1708 Gallery

Britta Bielak, UVA: Artist Statement

I’ve been in competition with memory since the first pauses of my late adolescence; muted by my mind’s absences, waiting helplessly for the recollections to surface. My elusive memories estranged me from my own life. A body of exasperation, research, and experimentation, my work confronts my nostalgia for this loss of control.

I had to find new ways to thrive in my ongoing rivalry with memory, and called on my senses for reinforcement. As active participants in years of collecting and storing memory, my sensory stockrooms gave me more wholesome ways of remembering. My recent work sprouted with buttery and cracked textures, stenches, and melodies as my memory fragments grew into monumental sculptural spaces. People engaged my singing headpieces and watched me curling my body across the floor, pulling my sculptures through the air. Senses stimulated, there was greater yet still insufficient resolution; everyone was mourning all we surrender to memory.

Refusing to embrace memory’s inevitable fracturing and continual decay, my current work transcends the truncation of both mental and sensory memories. Including hair, earlobes, and the skin of our elbows, these body sites are passive in the moments of living. Termed “dead sites,” by their lack of cellular growth, independent movement, or sensory reception, these witnesses have records of living that can be trusted to fill mind-memories with accuracy and richness.

Exposing these “dead sites,” drawing their warehouses of observation to the body’s surface for release; this is my art practice. Onion membranes, rinds, and nutshells are harvested and morphed into incubators. Isolating each “dead site,” these petite incubators revive and hatch the memory collections inside. Here poetry and innovation merge, making my sculptures simultaneously specimens of science and child-like imagination. This innocence and candidness of my incubators offers a new approach and solution to our natural human voids and imperfections: rather than rely on the inadequacy of medicating symptoms in my synthetic habitat, my practice provides a potentially nature-healing-nature triumph over memory.

The work of Tim Hawkinson, Lee Bontecou, and Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days, challenge and inform the imagery and conceptual processing of memory in my work. Their perceptions and appropriations of nature and humanness into their art help charge the penetration of memory in my drawings, incubators, and interactive sculptures. Throughout my practice, my work evades vulnerable submission to these innate mental voids; my work has built a beautiful home in this purgatory as a memory activist.

Britta Bielak participated in October 14th’s Graduate Artist Invitational Forum at 1708 Gallery.
You can see reviews and more work here.
Participate in the comments section to continue the critical dialogue started at the Forum.

Amy Chan, VCU: Artist Statement

My paintings portray the “new ecosystems” that are created in America as a result of the close crowding of human development and nature. By pairing big box stores with species of displaced North American mammals or traces of their habitats, my paintings question the American attitude towards nature and suburban sprawl.

The fragmented landmasses that occur frequently in my work are related to my notions of suburban landscape, particularly those of the East Coast. They are crowded areas where homes, wetlands, strip malls and 18th century graveyards all occupy the same space.

My process involves the gathering and implementation of appropriated imagery from a variety of sources. Because my work is essentially about the American landscape, travel and road trips are a large part of my research, along with my continuing interest in logos, architecture, scientific illustration and pattern.

Amy Chan is a graduate student at VCU Painting and Printmaking and participated in October 14th’s Forum at 1708 Gallery.
We hope that our blog viewers will give feedback on the Forum artists work in the comments section and continue the critical dialogue.
You can see more of her art here and here and here.

This week we are featuring the works of some of Virginia’s finest visual arts graduate students. who participated in 1708 Gallery’s Forum on October 14th. Professor Carole Garmon, from the University of Mary Washington, and N. Elizabeth Schlatter, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions at University of Richmond Museums were our guest critics and moderators for the event.
Amanda Sauer, a VCU Photo MFA candidate, was nominated by her department chair to this year’s Forum. Along with 7 other graduate visual artists, she presented her work at 1708 and will participate in a group show at Capital One.
We hope that our blog visitors will continue the discourse started at the Forum and will give the artists feedback on their work in the comments.

Amanda Sauer‘s artist statement: I explore areas around my home in Richmond to discover places where something a little magical might occur, even if only in the reaction of light and film inside the camera. In many of my photographs, I set up the camera in an interesting location and simply wait for something to happen. I collect and use my images to construct a series where, both individually and together, the photographs begin to suggest a narrative. My stories are always deeply rooted in the relationship between humans and the natural world. Nature plays many roles in my work; she is a stage for people’s dramas, an imagined realm, a source of wonder, a cage, a controlled and artificial environment, or even a myth. Together my photographs tell of a journey in search of a perfect place that, of course, can never be reached.

1708 Gallery is pleased to present the graduate student FORUM on October 14th, beginning at 5pm at 1708 Gallery. This year, for the first time, the event will be open to the public.

The Virginia Invitational Forum for Art Students (THE FORUM) is a newly expanded semi-annual invitational for graduate and undergraduate art students from Virginia¹s colleges and universities. Students are nominated by their departments and invited to present their most recent work for critique by their peers, professional artists, curators and community members.

