HABITATION
.WITH SPECIAL GUEST SHAUNA PECK
APRIL 29- JUNE 1, 2022
5435 Richmond Rd, Williamsburg, Virginia, 23188, (757) 675-6627
"Habitation," on view at the Linda Matney Fine Art Gallery through June 1, 2022, assembled a diverse group of artists—including Shauna Peck, Asa Jackson, Eliot Dudik, and Elizabeth Mead—to explore the complexities of human existence within our shared environments. The exhibition oscillates between reverence and critique, juxtaposing the sublime allure of the natural world against the stark realities of contemporary crises: environmental degradation, sociopolitical upheaval, and mental health challenges. This approach invites viewers to contemplate the dualities inherent in habitation—beauty and destruction, solace and turmoil—prompting a nuanced reflection on our collective human condition.
FEATURED ARTISTS INCLUDE SHAUNA PECK, ASA JACKSON, ELIOT DUDIK, ELIZABETH MEAD, NICOLE SANTIAGO, LUTHER GERLACH, JOHN R. G. ROTH, RYAN LYTLE, KRISTIN SKEES, NOREEN DEAN DRESSER, GLENN H. SHEPARD, SIDNEY ROUSE, IRIS WU, MARK EDWARD ATKINSON, TEDDY JOHNSON AND OTHERS
ELIOT DUDIK
Eliot Dudik, William and Mary
Eliot Dudik is an American photographer and book artist with works in institutional and private collections worldwide. His long-term projects, books, and collaborations focus on the connections between landscape, culture, memory, history, and how these combine to create place. Increasingly focused on the photobook as a means of expression, Eliot has published, self-published, or hand crafted 11 editions to date, beginning with Road Ends In Water in 2010. He was awarded the PhotoNOLA Review Prize in 2014 for his Broken Land and Still Lives portfolio, resulting in a book publication and solo exhibition. In 2015, he was selected for Magenta Foundation's Flash Forward and Duke University's Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award for the entire series of Road Ends in Water prints.
His works have been acquired by institutions such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the MoMA Library, Virginia Commonwealth University's Special Collections and Archives, Chrysler Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, William & Mary, the Cassilhaus Collection, The Do Good Fund Collection, Southeast Museum of Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Phoenix Art Museum, as well as many private collections.
Eliot is based in Richmond, Virginia where he manages his active photography and book arts studios. He founded the photography program within the Department of Art & Art History at the College of William & Mary in 2014 where he is currently teaching and learning. (To see some of his students' work, follow William & Mary Photo on Instagram @williamandmary_photo)
LUTHER GERLACH
Photographer Luther Gerlach works in a variety of historical photographic processes, highlighting the role of constraints in creative production and the hand-made, tactile connection between the artist and his work. Known for nude portraits and urban scenes of downtown LA in his early career, more recently Gerlach has pioneered the re-emergence of plein air wet plate collodion landscapes. His work distills detailed images of the natural world, particularly the trees, seaweeds, and grasses of Southern California, to emphasize pure light and line, endowing his images with a subtly abstract quality.
Luther Gerlach was born in Blayne, Minnesota in 1960. He apprenticed with Brett Weston in Carmel and Hawaii in the 1980’s, before learning the wet plate process which he still works in today. Gerlach has led lectures and demonstrations at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles since 2001. He has exhibited at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Ventura Museum of Art, the Schaknow Museum of Fine Art, Miami, the Denver Art Museum, and The Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe. Selected permanent collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Michael G. Wilson Centre for Photography, among others.
The artist lives and works in historic Hampton, Connecticut where he offers workshops, master printing services, and darkroom rentals from his English style barn, Little River Studio.
NOREEN DEAN DRESSER
Noreen Dean Dresser
Noreen Dean Dresser investigates human agency. Her current work examines the firescape aftermath of global climate change and human enterprise.
Her experiences in the National Service for 32 years have afforded Dresser’s art practice a unique observation between the intersection of civil, social and scientific interest. She has a longstanding commitment in bringing spiritual and ethical questions to the public. Dresser has exhibited in the tri-state area, California, and Europe and is the Director of Parlour 153, a visual and performing arts salon in Harlem.
Noreen Dean Dresser is represented by Linda Matney Gallery and Omo Misha.
