ARLINGTON ARTS CENTER presents
Spring SOLOS 2019
on view APRIL 13 - JUNE 7, 2019
Front Cover: Noel Kassewitz, I Wish to Communicate with You Inside Cover: Brian Barr, Missing Pieces
Spring SOLOS 2019 on view APRIL 13 - JUNE 7, 2019
featuring BRIAN BARR GRETA BERGSTRESSER EMILY CAMPBELL NOEL KASSEWITZ GREG STEWART JACK WARNER YING ZHU
WYATT RESIDENT ARTISTS GALLERY |
Roxana Alger Geffen: The Binding Ties
Director’s Forward Since the early 2000s, Arlington Arts Center (AAC) has been presenting its annual SOLOS exhibitions, providing opportunities for both emerging and established contemporary artists from across the Mid-Atlantic to exhibit new work, experiment with innovative concepts, and cultivate a broader audience. The long-running SOLOS exhibitions demonstrate AAC’s strong commitment to the regional arts community, as well as our desire to encourage audiences to discover, explore, and appreciate the work of the area’s finest contemporary artists. The Spring SOLOS 2019 artists were selected from a large number of entries by jurors Natalie Campbell, independent curator, and Peter Winant, director of the School of Art at George Mason University and co-founder of Workingman Collective. Spring SOLOS 2019 artists Brian Barr, Emily Campbell, Noel Kassewitz, Greg Stewart, Greta Bergstresser, Jack Warner, and Ying Zhu explore themes ranging from timely environmental issues to childhood experiences, and create installations that shift viewers’ perceptions of time, space, and history. Their work encompasses sculpture, photography, installation, drawing, and painting, representing the diversity of practice and concept embraced by contemporary artists in the region. Beginning in 2019, AAC’s SOLOS exhibitions will be offered only once annually, allowing us to present an exciting new program for Mid-Atlantic artists: a regional biennial. AAC’s first biennial opens this fall, and like the SOLOS exhibitions, it will offer an excellent exhibition opportunity for regional artists, while connecting audiences with diverse, exceptional contemporary art and artists. SOLOS exhibitions will
continue to be held each spring, with an increasing focus on the exhibition of innovative, site-specific work. AAC is also pleased to present Roxana Alger Geffen: The Binding Ties in our Wyatt Resident Artists Gallery. We are extremely proud of our resident artist program, which provides subsidized, private studios for ten to twelve artists annually for terms of up to six-years, as well as a dedicated exhibitions program. The Binding Ties features Geffen’s new body of work, created in part with humble objects and materials drawn from family members. By combining materials from different times and places, the artist weaves together disparate moments in time, reflecting the vicissitudes of memory, experience, and identity itself. At AAC, our critically-noted exhibitions are always offered free to the public, and are accompanied by public programs that create the opportunity for engagement with exhibiting artists. In addition to the exhibitions program, AAC offers a year-round slate of classes and workshops, as well as our respected artist residency program. AAC serves as a hub for contemporary art and artists in the Mid-Atlantic region, as well as a place of exploration and enlightenment for the general public. We welcome you to enjoy all that AAC has to offer. Holly Koons Executive Director Ying Zhu, No strings attached
BRIAN BARR
For Spring SOLOS 2019, Brian Barr examines imagery and objects, exploring the space between function, meaning, and aesthetics. Presenting large-scale photocopied images as found objects, Barr creates a dialogue between the works by installing them on an infrastructure of pipe, drywall, and lumber. This installation allows the images to interact with one another and intervene into the exhibition space itself. Faced with images stripped from their original context, viewers have two options for engagement: they must attempt to understand the meaning of the images within this new environment or, alternately, they may focus on the aesthetic qualities of the images. Either approach entails a certain loss of understanding. Viewers may also move between the two positions, responding to the sheer aesthetics of the work, before attempting to seek meaning within it. Barr’s interest lies in this in-between space, in the tension between communication and aesthetics. From this productive tension, a space opens up where new fictions can emerge.
