SCORCH: A Summer Group Exhibition at Page Bond Gallery Thursday, July 10, 6-8pm.
The Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present SCORCH, a summer group exhibition featuring work by Isabelle Abbot, Chris Baer, Steve Bickley, Fred Crist, Dragana Crnjak, Michael Kindred Knight, Anna Queen, Fiona Ross, Mary Scurlock, Alyssa Salomon, Sayaka Suzuki, and Erling Sjovold. The Exhibition will be on view July 10 through August 29, 2014. A reception for the artists will take place Thursday, July 10, 2014 from 6 to 8 PM.
Anna Queen is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, ceramics, and digital fabrication. She earned her BFA in ceramics from Maryland Institute College of Art. She teaches at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine and the Vermont Studio Center in Vermont.
Queen’s work shows her interest in the interaction of geometric forms within a space, as well as with one another. For her process, she arranges the same geometric form in multiple places throughout the same space. Her pieces frequently share similar ideas and a wide range of scale. By using the color white to construct her work, Queen allows for subtle light and shadow to reveal form. In her piece, Foam, Queen replicates packaging foam using delicate porcelain, challenging our concept of the traditionally soft material.
A Richmond native, Anna Queen lives and works in Maine.
Originally from Yokohama, Japan, Sayaka Suzuki has spent most of her life in the US and England, and currently resides in Richmond, VA. Suzuki received her BFA in glass sculpture from Tulane University, and her MFA in Craft/Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she now teaches glass casting.
Suzuki is well known for her unconventional depictions of nature. Her recent work captures portraits of animals native to Virginia, such as chickens, sheep, lambs, and deer. Looking back at art from the Baroque period, in which animals are depicted in still life paintings and hunting scenes, Suzuki’s paintings reflect her personal fondness for and interactions with wildlife.
Suzuki embroiders the outline of each animal onto the surface of ordinary drywall. Just as artists throughout history have used fabric as symbols of status, Suzuki frequently places her animals in front of ornately painted patterns from Japanese kimonos, Sashiko, or Chiyogami .
Suzuki’s work has been exhibited nationally, in Washington, DC, Maryland, Florida, Arizona and regionally at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, in Virginia Beach, VA
Erling Sjovold, a native of Southern California, earned his BA from the University of California Berkeley and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He currently teaches painting and drawing at the University of Richmond.
Although Sjovold now resides in Virginia, his work shows the deep influence of camping and backpacking trips he took as a child in California. Through his paintings, Sjovold contemplates the concept of displacement and the unifying properties of light and color. Sjovold’s paintings are constructed by piecing together various spaces from direct observation, memory, abstract invention, and photography. Throughout his process, Sjovold frequently recalls the Heraclitus quote, “No man steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” He explores the paradoxes of situation and identity through paint.
Sjovold’s work is included in many public and private collections and has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, New Zealand, as well as locally at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Brug Mania: Photographs by Willie Anne Wright will also remain on view through August 29, 2014.
First trained as a painter, Willie Anne Wright has been practicing pinhole photography for over 40 years. Her ethereal, evocative images often combine disparate subjects and photography methods from the last 150 years. Much of her work draws inspiration from 19th century photographs and the continual interplay of past and present. “When I was a teenager,” she tells us, “an elderly relative gave me a series of five albumen prints of a group of young people enjoying a day in the country in the late 1880s. My father (who was 50 when I was born) was a young child looking on at his elders in several of the photographs. Something about the past and present being a continuum and even interfacing fascinated me.” The “lensless” technology of the pinhole is the oldest photography process; Leonardo described the principle of the camera obscura in his notebooks. Wright’s Brug Mania series incorporates another antique process: lumen printing, in which objects are laid on light-sensitive paper and printed by direct exposure to the sun. In this new body of work, she combines stunningly detailed lumen prints of the Brugmansia blossoms with pinhole photographs and images from her collection of anonymous vintage albums. In Willie Anne Wright’s work, time is not linear but circular; people and objects from different eras meet and coexist on the page. Past and present are given equal weight and are simultaneously made available to the viewer, and Wright seems to have the unique ability to access all of these moments at once.