NICOLE SANTIAGO
Nicole Santiago, William & Mary
Nicole Santiago is a representational painter whose work centers on narrative figure and still-life compositions. Over her career, she has shown in more than 150 exhibitions and is currently affiliated with First Street Gallery in New York City.
Most recently, Santiago was recognized as a finalist for the prestigious Bennett Prize, one of the U.S.’s most significant painting prizes for women working in the realist figurative tradition. Her work has been featured in several art publications, including The Artist's Magazine, Art New England, International Painting Annual (INPA), Fine Art Connoisseur, and American Art Collector. She has also been awarded full fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, and the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, Ireland.
Santiago currently resides in Williamsburg, Virginia, where she teaches studio art courses at the College of William and Mary.
ELIZABETH MEAD
Elizabeth Mead, William & Mary
ELIZABETH MEAD
Mead’s sculpture and drawings have been exhibited across the U.S. as well as in Iceland, Italy, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Portugal, Australia, and England. She has designed more than two-dozen theatrical productions including work with the internationally acclaimed, Tony award winning Theatre de la Jeune Lune. She has had over two-dozen solo exhibitions and her sculpture and drawing have been included in more than fifty group exhibitions.
A recipient of the Japan/US NEA Creative Artist Fellowship (2002-03), Mead spent six months living and working in Japan. Mead has received recognition for her work in theater by the Dallas Theater League (1998) and the Theater Communication Group/NEA Designer Fellowship (1997, 1998). Mead attended the Ecole Internationale de Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France (1995). She was awarded a work-stay residency at Sculpture Space in Utica, New York (1992). Mead was awarded a Nes Artist Residency (2009) in Skagaströnd, Iceland, where she examined experiential aspects of landscape and the ways environmental cues connect us to the world. Last year she was awarded residencies at Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, Saratoga, Wyoming as well as the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center Residency, Friday Harbor, Washington. She has been a visiting artist and artist in residence at numerous distinguished institutions including The Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London, England (2001, 2002, 2003, 2013), Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo, Japan (2002-03), Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota (2002, 2004), Pacific Northwest College of Art (1994, 2000), Southern Methodist University (1993,1997), Burren College of Art, Co. Clare, Ireland (1995). Later this summer Mead will return to London where she will have a sculpture exhibition "Material Matters" at the Materials Museum, an exhibition of drawings at the Slade School of Fine Art and she will also curate an exhibition, "The Order of Things" from the museum collections at UCL. She is a member of the faculty at The College of William and Mary.
KRISTIN SKEES
Kristin Skees, Christopher Newport University
Kristin Skees was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. She has a BFA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, an MFA from the University of Arizona, and an MLIS from the University of Alabama. She works in a variety of media, including photography, experimental fibers, digital video and installation. Her photographs are found in various private and public collections, including the Cohen Family Collection, the Candela Collection, the Huntsville Museum of Art and the Mobile Museum of Art. Kristin was a recent recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Artist Fellowship. She teaches in the Department of Fine Art and Art History at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia.
CHRISTI HARRIS
Christi Harris
Christi Harris earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at Missouri State in Springfield, Missouri. The year following graduation, she pursued her M.F.A. in painting and printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, graduating in 1995.
Her major series of works since graduation have always focused on personal and societal issues, with an underlying reliance on technical skill while using formal arrangements of color, pattern and shape. Her most recent series, “Meta-Palettes”, focuses on viewing her art process as an art product. The larger-than-life imagery of the paint on her palette is used to create the focus of this series, painted in trompe l’oeil style with oils on canvas.
Her academic career has taken her to three states and seven teaching institutions. Christi is Chair of the Department of Fine Art and Art History at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia where she teaches foundation and advanced studio courses in painting and drawing.
MARK EDWARD ATKINSON
Mark Edward Atkinson
Mark Edward Atkinson is an accomplished professional photographer, documentarian, and writer, mostly because he's been at it for a while and knows little else. He is also the partner and creative director with Otto Design + Marketing. He started his career with the News and Observer in Raleigh, N.C. where he won his first professional award for a photo illustration, that in all honesty wasn't that great. With practice however, his work improved and has subsequently appeared in Time, Newsweek, The Washingtonian, Esquire, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Marie Claire, and numerous other publications including the National Enquirer. He has never been arrested. Mark has traveled the world meeting phenomenal people and shooting work for nonprofit organizations such as Mercy & Sharing, ICD, Smile Train, the United Way, Urban Ministries of Charlotte and Picture World Hope. He has directed and shot several documentaries in the past five years on a range of topics, including homelessness, poverty, mental health and facial deformity. As a board member and photographer for Smile Train, he has worked in Southern India, China, Haiti and Afghanistan to shoot both still photography and documentary film telling the stories of doctors and their cleft palette patients.
