Earth. Fire. Air. Water.
August 31 - September 21
Earth, Fire, Air, Water is the first in a two-part series of exhibitions featuring recent works by the University of Virginia Studio Art Faculty. Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and video, the diverse body of works on display each engage with the legacy of the landscape genre. Very few of these works, however, offer traditional depictions of the earth, sea, or sky. Some works isolate and enlarge particularly evocative facets of the terrain to create moving depictions of the spirit of a place. Others works instead offer clues to the experiences or sensations associated with the four elements through physical artifacts or painterly abstractions. Whatever their technique or approach, the works share a common interest in capturing the subtle beauty that can be found in otherwise unremarkable corners of the world and a willingness to explore the basic substances that compose it.
Earth, Fire, Air, Water offer students a rare opportunity to see and learn from their professors' mature work. For the university at large, this exhibition is a chance to share in the creative research that members of the university community have produced in the last two years both on and off grounds. As a showcase of some of the best new artwork from Central Virginia and elsewhere, Earth, Fire, Air, Water is a must-see event for everyone in the Charlottesville area.
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New Natural History
Faculty Exhibition
September 26 - October 22
Odd ducks, exotic specimens, curious artifacts--the second and final installment of the University of Virginia studio faculty exhibition features an eclectic mix of objects that merge the real and the surreal. Combining figurative and non-representational modes, the works on display belie any straightforward reading, and instead playfully juxtapose the natural with the artificial, the recognizable with the strange. Many of these pieces present seemingly pedestrian or familiar objects in a new or unfamiliar light. Other works feature abstract forms that have been fashioned with uncanny intimacy. Still other pieces appropriate objects or imagery with established uses, changing their significance in the process and achieving highly personal results. While some works take their inspiration from the Ages of Exploration and Enlightenment, marked as they were by an incessant drive to discover, study, and categorize the knowable world, still others tackle unresolved questions of identity, authority, and belonging left in their aftermath. New Natural History offers a present-day cabinet of wonders where the spectral, the natural, and the post-colonial collide.
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Julie Heffernan
Second annual Painter-in-Residence
October 2 - 26, 2012
The Studio Program at the University of Virginia's McIntire Department of Art presents its second annual Lee-Ellen Fleming Painter-in-Residence, Julie Heffernan.
Ms Heffernan is a New York artist and Associate Professor of Art at Montclair College in NJ who will be in residence and creating her own work from October 2-26, 2012 in Studio 323, Ruffin Hall. She will present a public lecture on her work Wednesday, Oct 3 at 5:30 in Campbell Hall, Room 153.
Julie Heffernan has been the recipient of many awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant, (1995), and the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader's Digest Artist at Giverny, (France.) Her work is included in many national and international collections, including the Columbia Museum of Art (Columbia, South Carolina), the Virginia Museum of Fine Art (Richmond, Virginia), and the Zabludowicz Art Trust (London, United Kingdom). Ms. Heffernan's paintings have been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Lux Art Institute (Encinitas, California), the John Michael Kohler Art Center (Sheboygan, Wisconsin), and the Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte, North Carolina) as well as prestigious galleries like POWW, (New York, NY) and Catherine Clark Gallery, (San Francisco, CA.) Her work has been written about and published in Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, and The New York Times.
David Cohen, art critic of The New York Sun, aptly describes Heffernan's art: "These paintings are a hybrid of genres and styles, mixing allegory, portraiture, history painting, and still life, while in title they are all presented as self portraits."
At the end of her U.Va. residency, Ms. Heffernan will have an Open Studio on Final Friday, October 26 from 5:30-7:30 in Studio 323, Ruffin Hall. The public is invited to both her lecture and open studio.
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The End of Language
Justin Quinn, Suzanne Silver, Adam Wolpa, Lauren Catlett
Four person exhibition
March 1 - March 29, 2013
Download catalogue
We are a Sign, unreadable.
- Friedrich Hölderlin
Introduction
We are grateful that these four artists - Lauren Catlett, Justin Quinn, Suzanne Silver and Adam Wolpa - have allowed us to gather their works together in this exhibition, and we are grateful likewise for Monica's McTighe's supporting - and supportive - essay on the works. Her essay helps establish the broader context for artist's working in this genre. The artists have provided us a rich installation, one slow to reveal, or at least to reveal fully. The installation is not entirely formless. The end is not the end.
Each of these artists has thought deeply about their works, working over a long period of time, and to bring them together into this collaborative venture has, we hope, enriched the individual works. We sense the diligence and devoted study of these artists. I hope even that the artists might gain something from the collaborative installation of their works. Perhaps they have found a new friend, or a new dimension to an old friend.
These artists are not dismayed by the everyday failure of language, just the opposite. In the ruins they see an opening and an opportunity. Let's here reprise Walker Percy's wonderful title: Love in the Ruins.
The first version of The End of Language was a portfolio a number of us put together around 2001. Wolpa and Quinn were in graduate school at Iowa at that time, and together with fellow graduate student Alan Harmon, provided the organizational principles guiding that portfolio. In the intervening years I have watched their works continue to develop ideas nascent in that early portfolio, and have long considered reanimating the project. Suzanne Silver had left Charlottesville for Columbus by the mid '90s, yet I have continued to follow her installations. Two years ago she visited again, and our conversation in Ruffin that day provided the impetus to go forward. She was, after all, already familiar with, and enthusiastic about, Quinn's work. Lauren Catlett, the fourth in our quartet, is a recent graduate of the Studio program at Virginia, and from the first works I ever saw her realize, it was clear she could join this group.
Wolpa closes the 2001 prospectus with the following sentence, as good today as then: "Please do not respond, these words have already begun to look only like horizons."
Welcome to the exhibition!
Professor Dean A. Dass, Curator
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