VisArts June 2016 Exhibitions

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Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Friday, June 17 from 7pm to 9pm

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Pat Alexander
Even the Stars
June 10 – July 10, 2016
Gibbs Street Gallery, VisArts
Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Friday, June 17, 7 – 9 PM
Taking advantage of the Gibbs Street Gallery’s wall of windows and artificial light, Pat Alexander creates an installation of pigmented cast-paper rocks and boulders, cast shadow and small abstract paintings inspired by rock-laden landscapes in Newfoundland, Canada, Vedauwoo, Wyoming and Cappadocia, Turkey.

About the Artist
The main impetus for Pat Alexander’s work is the inherent beauty and precariousness of the natural world. Her paintings, installations and drawings have been exhibited widely in the U.S.A. as well as Japan and Germany. She has just completed a major sculptural installation for Dear Mother, a multi-media collaboration with New York composer Angel Lam and Peabody Dance choreographer Constance Dinapoli. Their work was presented on March 23rd and 24th, 2015 for Peabody Dance’s Centennial celebration. Alexander created a major artist-cast paper installation for Meander, collaborating with Artistic Director, Carol Bartlett and Peabody Dance in 2008. Scaling the Walls, a multi-media collaboration with choreographer Joyce Morgenroth and writer/musician Ann McCutchan was performed at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York in 2001. It was expanded and reconfigured for a performance at the Brown Center of the Maryland Institute College of Art during Blurred Edges, the American Independent Colleges of Art and Design Conference on the Interdisciplinary in 2004.

Alexander’s public art includes Geometro, a mosaic covering eight spandrel beams at the Baltimore Metro, Lexington Market Station, commissioned by the Maryland Mass Transit Administration.  Her work has been supported by international and national residencies. These include Turkey (Babayan Culture House Artist Residency, Ibrahampasa, 2010), Newfoundland , Canada (Pouch Cove Artist Residency, 2007, 2000), France (Alfred and Trafford Klots Residency Fellowship, Rochefort-en-Terre, 2005) and Spain (Foundation Valparaiso Residency Fellowship, Mojacar, 2003) as well as artist residencies in Wyoming, Virginia, Florida and Georgia.  She has received numerous foundation awards including two Maryland State Art’s Council Individual Artist Grants, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Artist’s Residency Grant and a NEA Regional Visual Arts Fellowship. Since 1993, she has been a Professor of Fine Arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she was awarded ten Faculty Enrichment Grants. Ms. Alexander lives and works in a studio in downtown Baltimore. www.patalexanderart.com.

Brad Blair
Future Unknown
June 8 – July 10, 2016
Common Ground Gallery, VisArts
Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Friday, June 17, 7 – 9 PM
Brad Blair creates detailed clay and mixed media sculptural monstrosities that allude to the issues of genetic engineering and biotechnology unfolding in today’s world.

About the Artist
Brad Blair is an award winning, emerging artist and Maryland native who recently earned his M.F.A. from Florida State University and a B.S. Degree in Fine Arts, with a focus in Ceramics, from Towson University. His other-worldly artwork stems from interests in the biological sciences, cryptozoology, the future of genetic engineering, and the unknown. His artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Currently, Blair is the Chesapeake Gallery Coordinator at Harford Community College and is an adjunct professor of ceramics at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Blake Carrington
An Infinite Distance Between Two Points
Kaplan Gallery, VisArts
June 17 – July 17, 2016
Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Friday, June 17, 7 – 9 PM
Live Performance: Cathedral Scan, Friday, June 17, 8:30 PM
In a solo exhibition at VisArts, visual, sound and performance artist Blake Carrington presents three projects where technology and the senses unite in unexpected ways. Working with data mined from Gothic cathedrals, a film masterpiece, and psychotherapy sessions, his mixed media drawings, video, and live performance offer an inter-sensual experience with “sacred” space.

Andrei (Near and Far), a single channel video, features a single shot from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1966 film Andrei Rubley paired with an original sound composition that carries the viewer/listener through various fantastic, realistic, and abstract spaces. In Strata Systems II, recorded conversations between patient and psychologist served as the matrix for a series of mixed media drawings that carry the sonic topography of those private, personal talk sessions. Cathedral Scan, an audio-visual performance, treats architectural plans of Gothic cathedrals as open-ended scores. Space becomes rhythmic and sonic. Each version of the performance stresses the tenuous correspondence between different data sets — architecture, diagram, image, sound — and questions how close to an original source one can get by manipulating signs.

Carrington’s hybrid works create a sense that in the gaps between perception and data, there are infinite ways to experience space and time. An opening reception and live performance of Cathedral Scan scheduled for Friday, June 17, 7 – 9 PM.

About the Artist
Blake Carrington (b. 1980) works within the spheres of the visual, sound, and performing arts. He has had solo exhibitions at Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and Central Utah Art Center, featuring a range of work from inkjet painting to video installation using custom software systems. Parallel to his work in the visual arts context, he writes and performs original audiovisual compositions and releases full length albums. His debut Cathedral Scan was released in 2011 by the LA-based Dragon’s Eye Recordings, and in 2012 Radio del Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid commissioned a follow-up. Working collaboratively, he has created and performed concert visuals recently with Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective in New York, Abu Dhabi, Paris and Marseille. He has also co-founded a collaborative silkscreen print label called Personal Desire Propaganda that promotes the work of 35 artists, and previously co-founded and curated a public art platform called Urban Video Project that has featured work by Trevor Paglen, Jill Magid, and others. He received a Jerome Foundation Travel Study Grant to research media arts in Japan, and is a 2014-2015 NYFA Fellow. Blake was born in Indiana and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. www.blakecarrington.com.

Live Performance: Cathedral Scan, Friday, June 17, 8:30 PM
Cathedral Scan is an audiovisual performance that treats architectural plans of Gothic cathedrals as open-ended scores. Using a custom software patch, scans of varying speeds and intensities create unique rhythms and musical possibilities from each structure. Visually the scans reveal the plans with each pass, tying sound and image together with the architectural rendering. For each performance, Carrington forms a setlist from a library of over 200 architectural plans.

The piece was performed at Elektra Festival in Montreal in 2010 then was released as a full-length album by Dragon’s Eye Recordings in 2011. In preparation for a follow-up album to be finished in 2016, Carrington teamed up recently with a live drummer, Hamburg-based musician Leo Lazar (Lazar Crash). During the world premiere hour-long concert at Westwerk in Hamburg, the two improvised through a set list of roughly 10 different plans.

Each version of the performance stresses the tenuous correspondence between different data sets — architecture, diagram, image, sound — and questions how close to an original source one can get by manipulating signs.

VisArts Gallery Hours:

• Wednesday & Thursday: 12 – 4pm
• Friday: 12 – 8pm
• Saturday & Sunday: 12 – 4pm

Exhibitions are always free and open to the public.

VisArts at Rockville is located three blocks from the Rockville Metro station at 155 Gibbs Street, Rockville, MD. For information, please visit www.visartscenter.org or contact Susan Main at (301) 315-8200 ext. 110 or smain@visartscenter.org.