SHOWS AND PUBLICATIONS
Mark's photography has appeared in exhibitions at The Chrysler Museum of Art, the Stanley Gallery, the Hermitage Museum, The Fayetteville Museum of Art, the Maine Photographic Show, Communication Arts, The One Show, and Photo District News. His advertising photography and graphic designs have also won numerous ADDY Awards including Best in Show. His distinctive photographs and advertisements have been the focus of many hospitality, tourism, fashion, retail and lifestyle marketing campaigns.
EDUCATION
Mark received a business degree from Wake Forest University and an Associate of Applied Science degree in photography from Randolph Technical College. It is unclear just how much he really learned from either program.
ASA JACKSON
Asa Jackson
Asa Jackson is an American artist and arts leader based in North Carolina. As a multidisciplinary artist, Jackson’s work explores the cross section of textile from various countries, peoples, time periods, and personal histories. His works are often anthropological studies, representing the lives of myriad people, their collective and individual stories. By cutting and sewing fabrics together, Jackson metaphorically mixes cultures, time periods, people and places into unified works of art.
Jackson studied sociology at Boston University. He then moved to New York in 2010, where he was featured in several exhibitions, including a career-defining solo exhibition at the Samuel Owen Gallery in Greenwich, CT. Jackson then opened 670 Gallery in Virginia, leading the gallery as its director from 2014-2017. He has since been featured in numerous exhibitions, including more recently MoCA Arlington, VA, Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, NC, Virginia MoCA in Virginia Beach, VA, and the Harvy B. Gantt Center in Charlotte, NC. His work is a part of various prominent collections including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Capital One Corporate Collection, and The Rockwell Museum. Jackson is the co-founder of the CAN Foundation, a not-for-profit arts organization in Newport News, VA, with a focus on building sustainable careers for the creative class. He served on the board of the Virginia Commission for the Arts from 2018-2023 where he acted as chairman for FY 2022. In January 2025, he became President and CEO of the McColl Center in Charlotte, NC.
IRIS WU
Iris Wu
JOHN R.G. ROTH
John R. G. Roth
John R.G Roth iews his work as a distillate of experience, with life events, travel, relationships, politics, and dreams all condensing to varying degrees into his sculpture. He synthesizes, mixes, and mashes up these experiences with his love of object-making to fabricate his work. Much of his work is executed in a scale model format, rooted in a boyhood interest in model railroads, cars, ships, and planes. Many of these pieces reflect an interest in hybridization and polymorphism. Some of these hybrids are oneiric or the product of meditation and daydreaming. Through his work, he aims to engage, amuse, and provoke the viewer by creating sites for wonder and rumination.
DIANE COVERT
Diane Covert
DIANE COVERT
Diane Covert is a documentary photographer. In the 1970s and ’80s, her work focused on life in her native Midwest. During the mid to late 1970s, under a contract with the county to help voters understand the conditions within the jail, she photographed inmates in the Jackson County Jail. She also photographed in a small meatpacking plant in Kansas City.
In the 1980s, with the aid of a grant from the State of Missouri, she photographed family farm foreclosures. This was caused by run-away inflation and grain surpluses that led to bank repossession of many old, established family farms. During that period she began a project to photograph everyone who lived in a small, economically struggling, rural community along the Missouri River. Missouri City, population 343 at the time, was comprised largely of a small number of inter-related families, mostly descendants of people who had originally worked in the coal mines. These images cover everyone from all the students in the town school through the very elderly, as well as families with younger kids. During this period, she free-lanced for corporations and political campaigns and taught photography at both the Kansas City Art Institute and Avila College. in the 1990s, after her family relocated to the East Coast, she photographed Holocaust survivors in the Greater Boston area. The many hours that she spent with Holocaust survivors led to her interest in political violence. Starting in 2002, she worked with hospitals in Israel to collect x-rays and CT scans of survivors of terror attacks in Jerusalem. These radiographs included individuals of all ages, many ethnicities, nationalities, income levels, and religious affiliations: anyone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of the interesting aspects of this work is Ms. Covert’s recognition that x-rays are documentary photographs but made using a different wave length of light. The installation is supported in free-standing kiosks, printed on Duratrans, a special x-ray film, and backlit. It was seen by roughly 1.8 million people and received international coverage.
