Michele Montalbano, Crouching Tigers, Hidden Monkeys. Courtesy of Arlington Arts Center..
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 15 from 6pm to 9pm
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The Fall SOLOS Gallery Talk is scheduled for December 10 from 1pm to 4pm.
Bridging the community with contemporary art is key to Arlington Arts Center’s (AAC) mission. To achieve this, AAC brings 14 regional contemporary artists to Arlington each year through its SOLOS series alone.
Earlier this year more than 100 artists living in the Mid-Atlantic Region submitted proposals to an open call for this semi-annual exhibition.
Jurors Sarah Newman, Independent Curator, and José Ruiz, Co-Director of Present Co. (NY), Director of Furthermore (DC), and Professor in the Curatorial Practice MFA Program at Maryland Institute College of Art, recommended 14 applicants for inclusion in the 2016-17 edition of AAC’s competitive SOLOS series.
Selections are based on a range of criteria including compatibility with AAC’s mission of promoting new work by regional artists. Selected SOLOS artists present work in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and performance.
Aptly titled, SOLOS artists are assigned to one of AAC’s seven main gallery spaces, where they each mount a self-curated and self-contained exhibition. Artists often incorporate AAC’s unique building, which features bright, airy spaces and black box galleries for experimental works, into site-specific installations, resulting in a selection of never-before-seen exhibitions.
Fall SOLOS 2016 opens Oct. 15 and will be on view through Dec. 18, with an opening reception Saturday, Oct. 15, 6 – 9 pm.
Additional Programming:
Each exhibition will be accompanied by a gallery talk with the artists. The public is invited for a walking discussion and tour of each artists’ exhibition, followed by a light reception.
Selected artists are:
Michael Booker | Laurel, MD
Michael Booker’s work examines the fragility of time and how cultural events will be remembered or forgotten as time passes. By weaving canvas and sewn fabrics together, paintings combine memories and half-truths from African American culture, quilt-making, art history, and the artist’s own personal history to create artificial artifacts that document a version of the past for the future.
Amanda Burnham | Baltimore, MD
Amanda Burnham makes outsized wall drawings of cities culled from piles of paper scraps. She draws inspiration from the adaptive sensibility of the tinkerers, patchers, and foragers in her neighborhood. Burnham’s installations are developed within the gallery utilizing the space in the same way a collage artist views the page or panel, as a substrate for collage. Using an expressive, physical process, she creates line drawings with black paint on paper in dialogue with the architectural forms and signifiers of place she finds around her.
Lewis Colburn | Philadelphia, PA
As a sculptor, Lewis Colburn is interested in the way we re-interpret and re-tell the past through the filter of our current experience. Early America plays with our romanticized narratives about the American Revolution, generating a series of sculptures that live somewhere between art object, museum replica, and furnishings for a yet-to-be realized living history site.
Marion Colomer | Washington, DC
Melancholia does not directly shock the viewer but rather orients the gaze toward intimacy. The work is in a constant state of tension and reaction. The paintings offer nature in the background as both an Edenic, pristine paradise and an insatiable, devouring jungle. The distance between the two–fantasy and fear–recalls “memento moris” or a reminder of death. Revised, re-interpreted, and disenchanted bodies are rendered in soft drawings and white page, their blank bodies a reflection of melancholic, lost desire.
Liz Guzman | Arlington, VA
Liz Guzman’s work mines sensuality and questions its own seriousness with honest outspokenness. It is unapologetically saccharine with an overt interest in synthetic materials, using materials ranging from plastic heart-shaped earrings to tropical leaves drawn in fabric puff paint. Symbols within these paintings create a syntax of girlhood, existing between having a crush and a well-meaning love obsession.
Andrew Hladky | Philadelphia, PA
Andrew Hladky artworks combines painting and sculpture into a form of three-dimensional pointillism. Using sharpened cocktail sticks as brushes he gradually builds oil paint and cocktail stick shards into intricate, layered formations. These structures shelter fragile fragments of imagery – ghostly figures and shifting landscapes move around the piece before dissolving back into the sculptural form.
Michele Montalbano | Burke, VA
Michele Montalbano’s work is inspired by the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in which a woman suffering from depression sees frightful, nightmarish forms in the patterns of her yellow wallpapered room. This installation plays with the idea of apophenia, a phenomenon in which one sees recognizable shapes in repeating patterns.
Gallery Hours:
- Wednesday – Sunday: Noon to 5pm
- or by appointment
AAC is located at 3550 Wilson Blvd Arlington, VA. For more information visit https://www.arlingtonartscenter.org/exhibitions.
