FALL 2014 SEP 12 - DEC 28 Amy Cutler Matthew Brandt: Sticky/Dusty/Wet Gabriel Dawe: Plexus 28 ARTlab Kristin Skees: Cozy Up Dale Chihuly: Mille Colori Disposable Film Festival
IDEAS FOR ENJOYING THE GALLERIES Try this looking guide for the young, and young-at-heart, museum visitor. START WITH LOOKING Most works of art do not reveal themselves in just a glance. Try reading the work. Find a point that captures your eye and then move your gaze across and around the work. Try looking from different places (near or far, standing vs. sitting). You ll be surprised by what you can learn just by looking. Parents: You can help model looking by verbalizing where your eyes are moving to and why. ENCOURAGE QUESTIONS Whether visiting with a youngster, friend, or by yourself, it s important to recognize the questions that surface. What are some types of questions you might consider? Try these as you look: Is there a story? What is it? What feeling does this work project? Is there a message or symbolism? Do you get a sense of time or place? Parents: You can incorporate counting, word choice and the 5 senses into your discussion. Try asking: How many do you see? What 3 words describe what s happening? How would this color taste? What might this feel like if you could touch it? TRY ACTIVE LOOKING Imagine you are inside the work of art. Where would you explore? Try standing like something or someone in the piece. You can also make a tiny telescope with your hand (make a circle with your thumb and fingers and look through it). This will help you find details and focus your looking. Parents: This is a great way to make looking fun. Play I Spy. Choose an artwork with lots of details and describe a section to your child. Have them guess where it is. Reverse roles and enjoy! WHEN YOU VE TRIED IT ALL, THEN READ Resist the urge to start with the wall label, and trust your looking. After you ve shared your questions and interpretations, compare your ideas to the wall label. Often, there is additional information you may not have gained just by looking - but you ll be surprised how much you learned on your own. Parents: This is a great opportunity to impart lifelong skills, such as reading and writing. Look for new words and read together!
AMY CUTLER Have you ever been hanging out someplace in public when you heard just a small, but intriguing part of an anecdote or personal story? The details might seem bizarre and yet intriguing. Only parts of the conversation are audible. Your imagination catches fire and you want to know more. But, propriety keeps you from asking the storyteller for the answers. You have to fill in the blanks for yourself, who, what, where and why. This is what looking at artist Amy Cutler s work is like. Amy Cutler, Weavers, 2008, Lithograph in 17 colors on Rives BFK Gray, 34-1/8 x 24-1/8 inches, Edition of 34. Courtesy of the Artist. For well over a decade Cutler has crafted enigmatic narratives with pencil, brush and printing press. Each work is a small world in which remarkable events take place. They contain women with unusual styles of dress and fantastic plot devices. The impulse to reference them as fairy tales makes sense. This however would be a mistake. Although the artworks are illustrative, there are no fairies, princesses, knights or any other archetypes within them. Furthermore, they contain no tidy moral or clear outcome to the challenges at hand. Rather, they spring from the rich imagination of the artist and her relationship with the rest of the world. Perhaps this is why the figures in each of these worlds are almost always women. They seem to live their lives in extraordinary circumstances with a certain amount of aplomb. Although Cutler knows why she created two figures with their heads entwined, you do not. She has left the narrative open ended for you to decide. Amy Cutler, Brood Series, 2011, Gouache on paper, 5-1/2 x 4-3/4 inches each. Titles: (top) Elke, Berta, Lena. Courtesy of the Artist. What is easy to see is the artist s exceptional talent as a draftsman and painter. Cutler s newest work in the exhibition, the portraits from the Brood Series, is a testament to her skill and technique. The portraits began as a period of experimentation with a heavy paper, which the artist had not used before. Using gouache (a water-based paint) Cutler toyed with form and shape that resembled heads and faces to the artist. The need
to create a series of portraits with the paper became manifest. The women, nineteen in all, were born. Any one of them might have sprung from one of Cutler s more narrative works. But, again, they are not telling if they did. Their heads and faces are odd and irregular. Their expressions are exhausted...or perhaps sullen or resigned? They may not know this, but they are the heroes in their own stories. They are beautiful in their imperfection, and so are we. Originally from Poughkeepsie, NY, Amy Cutler lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She studied at Cooper Union and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has exhibited her work both in the United States and internationally including Spain, Denmark, Turkey, Sweden and Finland. Many prestigious institutions have collected her work including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Hammer Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Amy Cutler is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects. MOCA would like to thank both Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects and the artist for their help in realizing this exhibition. MATTHEW BRANDT STICKY/DUSTY/WET Imagine creating a recipe with unlikely ingredients that blend and transform into something completely new, unexpected, and delicious. Matthew Brandt has done just that with his fearless, playful, process driven explorations, pushing and pulling on photography s parameters. In an era of the ubiquitous digital image, he upends the very idea of the medium s core characteristic its reproducibility by making each work unique. Matthew Brandt Sticky/Dusty/ Wet was organized by the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. It is the artist s first museum exhibition and features four of his recent series, all made since 2008. Lakes and Reservoirs Dust Honeybees Taste Tests in Color Brandt intentionally aligns process with subject by folding in surprising elements from the material world lake water, bee bodies, and bubblegum, Matthew Brandt. American Lake, WA D3, 2011, From the series Lakes and Reservoirs, Unique chromogenic print soaked in American Lake water Matthew Brandt, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York and M + B Gallery, Los Angeles Private Collection. to name a few. In addition to investigating seriality and boldly experimenting with print surface, Brandt also is attuned to complex social and environmental issues, which permeate all of his work.