Brian Barr is an artist and independent curator based in Richmond, VA and Detroit, MI. He received an MFA from American University and a BFA from The College for Creative Studies. Barr’s work has been included in exhibitions at Skylab Gallery (Columbus, OH), Current Space (Baltimore, MD), Shockoe Art Space (Richmond, VA), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Flashpoint Gallery (Washington, DC), and Artist Alliance Inc.’s Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space (New York, NY). His work was featured in New American Paintings (no. 95), and he has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and the Kala Art Institute as well as a residency at the Luminary Center for the Arts (St. Louis, MO). Barr currently teaches for the Foundations and Sculpture departments at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Displaced, 2018 Vinyl banner 60 x 48 in
Self-portrait on Chicken Day, 2015 Archival pigment print 21 x 14 in
GRETA BERGSTRESSER
Greta Bergstresser’s photographic work examines her personal ideologies in relation to those of other people around her. She draws inspiration from her childhood growing up on a sheep farm in rural Pennsylvania where her family grew and raised most of their own food. These early ideologies instilled in her as a child manifested themselves in her desires and beliefs surrounding self-sufficiency. Bergstresser’s own ethical commitments connect her to a broader movement of people who, inspired in part by environmental concerns, are disconnecting from a consumer-based lifestyle and pursuing self-sufficiency by growing their own food, raising animals, and generally reducing their dependence on capitalist markets to meet their basic needs. She also explores the political juxtaposition of these beliefs with those of a rightwing or libertarian fatalist philosophy that focuses on stockpiling guns, ammunition, and gold in preparation for some unknown catastrophic event in the near future. Interested in how these philosophies overlap, often co-existing in rural environments, Bergstresser examines how everyday people position their lives apart from the cultural norm.
Greta Kathryn Bergstresser was born in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. She pursued an early interest in photography and attended the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts. Bergstresser received a BA in art from Muhlenberg College and an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at Grossman Gallery (Easton, PA), CICA Museum (South Korea), Morean Arts Center (St. Petersburg, FL), Barrett Art Center (Poughkeepsie, NY), The Gallery at Mayfair (Allentown, PA), and Grossman Gallery (Easton, PA). She has also participated in an artist residency at Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. Greta currently resides in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, pursuing her own fine art photography as well as teaching photography at both Muhlenberg College and Lafayette College.
EMILY CAMPBELL
Emily Campbell’s Reverie presents a series of disorienting and claustrophobic environments in which fictional characters engage in bizarre actions and rituals. Her work is inspired by ancient mythologies, science fiction, historical imagery, and botanical illustrations that explore themes of ritual and hedonism. For Spring SOLOS 2019, Campbell created an immersive installation of panoramic figural drawings and totem-like sculptures that envelope the viewer in an imagined world, a heterotopia that blurs the line between history and myth. The scenes evoke carnivals and festivals, holidays when the social order is upended and traditional hierarchies and laws are suspended. Depicted in stark white and dark blue, the work’s graphic simplicity and the joy communicated by the figures momentarily distracts from the disturbing and, at some points, explicitly violent activity taking place within the crowd. Her sculptural works form an abstract labyrinth that extends the procession presented in the murals, constructing a fantastical yet familiar space. Campbell’s chaotic scenes are depicted in precisely planned compositions with delicate lines, establishing a sense of order amid the irrational and inexplicable actions taking place within the drawings.
Emily Campbell is a visual artist and educator working in Baltimore, MD who holds an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA in visual arts from Mercyhurst University. Previous solo and group exhibitions include Institute of Contemporary Art (Baltimore, MD), IA&A at Hillyer (Washington, DC), Maryland Art Place (Baltimore, MD), St. Johns College (Annapolis, MD), Gallery CA (Baltimore, MD), Push Gallery (Asheville, NC), Essex Gallery (Baltimore, MD), The Delaware Contemporary (Wilmington, DE), and Arlington Cultural Affairs (Arlington, VA). She has participated in residencies at Can Serrat in Spain, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Vermont Studio Center, and Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. Campbell currently teaches at Maryland Institute College of Art and Anne Arundel Community College.
