Congratulations to alums MJ Sharp, Erin Canady, Chieko Murasugi, Jasper Lee, Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo, and Travis Donovan and current MFA student Chloe Rager, who make up 15% of the artists included in the group show Coined in the South at the Mint Museum in Charlotte. The show will be on view until February 16, 2020.
Congratulations to PhD Candidate Miranda Elston, who was recently awarded the Cerae: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Essay Prize for best essay in Volume 5: Representations and the Recollection of Empire, for her essay “‘Holy Things:’ Dürer’s ‘Feast of the Rosary’ in the Rudolfine Court.”
PhD candidate Carlee Forbes was recently appointed as the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. This multi-year collaborative project will bring together curatorial, conservation, and archival research to explore the museum’s collection of objects donated by the Wellcome Trust in 1965. Sir Henry Wellcome was an American-born British pharmaceutical entrepreneur who used his vast fortune to collect objects from all over the world. When he died, his trust dispersed more than a million objects to various museum collections. The objects now held at the Folwer museum cover a range of provenances, materials, and styles. You can follow Carlee’s progress via weekly #WellcomeWednesdays and #FridayFinds posts to the Fowler’s Instagram (@FowlerMuseum)
Congratulations to Assistant Professor Lien Truong, who has just been awarded a 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. She is one of just 25 artists to receive this prestigious honor. More information can be found here: https://joanmitchellfoundation.org/artist-programs/artist-grants/painter-sculptors/2019/lien-truong
What Remains of the Day – Memories of World War II opens at GreenHill in Greensboro this Friday, September 20, with a reception from 6-8 pm.
On view from September 20-November 15 with many associated programs happening throughout the exhibition.
Also, if you go early, you can also catch MFA Alumna Chieko Murasugi’s solo exhibition No Thing Is Simple at UNCG’s Gatewood Gallery.
Featuring the work of Bill Brown, Jerstin Crosby, Sabine Gruffat, George Jenne, Lindsay Metivier, Alyssa Miserendino, Travis Phillips, Rachele Riley, Derek Toomes, and Louis Watts.
großer Lauscher is made possible with sponsorship from Genelec, ARUP & The Kitchen. Additional support has been provided by an Ella Foundation Pratt Emerging Artists Grant, From the Durham Arts Council, with support from the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resource + a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
ODE TO HEISENBERG + DE MARIA (HDM)
Here is a short excerpt of HDM that includes recorded heartbeats from my community. A big thanks to Quran Karriem & Rebecca Uliasz – both candidates in Duke Unitversity’s Computational Media, Arts & Cultures Ph.D program – who have successfully built an ECG that can locate a visitor’s heartbeat down to a couple centimeters, during the exhibition of this piece.
If you or another are interested in presenting this project, via the health or art community, please reach out.
UNC-Chapel Hill has commissioned me to design and install a mural for the school medicinal garden’s concrete wall. I will be working with transfer students & the garden Club to help design and install the work. We are looking to have the plants create the design, via their electric activity within the garden.
SIXTH ANNUAL ART AUCTION
This annual auction supports the current graduate candidates in studio art at UNC-Chapel Hill. A piece from Resonance will be available for sale, on October 11, 2019.
46 artists from 12 countries collaborated on a Mail Art project that travelled over 66,000 km and was exhibited for the first time in Berlin from 8-20 July 2019 at project space tête.
I am happy to announce my new fiscal sponsor is VAE in Raleigh, North Carolina. Please consider sustaining or making a one time donation towards the projects I create.
Come see work by Alumni Leigh Suggs, Vanessa Murray, Jerstin Crosby, George Jenne, Lindsay Metivier, Alyssa Miserendino, and Louis Watts and studio faculty member Sabine Gruffat at OneOneOne Gallery in Greenbridge in Chapel Hill!