Born, raised, and based in Los Angeles, Brandt received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles and his BFA from Cooper Union in New York City. He has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally and is featured in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, The Columbus Museum of Art, OH and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. Brandt was recently named one of Forbes Top 30 under 30 in art and design. Matthew Brandt is represented by the Yossi Milo Gallery and M + B Gallery. MOCA would like to thank the artist, the Columbus Museum of Art and Catherine Evans for their help in realizing this exhibition. We thank the following collectors who generously lent works to this exhibition: Eleanor Alvarez, Gigi and Sam Fried, Peg Mativi and Donald W. Dick, and Neil Rector, all in Columbus; David Birnbaum in Denver, Colorado; and Yossi Milo Gallery in New York City. A 52-page, full-color catalog published by the Columbus Museum of Art accompanies the exhibition and is available for purchase in the Museum Shop. GABRIEL DAWE: PLEXUS 28 At Virginia MOCA, Gabriel Dawe has created one of his Plexus series of installations, Plexus 28. A plexus can refer to any intricate structure that contains a system of many different elements. The artist uses many miles of colored thread to weave his installations. Dawe manufactured a large needle-like tool to hook and move the thread, which forms patterns that mimic beams of light through a prism. Each installation takes tremendous amounts of time, patience and deliberation. Though the woven thread simulates light, the construction is solid and complex. The result, as you can see, is simply spectacular. Gabriel Dawe. Plexus 28, installation in progress at MOCA. Dawe s installations, drawings and small woven artworks all explore themes regarding the concept of rules and boundaries. Rules define our daily lives and form our world as we know it. Dawe uses creative freedom to explore form, color and test the boundaries that give shape to his work. For example, when making a drawing, the artist begins with a grid and a simple mark repeated at set intervals. He will then change the rules ever so slightly. This might mean a change in the spacing, color or direction of the mark. Each drawing is subject to a slightly different set of rules. The end results are varied and beautiful. Like a kaleidoscope, an infinite number of possibilities present themselves.
