October 27-December 12, 2025
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 9:00am-5:00pm
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 30, 5:00-7:30pm
Opening Performance: Thursday, October 30, 6:00pm
Second Performance: Thursday, December 4, 6:00pm
Ruffin Gallery at the UVA Department of Art presents The Thirteenth Chair, a multimedia installation and live performances by Maria Villanueva (Assistant Professor, General Faculty, Digital Art) and Sean Lopez, with choreography by Rori Smith.
The Thirteenth Chair explores transformation through a contemporary reenactment of the Last Supper, using this pivotal moment as a mirror for our own time of necessary change. Like the apostles gathered around that table, we find ourselves at a threshold confronting an uncertain future that demands we let go of what we have known.
Through performance, video, installation, and abstract movement, this multimedia experience examines how we carry our cultural histories and personal mythologies forward into an unknown phase of existence. The performers, moving as geometric forms that reshape and reconfigure, embody the tension between holding on and letting go between the weight of what we've accumulated and the necessity of transformation.
We interrogate the decisions we have made, the objects and artifacts we have given meaning, and the belief systems that have sustained us. As a generation standing at our own last supper, we prepare to release our grip on relevance while claiming the strength and responsiveness of minds that have witnessed profound change.
The thirteenth chair remains empty perhaps for the audience, perhaps for the betrayer among us. Who or what sits in that chair? The world that abandons us? The systems that fail us? Ourselves, complicit in our own undoing? This experimental work asks not just what we must become, but what we must reckon with in the process of becoming.
Artist Bios:
Maria Villanueva
Maria Villanueva is a multimedia artist and her studio art practice focuses on the human and natural ecologies that shift and form in the urban and natural environment. The media varies from technology, drawing and painting, photography, video, performance, to site-specific sculpture installations. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio in 2009, and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas in 2021. Maria’s work has been exhibited in national and international exhibitions. She is currently assistant professor of digital art at the University of Virginia.
Sean Lopez
Sean Lopez is an intermedia artist and educator who explores the boundary between conscious and subconscious realms through performance, projection mapping, and installation. Currently teaching at George Mason University's College of Visual & Performing Arts, Lopez combines poetry, theater, folklore, and digital media to profane how humans both create and destroy their own dreams. His work examines our paradoxical relationship with imagination—craving creative freedom while simultaneously fearing its unleashing. Lopez is a PhD Candidate researching intermedial studies at the University of Maine and holds an MFA from the University of North Texas. His performances have been featured at the Currents Art & Technology Festival in Santa Fe, NM and the Sweet Pass Sculpture Park in Dallas, TX.
Rori Smith
Rori Smith is a dancer and researcher of bodily experience based in midcoast Maine. Her work intersects environmental performance art, ecosomatic movement practices and phenomenology. She holds an MFA in Dance from Temple University and is currently a doctoral candidate in Art & Philosophy at the University of Maine, an educator at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Associate Director of the somatic arts nonprofit Watermark Arts, and a member of the Continuum Teachers Association. Rori is co-author, with Elaine Colandrea, of The Elemental Body: A Movement Guide to Kinship with Ourselves and the Natural World.
This exhibition is supported by the UVA Department of Art and the Peter B. and Adeline W. Ruffin Foundation.