Rachel Hutcheson

Jarod Charzewski: Rat’s Nest

duPont Gallery

September 3- October 11, 2015

Opening Reception: September 3, 5-7pm

Jarod Charzewski creates large scale installations of everyday items that are collected from the community in which the artwork is created. The accumulations have included varied materials, such as buoys and denim jeans, and now cables. These installations make evident the desire and pleasure we have in collection that then manifests into compulsion. Charzewski holds a BFA in sculpture from the University of Manitoba, Winnepeg, Canada, an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Minnesota. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.

Artist Statement: My installations are designed to evoke a viewer’s inherent connection to preservation by exploring objects and their ability to be tethered to attachments and the resulting compulsions. These collections of objects and the attention that is placed on arrangement mirror the installations created in our everyday lives through the inability to throw things away. My work investigates the transferring of animate sentiments to inanimate objects. The value put on objects that we humanistically continue to collect give us pleasure. That pleasure gives comfort and that comfort lends itself to compulsion.

 

Opening Reception

 

The World as We Know It

Andy Holtin + Galo Moncayo

Ridderhof Martin Gallery

May 21- July 30, 2015

Opening Reception: May 21, 5-7pm

Andy Holtin and Galo Moncayo, working together as CausalityLabs, create works that explore the nature of the world through a kind of mechanical theatre with humor and mimicry. Their collective works dig into materials and events to get at our notions of meaning, sequence and cause and effect. Holtin is a professor of sculpture at American University. Moncayo is currently a member of the Studio Hadid master class at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, Austria.

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Art History Forum

Friday, April 24, 2015

1-3PM

Ridderhof Martin Gallery

The UMW Galleries will participate in the campus-wide event, Research and Creativity Day, by hosting presentations and panel discussions by Art History students. The event will have an intermission with light refreshments. It is free and open to the public.

 

Annual Student Art Exhibition

duPont Gallery

April 8- April 26, 2015

Opening Reception: April 8, 4-6PM

Juried by Tosha Grantham

JUROR BIO: Grantham is the Curator of 2nd St. Gallery in Charlottesville Virginia, Tosha Grantham. Grantham earned a B.A. in art history from Georgetown University, a M.A. in art history from Howard University, and is a Ph.D candidate in art history in the Department of Art History and Archeology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Grantham was the David C. Driskell Fellow in Museum Studies at the Walters Art Museum (2006) and the Department of Art History and Archeology Museum Fellow at the Walters Art Museum (2007) along with several other accolades during her work as an artist, curator, adjunct professor, and museum educator.

Award Winners

Emil R. Schnellock Award for Excellence in Painting: Peggy Childers by Marie (Ria) Firth

Anne Elizabeth Collins Memorial Art Award: June Beach by Kristie Smith

Melchers Gray Purchase Award in Studio Art: A Lawful Order by Taylor White

Award in Excellence: Untitled V by Christine Valvo

Award in Excellence: Crow by Maddox Palmer

Award in Excellence: Grimm Series by Ashley Most

 Exhibition Opening Reception:

Exhibition Photos

Lily Cox-Richard: The Stand (Possessing Powers)

Ridderhof Martin Gallery
March 18- May 3
Reception: March 18, 5-7pm

Artist’s Talk: March 19, 4-5pm

Lily Cox-Richard is an award winning artist who earned her MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia and her BFA in Jewelry/Metal Arts at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California. Cox-Richards won the Smithsonian Artist in Research Fellowship (2012), she was the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, Ann Arbor, MI (2012-2013), and  received the Faculty Seed Grant from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan (2012).
Her exhibition, The Stand (Possessing Powers), is a set of sculptures that reference Neoclassical sculptor Hiram Powers’ great works. Powers created sculptures that emphasized the beauty of the physical body. Cox-Richard recreates the stands that these sculptures were placed on to emphasize how the stands themselves accent and amplify the sculptures. Some of Powers’ pieces that Cox-Richard re-creates  include The Greek Slave, The Last of the Tribes, and Eve Tempted.

Artist Statement

In The Stand (Possessing Powers) , I explore the history of sculpture as it relates to the myths and allegories used to promote American national and artistic identity in the 19th century. I am creating a series of sculptures based on works by the American neoclassical sculptor, Hiram Powers. In his works, idealized female figures symbolize allegorical themes. Further reducing subtractive sculpture, I am recarving these works without the figures, focusing on the elements that structurally support the figure. By co-opting Powers’ works and making them my own, I aim to complicate the gender and implicit sexuality of both sculpture and sculptor. Reduced to their structural supports, my carved plaster sculptures are both originals and copies, homage and critique, familiar and strange, created in an attempt to see what new content might be revealed when the figure is removed, and how this work can be transformed when it is reimagined through a contemporary sculpture practice.

Exhibition Opening: