Art Features


Culture- ART FEATURE- In sync: Coffey and Wostrel play well together Published on Mar 1st, 2007 0 comments Atop a pedestal in the back of Richmond's 1708 Gallery, a hemisphere of bone-colored porcelain cones blooms— points in, open mouths out— resembling a deep-sea coral formation or perhaps...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Eye opening: Local artists reach 0ut Published on Feb 22nd, 2007 0 comments "Free your mind and the rest will follow." En Vogue was referring to eradicating prejudice, but the lyric looped through my mind in a different context while viewing "Beyond the Bars," an exhibition...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Inner view: Vorlet gets personal Published on Feb 15th, 2007 0 comments In order to put food on the table and kibble in the dog bowl, many creative types– from architects to freelance writers– spend much of their time churning out work for hire. But what do...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Strange fruit: Lydia Moyer's southern exposure Published on Feb 8th, 2007 0 comments The first time I heard the song "Strange Fruit," it was UB40's reggae version, and, although I felt the melancholy of its minor key, I somehow missed the lyrics. Later I listened to Billy Holiday's...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Ars publica: Revolutionary book art Published on Feb 1st, 2007 1 comments This past fall, the University of Virginia Art Museum hosted "Regeneration," an exhibition exploring work by contemporary Chinese artists who grew up under the anti-intellectual strictures of the...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Praiseworthy: PVCC offers artful altars Published on Jan 25th, 2007 0 comments Last week Piedmont Virginia Community College's John Hancock stopped me on the stairs in the McGuffey Art Center to gush about how I was really going to enjoy PVCC's just-opened group show, "Little...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Party art: Kickin' events bring art to life Published on Dec 21st, 2006 0 comments IN THIS WEEK (0551) under ART FOR ART FEATURE Slaughter Recognized with "Terra Incognita": Second Street Gallery and Les Yeux du Monde put their walls together in March and April for an extensive...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Modern dreaming: Eye-opening Aboriginal art Published on Dec 14th, 2006 1 comments It never fails. Every time I write about the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, someone asks me, "Where's that?" After explaining how to reach the museum's Pantops location (turn right after the...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Artist gone girly: Jamison flowers at SSG Published on Dec 7th, 2006 0 comments "So many artists I know have a dead animal collection in their freezer"— not a sentence I expected to hear from painter Susan Jamison, whose ultra-feminine exhibition, "Full Bloom," is...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Revolution's children: Chinese art's eastern edge Published on Nov 30th, 2006 0 comments Imagine the police shutting down the University of Virginia and jailing its professors simply for being intellectuals. Think of soldiers ransacking the McGuffey Art Center and ordering its residents...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Masculine nature: Whetstone's southern exposures Published on Nov 16th, 2006 0 comments On a recent Wednesday afternoon, photographer Jeff Whetstone told a rapt audience about the time he nervously took his large-format camera to a creek near his Tennessee hometown. He knew he was...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Inside eye: Crawford's studio studies Published on Nov 9th, 2006 0 comments Ever since her art school days, painter Elizabeth Crawford has harbored a fascination for artists' studios, those intensely personal places where creative inspiration gets pushed into the physical...
Culture- ART FEATURE- America the beautiful? Free-for-all at PVCC Published on Nov 2nd, 2006 0 comments As a young girl growing up during the Vietnam War era, I used to festoon my fake-suede fringed vest with buttons bearing slogans like "Power to the People" and "Question Authority" (I choose not to...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Artistic alchemy: Dass and Witt mix it up Published on Nov 2nd, 2006 1 comments On the wall above the mezzanine at Les Yeux du Monde, a few lines from 19th century poet Friederich Hölderlin's melancholy "Remembrance" set the tone and reveal the origin of "dark light," the...