THE FORUM on October 14, will feature nominated students from James Madison University, University of Virginia, and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Participating students include:
From UVA: Maggie Sullivan and Britta Bielak
From JMU: Dave Bascom and Daniel Robinson
From VCU: Painting and Printmaking: Amy Chan and Valerie Molnar
From VCU: Photography: Amanda Sauer and Vita Litvak.

THE FORUM seeks to honor emerging artists with the opportunity to engage in critical art dialogue with members of the art community. This promises to be an extraordinary slide show and discussion where each student will show work and speak about processes and influences. This year¹s event will be moderated by Professor Carole Garmon from the University of Mary Washington and by N. Elizabeth Schlatter, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions, University of Richmond Museums. Ms. Garmon is a practicing artist who helped start the Slide Slam tradition that grew into THE FORUM. Ms. Schlatter will co-curate the exhibition Plane Text at 1708 Gallery in June-July 2007.

1708 Gallery is especially pleased to offer this year¹s FORUM students a group show at
Capital One Headquarters in Richmond, Virginia. This is the first time the gallery has been able to specifically offer FORUM participants the opportunity to be in a show. 1708 is grateful to Capital One for offering this exciting partnership.

1708 Gallery’ Education & Outreach is chaired by Fiona Donaghey Ross.

Click here to see a slide show of 1708 teamwork during the installation of
Craig Wedderspoon’s sculpture.

There is also a new sidebar link under the 1708 Archive (to your left) which can be updated regularly with photos that document 1708′s teamwork, volunteers and members.

über wearable art 9

3 things you need to know!

1. ENTRY DEADLINE EXTENDED
The deadline for entry submission has been extended to Friday, October 20th.
Please use the attached entry form to send us your Uber ideas.
The Jury Session is scheduled for Wednesday, October 25th, at 5:30 p.m. at VCU’s
Fishbowl -Room 301, 1000 West Broad Street (3rd floor.)
2. ENTRY FEE UNDERWRITTEN
Due to the gracious generosity of several donors, the entry fee has been
underwritten for student entries to this year’s event. Students who have
already submitted entries will be credited. Please contact the gallery at
804/643-1708 for further information.

3. IMPORTANT DATES
October 20th: Entries due to 1708 Gallery
October 25th: Jury Session at VCU Fish Bowl
October 27th: Students notified about participation
November 1: Dress Rehearsal at The Valentine Museum
November 11: Wearable 9

We look forward to hearing from you over the next several weeks and meeting
you at the Jury Session on October 25th. Best of luck on your creative
journeys.

Vaughn Garland Says: YOUR VOTES COUNT!

The 2006 Richmond Outdoor Sculpture exhibition has added

a new twist to this year’s event!

Our panel has met.

We started with seventeen sculptures and narrowed it down to three sculptures.
This outdoor exhibition is done for the community, so this year we decided it should be the community who decides this year’s winner of the

2006 Richmond Outdoor Sculpture exhibition.

All you have to do is go to

www.richmondoutdoorsculpture.blogspot.com

to cast your vote.

Select one sculpture from the three listed
and tell us who should be this year’s winner.
You have until October 15, 2006 to cast your vote.
The selected artist of the 2006 Richmond Outdoor Sculpture exhibition receives a solo show at artspace in the main gallery in 2007.
Let us know which sculpture you think is the strongest and why.

1708 Gallery opens the windows to large sculptures!

Two of sculptor Craig Wedderspoon’s pieces needed to come through the gallery’s front window because they were too big for any of our doors. Richmond Glass removed the glass, ten people helped bring in one 1000 pound sculpture (!!) and another aluminum piece.
At the same time, our neighbors at Quirk had a lift out in front of their gallery putting a “tree sweater” on their tree. Things are happening on our block. Weird, graceful and dangerous things. And that is why we are here.
Craig will exhibit three pieces of sculpture on the gallery’s floor, Eleanor Rufty will have the walls, and together the work has a vibrant elegance that you will just have to experience in person…
The opening is on Friday. See you there.

Drawings: Eleanor Rufty – Large Drawings
Bent: Craig Wedderspoon- Large Sculpture

OPENING: Friday, October 6, from 7-10pm
OCTOBER 6 – NOVEMBER 8, 2006

Eleanor Rufty’s large-scale drawings are based on fictional figurative imagery set in an elusive interior space, a motif consistent in Rufty’s work since 1980. Drawing from memory, Rufty explores the nature of visual memory; it is gradual, amorphous and fallible. Rufty’s charcoal drawings emphasize the linear element. Lines are made directly and repeatedly, establishing a mood derived through erasure.

The sculpture of Craig Wedderspoon is a cycle of asking and discovering solutions to a problem. Wedderspoon’s sculpture is activated with the dialogue of visual problem solving. His work represents a visual philosophy, constantly issuing aesthetic challenges toward interpretation, perspective, and approach.

Craig Wedderspoon, Shimmy (above)

Eleanor Rufty, Untitled No. 93 (right)