Past Exhibitions

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Barbara Liotta

A Gathering

In this exhibition, A Gathering, Liotta explores how a number of sculptures interact; how they dance together. All of this work is entirely new. The roughly two dozen pieces are smaller than works that have been shown in previous years. Emerging, as if out of a mist, is a congregation of beings. Each column is a singular individual. They convene as a group, but have, for the moment, drifted into smaller conversations. Liotta hopes that you will wander among them, will sense the being in each, and enjoy their dances.

Tara Youngborg

Abandonware [houses]

The New Castle and Frenchtown Railroad (NCFRR) was one of the first railroads in the United States. The railroad only operated for 28 years; as newer, more direct railways were built, the New Castle and Frenchtown Railroad was abandoned, and then without a commercial artery, the town of Frenchtown was also deserted. This obsolescence of the railroad and town is analogous to digital technological loss in its root in the movement of capital and technological change. In this exhibition, Youngborg engages with the town’s archive in conjunction with contemporary data to try and recreate a ghost without its community. Through glitch, loss, and (visual and sonic) layering, the sound and video installation questions the role of data, archives, and recreation in understanding place, loss and memory.

Esha Sadr

Absence of Us

Absence of Us is an interdisciplinary, long-term project that transforms used garments into narratives of memory, identity, and resilience. Esha Sadr reconsiders clothing not merely as a consumer product, but as a second skin—objects that carry personal histories and traces of absent bodies. The exhibition explores her experience as an immigrant, present in the U.S. while absent from her home country.

Richard Bach

CUT

This new body of work is about strength and resilience working from nature with unnatural materials. Painting with fire. Plasma cut enameled steel is cut into thousands of shards, destroying the material’s strength. The shards are then composed as objects regaining their strength both structurally and aesthetically, while exploring the beauty of creation, destruction, and rebirth. The work is both made and unmade. Built with intention but open to interpretation.

Adjoa Burrowes

Earth Sanctuary

Earth Sanctuary seeks to celebrate the natural world and the legacy of African American women gardeners in Virginia. In this exhibition of abstract works Burrowes explores vibrant color, texture, and rhythm in recent mixed media paintings on paper referencing botanicals found in local gardens.

Shelby Shadwell

EMERGENCY BLANKETS / VISCERAL

In EMERGENCY BLANKETS, Shadwell makes large scale charcoal and pastel drawings of space blankets (aka solar blankets, emergency blankets, thermal blankets, etc) which are made of a compact lightweight material used to regulate temperatures of things like spacecraft and human bodies in cold circumstances.

Flesh + Bone

Exhibition of Contemporary Figurative Work

Hillyer Art Space presents Flesh & Bone, an exhibition that focuses on contemporary figurative art, pushing boundaries and providing a fresh look at the familiar subject of the human figure. This exhibition was juried by DC-based artist Judy Byron, and will feature thirty-three works by local and regional artists.

Abol Bahadori

Hybrid Baroque

We view the world through our eyes, limited by a narrow color spectrum and depth of vision. But what if we had compound eyes like insects, sonar like dolphins, and used other senses to enhance our vision? In his exhibition Hybrid Baroque, Bahadori explores new sensoria by abstracting and recomposing elements of nature, architectural structures, and human figures.

Te-Mao Lee

In-Between beings

In the exhibition In-Between beings, Te-Mao Lee contemplates the question of existence through a series of video works that gaze toward a future two thousand years from now. Along Taiwan’s east coast, tectonic forces have gradually uplifted ancient coastal settlements to elevated sites—prehistoric traces now suspended above sea level—revealing that ancient peoples once lived by the sea. This vertical dimension of spacetime prompts a descent 20 meters below today’s sea level, where the artist explores a yet-to-arrive mode of being through the materiality of seabed sand.