Schlesinger Center’s Fisher Gallery Presents Katherine Akey Behind the Silent Hills

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Reception: Saturday, June 23 from 2pm to 4pm

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The Margaret W. & Joseph L. Fisher Art Gallery at the Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center at Northern Virginia Community College’s Alexandria Campus is pleased to present a photography and installation exhibition by Katherine Akey entitled Behind the Silent Hills.

The show will be on display from June 16, 2018 through July 29, 2018 with an artist’s reception on Saturday June 23, 2018 2-4PM.

Katherine Akey is an artist based in Washington, DC. Katherine uses a wide variety of film formats and photographic techniques to address adventure, the human spirit and the turn of the century and its many cultural upheavals. Her own childhood fantasies and nighttime visions fuel the romantic aspects of her art practice, while at the same time her scientific background and penchant for academic reading bring her work back to earth. This exhibition is the product of her time in the Arctic Circle, where she lived aboard a barquentine sailboat and a unique cyanotype sail created before her journey.

“When I began to create work about the poles, I had to do just that: create. I had felt the burn of rope in my hands and the spray of saltwater on my face, but I had never heard the fizz and crackle of ice in the water or seen the emerald and lavender hues of snow in the dull arctic autumn. And so the sail was born — a labor of love and perseverance.”

“After I saw icebergs myself and sailed amongst the crackling ice in the dull autumn sun of the high arctic — I couldn’t picture my dreamt-of bergs or auroras any longer. The price of knowing something is the inability to imagine quite as freely again. The arctic is a land of extremes, where the cycle of daylight, the temperatures, the tides all push and pull to their utmost, a land of ecstatic beauty and quiet danger.”

She graduated from the International Center of Photography at Bard’s MFA program in 2014 after completing her BA in Psycholinguistics at NYU in 2011. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and she was recently a participant in the Arctic Circle Residency, autumn 2015.

Gallery Hours:

• Monday-Friday: 10am—4pm

The Fisher Art Gallery is located on the upper level of the Schlesinger Center, which is located at 4915 East Campus Drive, Alexandria, VA.  For more information, call the Schlesinger Center at 703.845.6156.