In 2010, she was shown an old catalog of photographs of anti-Jewish violence, (pogroms), made during the Russian Civil War period. From these fragile images, she built Why They Left, an installation of photographs originally made by family members, Red Cross representatives, medical professionals, perpetrators and Russian and Ukrainian bureaucrats. As with the X-Ray Project, these photographs are preserved on Duratrans film and backlit in free-standing boxes.
Diane Covert studied at Rhode Island School of Design and The Kansas City Art Institute. She taught at The Kansas City Art Institute and at Avila College. Her work is in several corporate, private, and institutional collections. Her free-lance activities have included many political campaigns and corporate shoots. She has received two regional NEA Grants, and various other grants, and has been exhibited in a range of galleries.
SHAUNA PECK
Shauna Peck lives and works in San Diego California and has exhibited nationally and internationally. She received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University and shortly thereafter was nominated for the New Talent Award-Los Angeles County Museum. Peck has lectured on art at colleges and universities throughout Southern California. Her work is held in private as well as museum and public collections. Most recently she was invited to exhibit her work in conjunction with the COP21 in Paris. Peck’s exhibitions have been reviewed in major publications by celebrated art writers most notably- Peter Frank, Robert Pincus, Kenneth Baker, David Pagel and Marlene Donahue. Peck’s work and exhibitions, now spans almost three decades and is revered for her deftness in the use of a variety of materials; as well as her investigation of universal metaphors and contemporary narratives ; with particular emphasis exploring the interconnectedness between technology and the natural landscape.
Glimpse II by Shauna Peck
Shauna Peck
View of Only a Glimpse and other works by Shauna Peck
FEATURED PROJECTS 2022
Art Rosenbaum
Born in upstate New York in 1938, Art Rosenbaum is an acclaimed artist, folklorist, and teacher active from the 1960s to the present. He studied art history and painting at Columbia University during the waning years of high modernism and was part of the generation that re-introduced figuration and narrative into postwar art. Rosenbaum is best known for his expressive realism and for his significant contributions to the American South. Many projects include his wife, painter, and photographer, Margo Newmark Rosenbaum.
Rosenbaum lived in the historic West Village of Manhattan in the 1960s. He hosted a radio show during his years at Columbia. Bob Dylan was a regular listener and colleague in the legendary folk clubs. Continuing his interest in Americana, Rosenbaum brought critical attention to Southern culture during his years in Athens, Georgia, from the late 1970s to the present. A professor at the University of Georgia, Rosenbaum taught alongside painters such as Elaine de Kooning, Alice Neel, Richard Olsen, and Judith McWillie. He mentored numerous creative luminaries to emerge from Athens during this fruitful era, including Michael Stipe of REM. As discussed in Grace Elizabeth Hale’s lauded 2020 book Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture, Rosenbaum helped bring serious attention to many now-revered folk artists and musicians.
Paintings like Rakestraw’s Dream (1993) and Howard Finster with Couple and Fire (2006) feature the Southerners he championed in complex compositions. Outsider artists, folk musicians, and local hipsters populate Rosenbaum’s large, energetic canvases and richly detailed drawings. Rosenbaum’s style and technical prowess reveals his deep engagement with art history, ranging from the Italian Mannerists to American Regionalism. Rosenbaum’s work often includes subjects observed in his extensive travels throughout Europe, India, and Latin America. India Triptych (1998), for example, shows traditional hand drummers alongside figures in traditional saris and contemporary sports jerseys. His abstractions, such as The Way of the Sea (2019), showcases his expressive style in a raw, formally sophisticated form that echoes his early work of the late 1960s and '70s.
Rosenbaum was named the first Wheatley Professor in Fine Arts Emeritus at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia. In 2003, he received the prestigious Governor of Georgia’s Award in the Humanities. His collection of folk music, “The Art of Field Recording Volumes I: 50 Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum,” won a Grammy for Best Historical Album in 2008. Rosenbaum’s work is part of many prominent private and public collections, including the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Georgia Museum of Art.