Oneoneone promotes the work of emerging and established contemporary artists in a dynamic gallery space. www.oneoneone.gallery oneoneone@sitzerspuria.com
Free parking – garage entrance from Merritt Mill Rd
Patricia Sweetlow Gallery, San Francisco
Exhibition Dates: September 7 – October 19, 2019
Crafted Illusions: Victoria Jang ∙ Jacqueline Surdell ∙ Lien Truong
Reception: Saturday, September 7th, 4 to 6:30 pm
Saturday, September 7th at 3pm. Please join us for a conversation with Lien Truong, Jacqueline Surdell & Victoria Jang, moderated by Gail Wight. Gail Wight is Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University, where she focuses on experimental media.
PSG is pleased to present Victoria Jang, Jacqueline Surdell, and Lien Truong in Crafted Illusions. The artists in the exhibition investigate the fabrication of authority, questioning historical and contemporary reliability in authorship, aesthetics, moral imperatives and allegiances. The exhibition opens Saturday, September 7th and continues through October 19th. The reception is Saturday, September 7th from 4 to 6:30 pm. At 3:00 pm Stanford Associate Professor Gail Wight will lead the artists in conversation. Everyone is welcome; come early, as seating is limited.
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Fragmenting historic paintings, art, film and the gaming industry, Lien Truong’s mixed media paintings inform “our collective notions of heritage.”
The narrative of Role Playing Games, with virtual landscapes reminiscent of mythologized American manifest destiny, coupled with default white male avatars, become the backdrop and critique of Lien Truong’s paintings. Researching and reading RPG theory from a feminist, queer and multiracial perspective, Truong weaponizes her paintings to challenge the perpetuated culture of violence, inverting the romanticized RPG space and its domination of women and POC.
Aware of the religious and cultural ideologies associated with painting, her work tests the hybridity and historic hierarchies of painting techniques, materials and philosophies from the “West” and Asia. She subverts color and values, staging a background layered with singed panels of painted floating silk and carefully blended gestures of oil paint, amidst interpretations of historic textile patterns and hegemonic iconography. Creating a powerful fictive of female authority, with significant icons such as Patsy Matsu Takemoto Mink, the first non-white, and first Asian American woman elected to congress, and Anna May Wong, an exoticized and eroticized silent-era film star, Truong presents female protagonists who become forceful real-life counterpoints to the fictionalized bravado of the RPG.
Lien Truong is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She graduated with a BFA in 1999 from Humboldt State University and an MFA from Mills College, Oakland in 2001. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery; North Carolina Museum of Art; Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, Texas; the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; Nha San Collective, Hanoi, Vietnam; Art Hong Kong; S.E.A. Focus, Singapore; and Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA. She is the recipient of several awards including the Whitton Fellowship, and fellowships from the Institute for the Arts & Humanities and the North Carolina Arts Council. Residencies include the Oakland Museum of California and the Marble House Project, Vermont. Her work has been reviewed in ArtAsiaPacific; The San Francisco Chronicle; Houston Chronicle; Oakland Tribune; New American Paintings; and ART iT Japan. Her work is in several public collections including the Linda Lee Alter Collection of Art by Women at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (USA), DC Collection (Disaphol Chansiri, Chiang Mai, Thailand), North Carolina Museum of Art (USA), the Weatherspoon Art Museum (USA), and the Post Vidai and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Vietnam).
Nocturne – performance at night, are Victoria Jang’s new ceramic sculpture, layered with multiple narratives, composed in a period of darkness. With a vocabulary of decorative ornamental forms, Jang’s sculptures are a critical inquiry of colonial ideology expressed in ethnology, stigmatizing indigenous cultural legacies.
First-generation Korean-American, Victoria Jang takes aim at assumptions of Western European culture in its understanding and interpreting of non-Western cultures as inferior, while historically appropriating traditions, rituals and objects for aesthetic and cultural exploitation. Her ceramic vessels become microcosms of deconstructed colonial moral and aesthetic principles. Focusing on Korean traditions found in native craft and materials, Jang creates a musical panoply of abstracted geometric and natural forms that she can use and reassemble. Her ceramic sculptures are layered with these shapes – stemmed flower forms, ritual objects found in Korean Shamanism, surface aspects of urban erosion and decay – a fused assemblage of synthesized symbolist ornaments.
