plastic castoffs that humans inevitably leave in the forest. Thus are teen pregnancy and environmentalism shoehorned into a world which would seem to exclude them.

Andrea Chung deals with race, identity, and images of colonialism. Her work highlights the gulf between accepted stories and images and the actual human desires and histories that they serve. Chung brings personal content into the discussion: images of her grandparents and traditional recipes, which she turns into dramatic, large-scale works, albeit made from impoverished materials, like shipping palettes, sugar, paste, and butcher paper.

But she also attacks existing images of her culture, both past and present, by either excising laborers in the Caribbean from the black and white photos in which they exist (a sort of inverse of Kara Walker’s operation—instead of silhouettes, these figures are voids), or making her own mock advertisements for tourism in Jamiaca, and pasting her ads around town, often on top of existing posters. Chung’s advertisements are an attempt to make the exchanges of power in contact between indigenous people and debauched American or European tourists visible, and people’s responses when confronted with them in a public setting are often ugly.

Robin Dana makes visually sumptuous images that seem to be all about delectation. Her photos seem technically perfected, and boast rich color and smart compositions. But her depictions of white clay mines in Central Georgia show the natural world reduced to a barren, alien landscape. Traditional natural beauty peeks in occasionally at the edges of one of her pictures, but it is never the subject proper.

In a similar fashion, Morgan Craig’s hard-edged, high contrast images of empty buildings seem positioned between the Depression era precisionism of Charles Sheeler and the later photorealism of Robert Bechtle. But Bechtle and Sheeler made paintings of American abundance, of either factories churning at full capacity, or sleek new automobiles. Craig shows us factories and institutions stripped of their use and structural cohesion, foundering. Both Craig and Dana exhibit mastery, but their subjects seem to undermine traditional tropes in either of their respective mediums.

Ben Pranger’s work seems bent on obfuscation as he attempts to translate literary works into other codes, and uses numerical patterns to arrange those codes into compositions. In “The Bride Adorned,” a large, elaborate, hanging wooden sculpture with a decidedly Duchampian title, Pranger translates a passage from The Book of Revelation into Braille, and, through an obscure system, creates an ominous, spiraling cloud of data. The pairing of blindness and religious prophecy here is hard to miss.

Lily Cox-Richard hearkens back to a moment when the distance between science and pseudo-science seemed much narrower. Specifically, she alludes in her work to Nicola Tesla, and his ill-fated attempts to transmit electricity through the air, without wires. Tesla’s work combined actual science with fantastic dreams of death rays and spiritualism.

Her sparse installation, Spark Gap (2008), vaguely resembles vintage natural history museum displays, with curious copper-colored lightning rods outfitted with purple cast plastic feet. These sleek metal fixtures seem ready to receive transmissions from across the large 300 pound linen rug in the middle of the room around which they are arrayed. The rug is hand-woven to resemble a meadow having sustained a lightning strike. Though it looks like a scientific diorama, there’s also a palpable sense of mysticism here, of knowing the world through some sort of alchemical ritual—which, through the ages, is how art itself has often been considered.

Performance Series

Finally, new to the AAC this year is a performance series, featuring Baltimore artists Virginia Warwick, Judy Stone, and Sarada Conaway. Each will occupy the same downstairs gallery for a span of roughly two weeks; documentation from each performance will remain after each project is de-installed. In Warwick’s Underwater Adventure 2008, the artist dons a cartoonish animal costume, presenting herself as a sea turtle, frolicking in a synthetic kelp forest. But Warwick’s cartoon animal is neither loveable nor child-approved; in costume and in character, Warwick vents all sorts of private terrors, feelings of inadequacy, and anger. Her performances are both humorous and tremendously uncomfortable to endure, by design. Later this month, on Thursday, October 30th, all three artists will be present in the building, performing simultaneously. Stone will perform a piece that links rifle sport with transcendental meditation; Sarada Conaway will give free makeovers to willing volunteers. Before and after shots will be taken of her subjects, in which the results will make each person look slightly different, but not necessarily better—thereby mirroring the empty promises of consumer culture, which offers customers the false hope of an escape from themselves.

A show like this, spanning seven galleries and two floors of the building, requires an extraordinary group effort. Without our faithful supporters, AAC members, and our crew of volunteers—who, every six to eight weeks, invest hours of their own personal time preparing and installing—this show would not have been possible. Thank you.

Rare Specimens

In the Wyatt Gallery, Rare Specimens, a show of three dimensional textile work by AAC resident artist Paula Bryan. Bryan creates wearable pieces—jackets, shirts, wraps—that use texture and pattern to evoke objects in the natural world, including fossils and flora. She pairs these with fanciful hanging sculptures made with green and white felt.

Day of the Dead/El Dia de los muertos Altar

In the Jenkins Gallery, through November 15, it's the Day of the Dead/El Dia de los muertos Altar, an annual installation created by David Amoroso, and featuring a celebration for adults and children on Saturday, November 1st. From November 18 – 30, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP) will present a children’s art competition in Jenkins.