Deep Flash: On Art and Transformation

September 5 – October 14, 2018

Gibbs Street Gallery | Kaplan Gallery | Common Ground Gallery | Concourse Gallery

Opening Reception: Friday, September 7th, 7 – 9 PM

30th Anniversary celebration exhibition


Curators:

Cynthia Connolly, Judy A. Greenberg, Fletcher Mackey, Jacqueline Maria Milad, Jack Rasmussen, Laura Roulet, José Ruiz, Nancy Sausser, Lynn Silverman, sindikit (Zoë Charlton and Tim Doud)

Artists:

Ashley Culver, Frank Hallam Day, Elsabé Dixon, Alex Ebstein, Shané K. Gooding, Stephen Hayes, Christopher K. Ho, James Huckenpahler, Jean Jinho Kim, Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Guy Miller, Evan Reed, Allan Rosenbaum, Rachel Rotenberg, Foon Sham, Joe Shannon, Chad Stayrook, Hillary Steel, Judit Varga, Elizabeth Zvonar, bees, The Punk Rock Flyer and Zines (from the archives of Cynthia Connolly, Dischord Records at the University of Maryland at College Park).

In celebration of its 30th Anniversary, VisArts presents an exhibition in four galleries that explores the power of visual art to transform. Eleven curators selected a single work of art, a small curated group of artworks by multiple artists, or an art experience that addresses art’s ability to shift social, cultural, or personal forms. This exhibition was created in the spirit of sharing experiences and opening conversations about the “work” of art as a spark or trigger for conversions spectacular and subtle in both makers and viewers.


SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Opening Reception, Friday, September 7th, 7 – 9 PM

Docent Tours of the exhibition
Weekly public tours on Saturdays and Sundays at 1 PM in all galleries.
Schedule a private tour for your group during our gallery hours. To schedule your tour please complete and submit the tour request form.

DIY-Punk Rock Fliers and Zines: Concourse Gallery (2nd floor), during regular gallery hours.DIY-flyer and zine-making table with instructions in a take-away zine by John Davis, publisher of Slanted zine, musician and the Performing Arts Meta Archivist at Special Collections in Performing Arts (SCPA), University of Maryland at College Park.

Performance and workshop: The Girl Who Stepped on Bread: Gibbs Street Gallery (1st floor), Friday, October 5, 2 PM – 6 PM, Saturday, October 6, 10 AM – 12 PM.Elsabé Dixon focuses on honey, pollinators and bread. Baking and beekeeping are not only ancient spiritual/sacred crafts, but they are also the last frontier in a world that faces increasing food deserts because of pesticide and GMO contamination. Participants will witness a 10-minute performance and participate in three actions involving bread, agriculture and art. To register for a one-hour action with the artist in this guided workshop, register here: www.bit.ly/2NWa8bm

Pollination Panel Discussion: Sunday, October 7, 1:00 – 3:00 PM, Beall-Dawson House, 42 West Middle Lane, Rockville, Maryland (walking distance from VisArts). Discussion on beekeeping, pollination, and the intersection of living systems with art. Special guests to be announced. Parking available on the street and in a small nearby parking lot.

Deep Flash: On Art and Transformation: Digital catalog available for download or print copies. Essays on art and transformation by all guest curators.
To read the full catalog: HERE
To purchase your own copy: HERE

Deep Flash Panel Discussion with Curators and Artists: All galleries, Sunday, September 16, 2:00 PM. Curators and artists discuss the resonance of an art experience.

Inside Art Transformational Art Experiences
Were you transformed by art? How? When? Where? Tell us your story. Instructions for submitting your story: |https://www.visartscenter.org/event/deep-flash-on-art-and-transformation/|HERE


Exhibitions and events are always free and open to the public. Suggested Donation is $5.00.

Questioning Power featuring Esteban del Valle (installation pictured above), Shané K. Gooding, Estefaní Mercedes, Antoine Williams

February 24 - March 26, 2017
Gibbs Street | Kaplan | Common Ground | Concourse Galleries, VisArts

Curated by Susan Main, Frank McCauley


Contemporary artists are particularly effective at igniting discussion, stimulating debate, and grappling with rapidly shifting cultural conditions. Given the intensity of the current socio-political climate, VisArts presents four solo exhibitions, music, performance, and participatory events that question the dynamics of power. The featured artists shed light on the relations of power that shape identity, perception, leadership, and action. With thoughtful urgency and diverse means, they are meeting the challenge of the times and opening up space for dialogue.

Esteban del Valle uses a mix of painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and political cartoon exhibition to grapple with the push and pull of power. Del Valle amps up the scale of his work to monumental, wall sized narratives where politics unfold in everyday life. Smaller mixed media paintings reference hot button issues and attitudes that continue to reverberate from the past U.S. presidential election: migration, displacement, drama, bad manners, lies, and vitriol. Vibrant, acidic color and dripping paint engulf, dissolve, and bind characters in shallow settings packed with symbolism. Del Valle presses his characters into claustrophobic frames where they shout, grimace, and point fingers. Politics and iconic American rituals from Thanksgiving to TV dinners to home improvement merge in an unsettling blend of nostalgia, historical amnesia, and emotion. Home sweet home is a hot mess.