Installation view of Totems with Parade I, 2018 Plaster Dimensions variable
Ode to Agnes II, 2017 Acrylic, dye, bleach on woven canvas, found buoys, net floats, rope 24 x 18 in
NOEL KASSEWITZ
“How does an artist prepare for climate change?” Understanding art’s cultural value but non-essential nature in disaster scenarios, Noel Kassewitz recognized the need to expand her work’s utility. She creates painting hybrids that exist as aesthetic objects and conversation starters in times of stability and function as flotation devices in potentially flooded futurescapes. Her experiments satirically include wrapping existing works in pool noodles, learning to weave her own canvas with buoys and other found flotation devices embedded into them, and crafting ultra-buoyant paintings from synthetic sailcloth and marine foam that can double as life-saving rafts for their collectors. Kassewitz takes the works into the field, testing and documenting their resilience by photographing the pieces adrift or acting as ad hoc rafts. Bemusing yet intended to provoke, the works force the viewer to ask themselves, “If even artists are preparing, how might climate change affect me?” Though hopeful, Kassewitz can rest assured that if the coded messages within her paintings do not instigate the change she is looking for, their dystopian pragmatism will remain. Presented in this solo exhibition are her woven works, their documentation, and a video-piece projected onto a hand-carved marble and sand installation.
Noel Kassewitz is a contemporary artist and third-generation Floridian currently based in Washington, DC. She received a BFA in studio painting from the University of Florida and later completed an artist residency in Carrera, Italy with marble master sculptor Boutros Romheim. Kassewitz has guest written for Union of Concerned Scientists and her work was recently featured in HuffPost. Previous solo and group exhibitions include IA&A at Hillyer (Washington, DC), Sense Gallery (Washington, DC), Woskob Family Gallery (State College, PA), Woman Made Gallery (Chicago, IL), Piazza del Duomo (Milan, Italy), La Fastuchera (Bologna, Italy), Pyramid Studios (Miami, FL), and The Gallery, Ayers Plaza, and The Doris (Gainesville, FL).
GREG STEWART
Greg Stewart’s A Turning and a Strange Appearance has two primary components. One is a comprehensive collection of stencils providing the names of all the species of birds in the state of Virginia. The other is a freezer that maintains a finite number of chocolate covered ice cream bars that are made to resemble the four species of birds currently found on Virginia’s list of threatened species: piping plover, roseate tern, red knot, and red cockaded woodpecker. Together, these components form a kind of strange loop. The freezer playfully maintains an element of violent consumption, where the subject literally disappears, while the stenciling acts as a reminder, or a recovery of the knowledge that these things still exist.
Greg Stewart is a Virginia-based sculptor, performance artist, teacher, and inventor. He received an MFA at Ohio University and a BFA at State University of New York at Brockport. His work has been exhibited at Beverly Street Studio (Staunton, VA), Western Carolina University (Cullowhee, NC), Sawhill Gallery (Harrisonburg, VA), Grand Central Arts (Los Angeles, CA), 1708 Gallery (Richmond, VA), Redux Contemporary Art Center (Charleston, SC), Dean Project Space (New York, NY), Flux Factory (Long Island City, NY), Spitzer Art Center (Harrisonburg, VA), Miller Gallery (Bridgewater, VA), Affero Gallery (Newark, NJ), Gallery Underground (Harrisonburg, VA), and Begovich Gallery (Fullerton, CA) among others. Stewart has given numerous lectures at colleges and universities across the country including George Mason University, Virginia Tech, Western Carolina University, and the University of Alabama.
