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!

Congratulations to PhD Alumnus Michael Yonan, Professor of Art History at the University of Missouri, on the recent publication of Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art, ed. Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). While the connected, international character of today’s art world is well known, the eighteenth century too had a global art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to attempt a map of the global art world of the eighteenth century. Fourteen essays from a distinguished group of scholars explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the eighteenth century.

Michael was also a visiting guest professor in the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, in Stockholm, Sweden in Spring 2019 and will be returning there for Spring 2020.

Michelle P. Brown’s Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, originally published in 1994 and a standard English-language reference work on the terminology associated with the study of European illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, has been published in a new edition revised by Elizabeth C. Teviotdale (PhD, 1991) and Nancy K. Turner. The text of the original edition has been substantially revised and new terms have been introduced relating to the emerging science of the study of materials in manuscripts. The text has also been updated to better conform with contemporary usage. An entirely new suite of color images—mostly from Getty manuscripts acquired since the original edition was published—illustrates the dictionary-style text, with images accompanying terms that can most benefit from illustration. The new edition has been labeled “essential” by Choice, and Nicholas Herman in The Medieval Review writes: “The authors of this excellent mise-à-jour should be thanked for their contribution to what will remain a standard introductory and reference resource.”

Teviotdale, who was a curator in the Department of Manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum for ten years, has been the Assistant Director of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University since 2002. Her other publications include The Stammheim Missal (2001) and Das Sakramentar von Beauvais (2011).

Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, revised by Elizabeth C. Teviotdale and Nancy K. Turner

Useful Fictions is a week-long symposium and a public participatory art project in Paris. It is a platform to embrace complex problems by modeling radical openness to research in which tools, laboratories, studios are shared between artists and scientists to expand concepts for ecological thinking. Useful Fictions proposes to see the calculation of a catastrophic future not as an inevitability but as an invitation to innovate and effect change. Bridging the divide between urgency and agency, the project gathers a coalition of artists, designers, humanists, and graduate students to work with globally acclaimed climate scientists in their laboratories to build future machines and write absurd fictions.

This project invites critique of the human-centered narrative that dominates and defines contemporary cultural consciousness. The issues we are faced with challenge us to reclaim knowledge creation by examining the idea of proxy and measurements in ways that will expand anthropocentric lenses. Through the use of both critical discourse and practice-based research in art, design, and science, as well as case studies in climate science and related contextual research, we will ask: “What controls the manufacturing of our systems of belief? What stories do we tell ourselves? Can we imagine differently?”

Chosen from a competitive selection process based on an International Open Call, graduate fellows will participate in the symposium and the Speed of Light Expedition. Each Graduate Fellow will receive one week of full room and board at École polytechnique, Paris, from September 9-13, 2019. All lab fees and material expenses are also covered under the Fellowship. We are pleased to see that the fellows are from a wide range of disciplines, including the arts, humanities, sciences, and engineering. 

Peter Hoffman
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, USA
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Considering the failures and limits of the documentary photograph in translating climate change narratives, Peter Gabriel Hoffman is informed by environmental communication theories and eco-critical texts that emphasize the necessity of collapsing the human/nature binary way of thinking. He is interested in how creating new representations of landscape and ecological systems may play a role in perpetuating this dialogue. He holds MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA in Documentary Photography from Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication. Hoffman lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife Liz.

Sydney Steen was named Creative Economies Coordinator of the N.C. Arts Council on May 1. She previously served as the Arts in Communities Coordinator for the agency, and while she will continue to provide support to Grassroots Arts partners, her duties are being expanded to include the N.C. Arts Council’s public art and SmART communities program. Sydney will oversee the state’s public art collection and manage the artist selection process for all the SmART communities in N.C. She will also work with each SmART partner to track the economic impact of the SmART program across the state. Sydney received her Master’s in Fine Art in painting and sculpture from UNC-Chapel Hill.

Congratulations to PhD Candidate Jennifer Wu, who was awarded a grant to attend the Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art (SITSA) at the Harvard Art Museums. Along with a cohort of doctoral students in art history, she received object-based training on conservation and technical analyses as well as hands-on experiences with various artistic materials and techniques. The two-week program emphasized interdisciplinary collaboration with conservators, curators, scientists, artists, and art historians in discussions on art-technical history.

Night Swim
Vanessa Murray (MFA 2017)

The Durham Art Guild
June 26 – July 24th
Golden Belt Campus
800 Taylor St. Durham

3rd Friday Reception:
July 19th, 6-9 pm
Artist Talk at 6:30

Night swim explores the psychological vulnerability that is felt when we place our self under the dark sky and in the presence of the unknown. Both paintings and sculptures explore a quiet push and pull between exposure and concealment, concave and convex, darkness and light.

Congratulations to Ph.D. Alumnus Michael Yonan on the recent publication of his recent book Messerschmidt’s Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History. Artsy recently interviewed Michael about Messerschmidt’s weird, grimacing figures and you can read about them here.