FOR IMMEDATE RELEASE

THINGS THAT APPEAR: WILLIAM WYLIE AND IN-SITE: TOM ADAIR AT THE PAGE BOND GALLERY, FRIDAY, APRIL 7, 2017

Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present THINGS THAT APPEAR: WILLIAM WYLIE and IN-SITE: TOM ADAIR opening Friday, April 7, 6 to 8 PM. The exhibitions will run April 7 to April 29, 2017.

For over thirty years William Wylie’s photography has focused on the specifics of place. He has looked for the instances, both physical and psychological, that define associations with a particular landscape and the history it represents. His current exhibition, Things That Appear, turns inward to personal history and the studio space.

Wylie uses his pending sixtieth birthday (occurring during the run of the exhibition) to develop this new body of work by improvising on the form of the vanitas, a historical genre containing symbols of death or change as a reminder of the fleeting nature of life. Working with studio detritus from decades of obsessive collecting, Wylie eschews his usual sense of scale and space for the confines of small, well-lit room and the objects he keeps there to create a deeply personal series.

Wylie studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI and Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, CO. His work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at venues such as the University of Virginia Art Museum, Charlottesville, VA and Foiano Fotografia III, Foiano, Italy. He work is in numerous collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Tom Adair is a Richmond based artist known for his performance, drawings, and conceptual work. For In-Site, the artist will create an installation in the gallery that challenges the traditional exhibition format of artwork, frame, and artistically neutral wall space. Adair has created site specific works in exterior and interior architectural spaces, using the concept of the frame as the work itself. In these pieces he transforms the two-dimensionality of the frame into three-dimensional simplified geometric forms that recontextualize and respond to their environments. By using the frame as an independently valid compositional form rather than merely a physical delineation between the “art” and the surrounding “non-art,” Adair collapses preconceived notions of art, exhibition, and gallery spaces.

Adair studied at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN and Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI. He has exhibited internationally with solo exhibitions across the US and in Canada. Adair is a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University teaching in the Art Foundation Program, Photography and Film Departments, Painting and Printmaking, the University HONORS Program, and VCU-Q in Doha, Qatar.