In the current show at Linda Matney gallery entitled Postcolonials we are presented with the work of nine artists who use various strategies of art making to develop sophisticated ideas and imagery. The nine demonstrate an impressive range of intellectual interests and formal concerns that serve to emphasize the multifaceted nature of contemporary visual culture. The result, is a collection of compelling works that are provocative and energetic. Despite the diversity in each artist’s means of production, a collective interest and attitude addresses notions of social space. We are presented with a basic set of polarities for organizing frameworks of perception and the psychological effects invoked by them. Each artist work constitutes a habitat for behavior patterns and rituals, as well as settings for stories and interests, individual and communal, to engage with our sensibilities.
Anthony Wislar’s Party Pix 3 exemplifies a means of cut and paste socialization. Reconnections of moments and dissolutions of boundaries are collaged, painted, and reassembled. Melancholy, deadpan excerpts of figuration are inserted into a scene, and the narrative seems darkly humorous. Tyrus Lytton’s indirectly sequential film-inspired work combines recognizable iconography from western and non western culture and plays comically with our notions of high and low art. Zuzka Vaclavik’s sensuous watercolors are simultaneously about geography and the human body, and seek to combine them to acquire a new meaning and purpose. Hope Hilton’s series, The Recognitions: Plants as Medicine, identifies specific plant life to a specific location and documents how they have been used in her family’s history and locally in Williamsburg, Va. Brian Hitselberger’s intensive and accumulative mark-making technique culminates in a non-cerebral and soulful space: This is a drawing that provides a place for a certain solace after an exhaustive process. Similar in affect but extremely expansive and monumental, Winter Sky North by Judith Mcwillie envelops the viewer into a night sky’s constellation. The sensation is surreal and holds us in suspension. In Teddy Johnson’s paintings, the figure is precariously posed on a ledge or rooftop within the urban landscape of his home in Baltimore. Each scene is both a portrait of the individual and a portrait of the place in which he resides, which like everywhere is in a state of flux. The humor and sincerity in the blown glass works of Zachary Herrmann also address our states of being. The severed fish heads at once are tragic and funny, and remind us how we ignore our natural environment. Jeremy Hughes’s paintings revise and explore classic and recent art history and draw parallels between the two. A haughty class distinction that may come with a famous work by John Singer Sargent is counter-balanced with a portrait of Hughes’s middle class friend. The works aim to alter our preconceptions of media based imagery.
Please join us for the opening reception on Friday , March 18th, at 7 p.m.
You may call the gallery at 757 675-6627.
Note about our location: Linda Matney Gallery is located on the service road extension of Richmond Road at the Shops of Carolina Furniture. We are across from Loft Furniture and in front of Abe's Mini Storage.