For the first time the powerhouses of Fine Arts Club and Photography Club have joined forces in unholy unity to create a Joint Student Show. The Gallery has been looking for ways to include more student work in it shows every semester and this first effort was very well received and attended. Each Club went through a selection process and prepped the work themselves. This show increased the level of student engagement in the Art Gallery and will lead to future shows featuring both clubs.
Please come by and view the current work of Artist Justin Strom. These massive prints are really sight to see up close and personal.
Self/Non-Self is an exhibition of mixed-media works by Baltimore artist Justin D. Strom. Strom’s series Self/Non-Self investigates a deep curiosity of the human body, creating a digital landscape of our unseen inner-spaces by combining elements of the real with those of the imagination.
Engaging with issues of microbiology, cloning, and genetic sequencing, Strom uses a hybrid of photography, digital printmaking, and 3D composite imagery to build luminous 2D works. Dense abstract forms with no clear boundaries create an alternative interior with scenes of rich color, frozen explosions, and conglomerated forms that act as symbolic reminders of transformation and impermanence in a volatile world. These multi-layered works offer a microbiological investigation of forms in imagined space that revel in the structures and processes of the body by exploring it from the inside.
Bio: Strom is a mixed-media artist, an Associate Professor in Printmaking and Digital Imaging, and the Graduate Director of the Arts Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Born in Columbia, Missouri, he received his BFA in Painting at Columbia College-Columbia, and his MFA in Studio Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has worked as an Assistant Printer at Highpoint Editions in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a Production Assistant at Tandem Press in Madison, Wisconsin.
Website: www.Justindstrom.com
Currently on view in the Gallery is the Annual Faculty Group Exhibition. Featuring works by our Fine Arts and Photography Faculty. Please come by and see what your Instructors are up to in their own personal practice.
Works By:
Fred Markham, Veronica Melendez, Amanda Sauer, Julia Kwon, Gail Rebhan, Roxana Geffen and Zac Jackson
Structure(d) Observations was co-curated by Gallery Director and Associate Professor of Art History Erin Devine and Assistant Professor of Sculpture Zac Jackson. NOVA-Woodbridge’s Sculpture program was initiated with the arrival of Jackson in 2013. Sculpture classes have added an additional understanding of design concepts in the program’s foundational areas, furthering materials and processes from which art students can create. Sculpture(d) Observations was intended to invite artists who stretch the boundaries of sculpture from object of contemplation to an awareness of material and space in how we experience our surroundings.
Artist, writer, curator, Erin Devine is also the Director of the New Gallery for Contemporary Art. Her muse trilogy, their selected still images, and the introduction of a new piece, Mnemosyne, her first work in Epic Red Film, were part of her first solo endeavor at NOVA. Four encaustic “non-modernist” objects supplemented an exhibition that investigates the gaps between gender, history, creative partnership, and questions the stereotype of “the muse.”
The Muse Trilogy on monitors, and Mnemosyne projected
It was a wonderful evening with Iranian cartoonist Kianoush Ramezani, who came from Paris to join us in the gallery for a closing reception to his mid-career retrospective. His artist talk in the Lakeside Theater drew an interesting dialogue among students and visitors from the DC community.
We are grateful to our co-sponsors, our Campus & Community Life Fund and our Visiting Artist Fund made possible through the Chadab Foundation for Visual and Performing Arts.
Guests to the reception for Contemplating Candy II took away some of the artist-made lollipops to reveal, one letter at a time, the literal subtext of the exhibition. Between now and the show’s end on December 10, come grab a lollipop and see the hidden meaning unfold!
A lecture with the artist will be held Wednesday, Nov 18 at 4:30pm in the Black Box.
Our best attended reception yet! Around 150 students, faculty, and staff — along with three of the participating artists — turned out last Thursday evening.
Despite some awful weather and a delayed schedule, a reception was held for Zac Jackson’s solo effort, It’s Not as Bad as It Looks. Jackson also gave a well-received gallery talk on his newest work.
Air Loom was based on a commission Carothers completed called Floating Seeds for a new hospital in Owensboro, KY. A nationally juried competition, the Commission of Design and Architecture (COD+A) also designated her installation in the top three national health care commissions in the last three years.
Taking cues from the area’s local ecology and community members Carothers made connections between the hospital’s leading plant-based medical research and the fact that the facility now occupies what was once a farm. Also on the grounds was a WWII airplane hanger and Carothers connected it with the region’s importance as a migration flyway for birds. Acknowledging the theme of hope and healing, coupled with flight and agriculture, Carothers sculpturally addressed the concept of floating seeds, not unlike those one might blow off of a dandelion, and involved the Owensboro community, holding seed collections and archiving written stories over a six month period. By incorporating the inclusive efforts of others Carothers blurs the boundaries of authorship, allowing the work to make a far more genuine connection to the landscape, the people who live upon it and the changing audience that experiences the installation on a daily basis.
Following the reception for the installation on January 20, Carothers gave a lecture on her work in the Black Box Theatre, where she explained her concept for the commission as well as her many community engaged projects.