A Turning and a Strange Appearance (detail), 2019 Cardboard and wood Dimensions variable
Bullyproof Locker, 2019 Wood 24 x 26 x 60 in
JACK WARNER
Through an installation of large-scale sculptures created for Spring SOLOS 2019, Jack Warner explores the ways the physical and symbolic characteristics of educational institutions influence the individuals in those institutions. While the physical environment sets a particular tone for a place, so does the practice of naming an institution after a particular person – giving it an eponym. Warner draws on his own experience as a teacher at the same middle school he attended in his youth, as well as Arlington Arts Center’s own history as a school building, to create sculptures that conjure kinesthetic and universal memories of the schoolhouse. The works evoke and, in some cases, are created from, furniture found in educational spaces, including a set of lockers built from old drawing boards covered with scrawls and graffiti from years of use by teenagers.
Jack Warner is an artist residing in Baltimore, Maryland. He received a BA in both studio art and art education from the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his MFA from the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions at IA&A at Hillyer (Washington, DC), Abrons Art Center (New York, NY), Mason Gross Galleries (New Brunswick, NJ), Livingston Art Building (Piscataway, NJ), Alley Cat Studio (Washington, DC), 39th Street Gallery (Brentwood, MD), and Herman Maril Gallery (College Park, MD). He is currently a resident artist at VisArts in Rockville, MD. Warner served four years in the United States Marine Corp and currently teaches art at Benjamin Banneker Middle School in Burtonsville, MD.
YING ZHU
Inspired by her experience as an immigrant, Ying Zhu’s work negotiates the confluence of culture and identity. In new work created for Spring SOLOS 2019, a miniature mountainous setting formed from multicolored thread accompanies compositions of undulating waves created from eggshell shards. The colors, textures, and other inherent characteristics of Zhu’s materials provide the foundation of the installation. Through the use of natural materials, Zhu creates a symphony of elements with reassuring rhythms, emphasizing sophistication in detail but simplicity in structure. Her inventive use of ordinary materials highlights the fragile, ephemeral, and poetic qualities within and beyond our habitual perceptions. This challenge to our perception inspires subtle changes to our behavior, causing a shifting of the senses. Process and labor are also integral to Zhu’s work, as the time required to create her labor-intensive installations becomes an important and active component of the work.
Ying Zhu was born in Lanzhou, China, and now lives and works in Washington, DC. She received an MFA in studio art and a BS in management information systems at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Prior to moving to the United States, she received a BA in photography at China Communication University in Beijing. She has participated in artist residencies at Centre D’Art – Marnay Art Centre (Marnay-sur-Seine, France) and Serenbe (Atlanta, GA). Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at Littles Gallery (Chengdu, China), Art League Houston, (Houston, Texas), Klein Sun Gallery (New York, NY), Roots Division (San Francisco, CA), RNG Gallery (Council Bluffs, IA), Antenna Gallery (New Orleans, LA), Majestic Gallery (Athens, OH), Lied Gallery, Union for Contemporary Art, and Darger HQ (Omaha, NE).
Viva Dan (detail), 2011 Eggshells, paper towel, oil clay 56 x 41 x 19 in
Horse Muzzle (ladies’ headdress), 2019 Glove leather, wire horse muzzle, cotton string, Ikea costume ruff, horsehair, welting 16 x 15 x 26 in
Wyatt Resident Artists Gallery
| The Binding Ties
ROXANA ALGER GEFFEN
In The Binding Ties, Roxana Alger Geffen presents sculptures created in part with objects and materials drawn from her family, including ordinary household items found in her attic and trinkets pulled from her grandmother’s junk drawer. While exploring these physical remnants of her family’s past, Geffen also looked to its broader history. Tracing its roots in the United States to the 17th Century, the artist’s family tree includes ministers and soldiers, educators and robber-barons, abolitionists and slaveholders, as well as a number of well-known moral crusaders. Her most prominent ancestors left behind a legacy of activism and philanthropy which, however well-intentioned and consequential, cannot be disentangled from a parallel story of white privilege, preferential treatment, and economic advantage. Combining materials and objects from different times and places, the artist binds together disparate moments, influences, and intentions. The works reflect the impossibility of forming a single, coherent image of the past when faced with layers of interpretation, the complexity of individual stories, and our own pre- existing perspectives. Although it may be incomplete, this understanding of the past acts as a foundation for our understanding of the present and, consequently, our understanding of ourselves. Geffen’s approach to materials acts as a physical manifestation of the ways we make and remake ourselves, cobbling together past and present, idealism and ignorance, pride and shame.