Culture- ART FEATURE- One shot wonders: Knill's surreal focus<span class="s1"> Published on Nov 2nd, 2006 0 comments When contemplating how to describe the imagination of photographer Joachim Knill, whose work is on view at Migration: A Gallery, all the clichéd adjectives— "fertile," "active," "juicy...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Saved! New footage splices up festival Published on Oct 26th, 2006 0 comments In the old days, film festivals offered the opportunity to view documentaries and short films that otherwise would not flicker across the big screen. But ever since Fahrenheit 9/11 and March of the...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Inner dimensions: UVA artists delve deep Published on Oct 19th, 2006 0 comments Years ago at an oh-so-polite UVA faculty party, professor Farzaneh Milani and I got into a lively discussion about why female genitalia weren't more lavishly celebrated in art. A male faculty member...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Rock of ages: Wylie gets stoned at SSG Published on Oct 12th, 2006 1 comments Although I forget why I missed photographer William Wylie's 2002 University of Virginia Art Museum exhibition, "Stillwater," I remember the first time I saw an image from that black-and-white series...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Re-vision: McLeod's Cezanne makeovers Published on Oct 5th, 2006 0 comments Visually quoting other artists is an established art tradition. Appropriating a known image not only pays homage to the original source but also pulls viewers into the new work by forcing them to...
Culture- ART FEATURE- </span>Cultural consumption: Art world collides with worldly art<span class="s1"> Published on Sep 28th, 2006 0 comments "Joyous!" The word kept leaping to mind as I wandered through "Complicit! Contemporary Art and Mass Culture" at the University of Virginia Art Museum. Although the exhibition comes with a hefty...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Creative evolution: Watching two artists push forward Published on Sep 21st, 2006 0 comments One benefit of living in a place as small as Charlottesville is practically being able to look over the shoulders of local artists as they work through visual problems and take tried-and-true ideas...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Mind games: Gaskell's missing memories Published on Sep 14th, 2006 0 comments The "unreliable narrator" is a device employed by filmmakers and writers involving a character who reveals key information about a past event— but from a skewed perspective that fails to...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Wax works: Saunders layers it on Published on Sep 7th, 2006 0 comments Over the past few years, I've compiled a mental list of local artists whose work I'd like to own if my ship ever comes in (alas, I'm pretty sure it sank). The list is shorter than you might think,...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Sinister angels: Chambers' unreal photography Published on Aug 31st, 2006 0 comments It didn't surprise me when photographer and digital artist Tom Chambers mentioned how much he likes the ultra-creepy 1973 film, Don't Look Now. "I think books and movies influence me more than other...
Culture- ART FEATURE- <b>Dignity reclaimed: Shepherd's beautiful N.O. abyss</b> Published on Aug 24th, 2006 0 comments While viewing John Shepherd's wrenchingly beautiful black-and-white photographs of New Orleans, collected in the Mudhouse exhibition, "The Aftermath of Katrina," I recalled a book from my publishing...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Beast-ly art: Howe goes hog wild Published on Aug 17th, 2006 0 comments If you're counting the days until the movie version of Charlotte's Web hits the multiplex next December, good news! You can get your farm-animal fix (no, not that kind of fix— get your mind...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Retro-vision: Looking back with the Lees Published on Aug 10th, 2006 0 comments "Can an object or a fact exist out of time and still be up to date?"asks painter David Lee in an essay that accompanied his work in the 1966 Guggenheim exhibition, "Systemic Painting." My response is...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Ix-travaganza: Wunderbar Wunderkammer Published on Jul 27th, 2006 0 comments If strange words begin to recur in your life, take notice. This past winter artist Rosamond Casey recommended I read Lawrence Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, in which the author discusses...
Culture- ART FEATURE- <b>Partial disclosure: Snyder's fascinating revelations</b> Published on Jul 20th, 2006 0 comments The smell of honeysuckle suffuses my memories of childhood summers, along with the buzzing crescendo of cicadas and the sight of trees enveloped in tan gauzy webs. Caterpillar trees. They fascinated...
Culture- ART FEATURE- Here's the dirt: 1708's earthy installations Published on Jul 13th, 2006 0 comments Although the recent downpours– and my flooded basement– have extinguished the alarm of impending drought, I was again thinking about water, fertility, and the lack thereof as I drank in...