In a mixed-media installation of paintings, drawings, and collage, Antoine Williams creates a mythology of loosely autobiographical humanoid beings that personify the complexities of perception in relation to race, class, and masculinity. His art practice investigates how the use, repetition, and reproduction of words, expressions, and images relate to cultural and institutional benefits and inequities. The signs that interest Williams are associated with the Black body within the American psyche. Inspired by the Amiri Baraka poem “Something in the Way of Things”, the beings he creates live in the intangible spaces that exist between the nuances of class and race. They are both born of and perpetuate the actions and thought processes due to social reproduction. They exist in an abstracted purgatory.

Estefaní Mercedes proves that even failed attempts to send messages to “the powerful” can offer perspective on political and social dominance. Through ethical imagining, ornamental activism, speculative poetics, and radical gift giving, Estefaní Mercedes stages public interventions. In her solo exhibition at VisArts, Mercedes re-presents through video and photography her recent performance, 1,000 Yellow Dahlias. This performance involved Mercedes’ attempt to deliver “thank you notes” from 1,000 different immigrants in New York City to Trump Tower. The performance went viral and was picked up by both the right wing media and Latin American art newspapers.

Shané K. Gooding’s To See or Not to See is a three channel video, that pokes at the hyper-visibility of Black men as a collective and at the same time the invisibility of Black men as individuals in American society. The project primarily follows four separate men- Jonathan Davis, Paul Henry Foote, Frankiem Mitchell, and Bruce Wilson. In conjunction with “video gazes” there are vignettes of documentary footage that share the day-to-day lives of the men and offer a piece of their journey, their truth, their visibility, and their individuality.

HAPPY NOT SAPPY
December 10 – January 18, 2015
Kaplan Gallery (2nd floor), VisArts

Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Friday, December 12, 7 – 9 p.m.
Artist Roundtable: Happiness and Contemporary Art, Sunday, January 11, 2:00 p.m.

(Exhibition and reception is free and open to the public)

Rockville, MD- What role does happiness play in contemporary art? Is it hard to make artwork that is happy without sentiment or nostalgia? Eight artists bring a mix of exuberance, independence, irreverence, and play to artworks and the practice of making art. They open a conversation about the qualities of happiness, sappiness and their relationship to contemporary art and culture.

Featuring: Kelley Bell, Amy Boone-McCreesh, Bonnie Crawford Kotula, David Krueger, Fabienne Lasserre, Margo Malter, Nick Peelor, Stewart Watson.

Curated by Susan Main.

speed and pressure

May 22 - July 27, 2013
Kaplan Gallery, VisArts

VisArts presents a group exhibition that examines how speed and pressure shape contemporary drawing as an activity and an idea. Ranging from traditional, observational drawing to expanded notions of drawing using algorithmic processes, the artists in this exhibition have in common an engagement with drawing as a primary activity or as the central focus of their creative inquiry.
Lines and marks comprise the core of the exhibition. Tying speed and pressure qualitatively to essential drawing elements, materials and processes, yields an extraordinary array of possibilities.

“________scape"

June 1 – August 10
Kaplan Gallery, VisArts

Slipping a variety of words into the blank of “_____scape”, artists investigate the semantic origins of landscape as a condition, shape or idea rather than the depiction of scenery. Skinscapes, Airscapes, and Interscapes are among the paintings, drawings and photographs on view.

Featuring the work of: John M. Adams, Sabine Carlson, Michael Farrell, Heidi Fowler, Lisa Kellner, Karey Kessler, Kim Manfredi, Steven Pearson, Rachel Sitkin, Theo Willis and Elena Volkova.

image caption: Rachel Sitkin,"Berkely Pit", acrylic on canvas

FIELD WORK
March 8 – April 14

VisArts
Gibbs Street and Kaplan Galleries
Opening Reception: March 9, 7 – 9 p.m

Featured Artists: Dan Allende, Ian Cox, Selin Balci, Lynn Cazabon, Patterson Clark, Margaret Boozer, J.J. McCracken, Hugh Pocock and Jackson Martin.

How do smoke signals, dead grass, weeds, and hungry microbes contribute to a conversation surrounding sustainability? Does meeting for a picnic in twenty years have anything to do with a long-term plan for a balanced relationship between human life and the natural environment? Can artists serve as effective messengers and advocates for sustainable issues?

The nine artists in the VisArts exhibition FIELD WORK propose that sensitive observation and simple questions might be the first steps toward identifying what is valuable and how to sustain it. Working individually or collaboratively, the artists direct attention toward the obvious, but often taken-for-granted, natural world. They create participatory installations that investigate the relationships between community, resources, sustainability and art.

FIELD WORK Events Include:

Panel Discussion: March 24, 2:00–3:30 p.m. Artists, scientists, community sustainability promoters, and farmers discuss the relationship between community, resources, sustainability and art. (free)

F.E.A.S.T. at VisArts: March 24, 7:00–10:30 p.m. Dinner designed to use community-driven financial support to democratically fund new and emerging art makers. Theme: Sustainability. (Tickets- $30 at FEAST)

Hands-on workshops include: “Prospecting for Materials from Invasive Plants” on Saturday, April 14 from 1:00–4:00 p.m. Artist Patterson Clark leads an exploration of papermaking using local weeds (suggested donation: $10). More workshop info at: http://www.visartscenter.org.

image caption: Jackson Martin, mixed media installation