The Arts at the University of Virginia is dedicated to building on innovative research and fostering inspired expression that equips us for the future.
Dean Dass, Spreading Cloud, 2012
gouache, acrylic, pigments, kaolin, marble dust on paper on panel, 27. 125 x 54.25”
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.
Participating artists:
George Andrews
Dean Dass
Kevin Jerome Everson
Philip Geiger
Dana Giacofci
Alison Hall
Jason Robinson
Martha Saunders
Dave Woody
William Wylie
This exhibition is curated by Leslie Cozzi, who received her Ph.D. in Art History from UVa in May of 2012.
Jason Robinson, Nothing to Undo, 2012
4:04 single-channel looped video
Martha Saunders, Notes, 2011
beeswax, pigment , organic matter, paper, press type on wood panel, 24 x 24"
New Natural History Faculty Exhibition
September 28 – October 21
Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 9–5
Tuesday, Thursday, 9–4:30
Ruffin Gallery
Final Friday Reception
September 28, 2012
5:30–7:30 pm
Ruffin Gallery
Elizabeth Schoyer
Bartram's Schuylkill Press, 2011
Gouache and pencil, 22 x 30 inches
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.
Participating artists:
George Andrews
William Bennett
Barbara Bernstein
Carolyn Capps
Amy Chan
Dean Dass
Sanda Iliescu
Maya Mackrandilal
Megan Marlatt
Lydia Moyer
Akemi Ohira
Pamela Pecchio
Alyssa Pheobus Mumtaz
Elizabeth Schoyer
This exhibition is curated by Leslie Cozzi, who received her Ph.D. in Art History from UVa in May of 2012.
Alyssa Pheobus Mumtaz, Rupee Deck, 2011–12
Collage of discontinued Pakistani rupee bank notes,
53 cards, 3.75 x 2.25 inches each Edition of 3
Courtesy of Tracy Williams, Ltd.
Akemi Ohira, Butterfly Kiss, 2012
On My Mind Series
5.5 x 4 inches
Julie Heffernan Second annual Painter-in-Residence
October 2–26, 2012 | Studio 323
Public Lecture
October 3, 2012 | 5:30 pm
Campbell Hall, Room 153
Final Friday Open Studio
October 26, 2012
5:30–7:30 pm
Studio 323, Ruffin Hall
Julie Heffernan, Self Portrait Talking With Stones, 2011
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.
January 25 - February 22
Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 9-5
Tuesday, Thursday, 9-4:30
Ruffin Gallery
Final Friday Opening Reception
January 25, 2013
5:30-7:30 pm
Ruffin Gallery
The new media program in Studio Art will mount an exhibition entitled Terrestrial Transmissions in Ruffin Gallery for a month that straddles January and February of 2013. Assistant professor Lydia Moyer will curate the exhibition, which will include recent videos by artists who play with the tropes of science fiction in relation to femininity. Artists in the show will include:
Julia Oldham, Brooklyn, NY
Ashley Brett Chipman, New Orleans, LA
Krista Caballero, Los Angeles, CA
Meredith Drum, Brooklyn, NY
Stephanie Hough, Cork City, Ireland
February 22 – March 8
Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 9-5
Tuesday, Thursday, 9-4:30
Ruffin Hall
Final Friday Opening Reception
February 22, 2013
5:30–8 pm
Ruffin Hall
Un Lugar, Chandler Freelander
The End of Language
Justin Quinn, Suzanne Silver, Adam Wolpa, Lauren Catlett
Four person exhibition Dean Dass, curator
March 1 - March 29
Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 9-5
Tuesday, Thursday, 9-4:30
Ruffin Gallery
Opening Reception
March 1, 2013
5:30-7:30 pm
Ruffin Gallery
Suzanne Silver
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.”
April 1 – May 10
Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 9-5
Tuesday, Thursday, 9-4:30
Ruffin Hall
Closing Receptions & Film Screenings
Fridays: April 5 | April 12 | April 19 | April 26 | May 3 | May 10
5:30-7:30 pm
Ruffin Hall Parking available in Culbreth Garage during receptions
April 1–5
Cara Gilroy
June Sturm
April 8–12
Elizabeth Webb
Sarah-Louise Dechow
Luis de Roux
Courtney Springer
Amanda Henry
Elly Taura
Michelle Ross
Joliza Terry
Hannah Brock
Ashley Taylor
April 15–19
Hannah Barefoot
Mitch Oliver
Lauren M. Williams
Alexa Vasiliadis
Jessica Welch
Natalia Data
Anne Allen
Lauren E. Williams
LoVante Battle
April 22–26
Ally Burnett
Rachel Lane
Riley Blanks
Leah Harbour
Laura Price
Emily Macon
Mary Adams Bode
Kiyoko Timmons
Shailagh Kennedy
Evan Howell
Betty Quinn
April 29 – May 3
Felisha Nguyen
Elise Heartwell
Pearl Bickersteth
Caleb Jang
Marisa Adhikusuma
Janne Huang
Susanne Grainger
Thomas Bynum
Mollie Crosby
Zach Naquin
Nicole Shadowen
May 6–10
Elisabeth Hogeman
David Cook
Dana Castner
Lucy Dabney
Lizzy Cole
Victoria Van Kesteren
Alessandra van der Meulen
Roxanne Campbell
Chuqiao Wang
Matthew Butler
Meredith Nelson
David Cook
Elisabeth Hogeman, Vivarium, 2013
Sarah Louise Dechow
Elizabeth Webb, Untitled (Paradise), 2013
Mitch Oliver
Ally Burnett
Reproduction, including downloading of ARS works is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