In this context, we must consider the validity other rules or systems of conduct that stem from the beliefs of others. Dawe was born and raised in Mexico City, Mexico. He watched his grandmother teach embroidery to his sister. But, because of the machismo belief system found in his native culture, he felt excluded from its rich needlework traditions. As an artist, he broke away from those rules. He makes art using needlework techniques and borrows from the bright palette of color found in Mexican textiles. As we enjoy Plexus 28, our perception shifts both literally and figuratively. The reconfigured gallery architecture dazzles us. In turn, our preconceived ideas about a man with a needle and thread changes as well. Perhaps we will then question other rules and what they prevent us from creating. A native of Mexico City, Gabriel Dawe has exhibited his work throughout the world including the US, Canada, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. He lived in Montreal, Canada for seven years before relocating to Dallas, Texas where he obtained his MFA at the University of Texas. Several publications have featured his work. They include: Sculpture magazine, the cover of the 12th edition of Art Fundamentals published by McGraw-Hill and in author Tristan Manco s book Raw + Material = Art. Gabriel Dawe has representation with Conduit Gallery in Dallas, TX and Lot 10 Gallery in Brussels, Belgium. butler gallery ARTlab Explore the artistic processes shown in MOCA s fall exhibitions. Discover the history of these mediums and all the ways they are used in our everyday lives, then create your own masterpiece to take home with you. community gallery KRISTIN SKEES: COZY UP Kristin Skees, The Bakers, 2012, Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag. Courtesy of the Artist and Mayer Fine Art Gallery. Do the things we own and places we live give clues to who we are? Artists have used clothing, objects and settings in portraits to convey the prestige of the sitter throughout history. Artist Kristin Skees makes use of this tradition in her photographs from the Cozy series. The figures in each portrait stand or sit in an environment that is important to them: a place that they feel at home. Objects (and sometimes pets) surround them and
define them. Expecting mother Kathleen loves her vegetable garden. Brett and Mindi, a very stylish couple, enjoy an equally chic evening cocktail. But of course, we don t really know them. We can t see their faces or know their identities because the artist cozied them. Like the coverings made to keep teapots warm, the cozies envelope the wearers, leaving only legs and feet exposed. Skees knits them herself especially for each sitter. The colors, pattern and embellishments allude to the figures inside, but obscure them as well. Are they comforted or smothered? This tension is at the heart of each piece. Like the cozies, at what point do our comfort zones change from snug and secure to binding and oppressive? Kristin Smith Skees was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. She has a BFA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, a MFA from the University of Arizona, and a MLIS from the University of Alabama. She works in a variety of media, including digital photography, experimental fibers, digital video and installation, and shows her work nationally and internationally. Kristin Skees teaches in the Department of Fine Art and Art History at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Virginia MOCA would like to thank the artist and Mayer Fine Art Gallery for their help in realizing this exhibition. rodriguez pavilion DALE CHIHULY: MILLE COLORI Suspended from the ceiling, this colorful work of art by artist Dale Chihuly was originally part of an exhibition where 15 of these enormous chandeliers were placed under bridges and across Venetian canals as a tribute to the biennale Aperto Vetro. Measuring 14 feet tall by eight feet wide, the chandelier is made up of 520 blown glass objects attached to a metal frame called an armature. You might notice shapes that remind you of horns, split leaves, water drops, or goosenecks the same names the artist uses to identify each one. These shapes weave in and out, and together they form one large cone shape extending downward to a point barely above visitors heads. Even though most of the chandelier is made of hollow glass, the final work weighs over 2,000 pounds! Dale Chihuly, Mille Colori, 2003.
price auditorium THE DISPOSABLE FILM FESTIVAL MOCA is pleased to present this festival as part of its fall exhibition schedule. Selected by MovieMaker Magazine as one America s coolest film festivals, The Disposable Film Festival (created in 2007) is a juried competition where artist create works using everyday equipment. Cell phones, pocket cameras and other inexpensive devices are used to explore and celebrate the creative potential of short films. Loops daily in Price Auditorium during exhibition hours. All the films presented are under 10 minutes. The films are shown in the order listed with special considerations noted. Includes strong language and adult situations. COVER: (L to R) Matthew Brandt, Sylvan Lake, SD 3, 2012. From the series Lakes and Reservoirs. Unique chromogenic print soaked in Sylvan Lake water. Matthew Brandt, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York and M + B Gallery, Los Angeles. Collection Columbus Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, Howald Fund and Westwater Fund Amy Cutler, Ingrid, 2011, Gouache on paper, 13 x 10-1/2 inches Amy Cutler, courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York Gabriel Dawe, Installation in progress at the National Centre for Craft and Design, United Kingdom. Courtesy of the Artist. PRESENTING EXECUTIVE PATRON partners in the arts grants SUPPORTING CONTRIBUTING John and Beth Overton - The Capital Group Companies Bill and Uschi Butler Rebecca Robinson Mrs. Lois Turnbull ADDITIONAL SUPPORT Howard J. Rodman BCF - Boom Your Brand The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art is funded in part by the citizens of Virginia Beach through a grant from the City of Virginia Beach Arts & Humanities Commission, and by the Virginia Commission for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Business Consortium for Arts Support and Hampton Roads Community Foundation. why not join? 2200 PARKS AVENUE VIRGINIA BEACH, VA 23451 757-425-0000 www.virginiamoca.org