Victoria Jang received her BFA in ceramics and sculpture from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2010. She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and received her MFA in ceramics at the California College of the Arts in 2014. Jang received a Headlands Graduate Fellowship Award, a Murphy Award and Cadogan Scholarship, and was the featured artist for the 2014 APAture exhibition at Kearny Street Workshop. She recently received the 2017–18 AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she continues to teach, and the Retired Professors Award by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. She was a Visiting Artist in Residence for 2015-2016 at the University of California, Berkeley.
Using a hybrid of macramé and weaving, Jacqueline Surdell’s studio practice demands the physical strength of a trained athlete. Her multi-dimensional tapestries bring to mind abstracted landscape paintings – born of body, and blemished with stains of labor. Her acumen in expressing both beauty and raw complexity is reflected in monumental volumes of cascading, disfigured, twisted rope. Defying the ‘60s approach to a mannered macramé of decorative or functional value, Surdell instead follows in the footsteps of early groundbreaking fiber artists, Mrinalini Mukherjee, Françoise Grossen, and Sheila Hicks.
Close familial memories contributed to Surdell’s complex psychological terrain between body, athleticism, making, sanctuary and spirit. From childhood through college, Surdell was a competitive volleyball player, accustomed to pushing the limits of physical endurance. She was recruited by Occidental College in Los Angeles, whose volleyball program started four years after passage of Title 9, legislation seeking gender equity in school sports. Her experience in sports provided Surdell with skill and strength – and her studio practice is an extension of those experiences. Weaving her wall sculptures demands full body action, using her body as a weaving shuttle, moving in and out of the warp, knotting and pulling pounds and yards of rope on self-made mural-sized looms. The warp is looped over steel weightlifting bars of various lengths. Although the material is fiber, Surdell’s approach is painterly – manipulating her knotted layers, reducing material to open the structure, draping to create volume and texture, painting the surface with Paracord and acrylic.
Jacqueline Surdell was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1993. She received her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017, and a BFA from Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA. An emerging artist, her work has been exhibited in New Orleans, Montreal, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
Hello!
I would like to invite you to my exhibition Transmutations, opening Friday the 6th at Artspace in Raleigh. The show is located in the Upfront Gallery and runs through September 28th. Please invite your friends and family. All information is found below.
I look forward to seeing you there!
Vanessa
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Info:
Transmutations
Artspace
Upfront Gallery
201 E Davie St., Raleigh
September 6th – 28th
First Friday Opening 6-10 pm
About:
All things physically change form over vast expanses of time and external forces create certain topographies around us. In this body of work, negative spaces appear as cavities. These pockets of space have developed from the artist’s fascination with caves, chasms and the way crevices or folds behave. Murray is influenced by any type of hole, split or fracture, whether seen in an image of an arctic ice sheet or an open wound. Openings are instinctively mysterious, having the potential to create various levels of unease or anxiety. It’s our long fascination with the abyss. These moments in the work become contemplations on mortality and the unknown. Ultimately though, both paintings and sculptures are absorbed in conveying a sense of slow movement, a state of transformation that is taking shape. Murray’s process is driven by the complex relationship between positive form and negative space. It’s a dynamic relationship that is never constant, but rather fluid and changeable. Movement and change occur continuously around us, but it’s the imperceptible shifts that are inspiration for the work in this show.
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Bio:
Vanessa Murray is a painter and mixed media artist based in Carrboro, NC. She received her MFA in Studio Art from UNC Chapel Hill in 2017 and her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. She was recently a Regional Emerging Artist in Residence at Artspace in Raleigh and is currently a studio artist at Attic 506 in Chapel Hill. Murray has had solo exhibitions at The Durham Art Guild, UNC Chapel Hill’s Allcott Gallery, the Gutter Box Gallery in Raleigh and the Contemporary Art Workshop in Chicago.
Read all about it in the DTH: https://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2019/08/chambers-portrait-unveling-0828. Congratulations, Will!