Roxana Alger Geffen received a BA in visual arts from Columbia University and an MFA in painting from Boston University. Geffen has had solo exhibitions at DC Arts Center (Washington, DC), Say What Gallery (Tannerville, NY), and Flashpoint Gallery (Washington, DC). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Skirball Cultural Center (Los Angeles, CA), Museum of Design Atlanta (Atlanta, GA), Hemphill Fine Arts at Carroll Square Gallery (Washington, DC), Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia, PA), First Street Gallery (New York, NY), and Mint Gallery (Atlanta, GA), among other venues. She has participated in residencies at Vermont Studio Center and is a current artistin-residence at Arlington Arts Center. Geffen grew up in New York City and now lives in Washington, DC.
About Arlington Arts Center (AAC) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit contemporary visual arts center dedicated to presenting and supporting new work by regional artists in the Mid-Atlantic states. Through exhibitions, educational programs, and subsidized studio spaces, AAC serves as a bridge between artists and the public. The goal is to increase awareness, appreciation of, and involvement in, the visual arts in Arlington County, VA and the region. AAC was established in 1974 and has been housed since 1976 in the historic Maury School. Our facility includes nine exhibition galleries, a large lawn suitable for public art, working studios for twelve artists, and three classrooms. At 17,000 square feet, AAC is one of the largest non-federal venues for contemporary art in the Washington, DC metropolitan area.
Exhibitions Through quarterly changing exhibitions, AAC serves as a launching pad for emerging artists, provides established artists with the opportunity to experiment, and offers the public a snapshot of the region’s most compelling contemporary art. AAC’s exhibitions and attendant lectures, workshops, and panel discussions offer opportunities for dialogue, and ultimately serve to illustrate the value of contemporary art – specifically, what it is and why it matters in our daily lives.
Education AAC offers a stimulating schedule of art classes year-round for novice and seasoned artists of all ages, from toddlers to adults. Taught by experienced professional artists, AAC’s classes are small, scheduled around the school and work day, and tuition is affordable. AAC’s art students have access to the excellent contemporary art in our galleries to help stimulate and inspire their own efforts.
Resident Artists Program AAC’s resident artist program provides subsidized studio space in a supportive environment that encourages interaction, dialogue, and exploration. Residents become part of a creative community that enables them to exchange ideas, engage in meaningful conversation, and expand their practice.
Hours & Location Arlington Arts Center is open free to the public Wed - Sun, 12 - 5 pm Metro: Silver & Orange Lines: Virginia Square 3550 Wilson Boulevard Arlington, VA 22201 703.248.6800 For more info about AAC visit: www.arlingtonartscenter.org
Staff EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Holly Koons / director@arlingtonartscenter.org EDUCATION & OUTREACH MANAGER Samantha Marques-Mordkofsky / education@arlingtonartscenter.org CURATOR OF EXHIBITIONS Blair Murphy / exhibitions@arlingtonartscenter.org MARKETING COORDINATOR Laura Devereux / information@arlingtonartscenter.org
Sponsors & Partners Our programs are made possible through the generous support of the The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; Arlington County through the Arlington Cultural Affairs division of Arlington Economic Development and the Arlington Commission for the Arts; the Virginia Commission for the Arts/National Endowment for the Arts; the Washington Forrest Foundation; and generous individual donors.
VIRGINIA SQUARE • 3550 WILSON BLVD • ARLINGTON, VA ARLINGTONARTSCENTER.ORG • 703.248.6800