Post Secret

Post Secret

June 2009

Post Secret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God

In November 2004, Maryland resident Frank Warren launched a community art project that would soon become a worldwide phenomenon known as PostSecret. By handing out postcards and leaving them in public places around Washington, DC Warren invited strangers to anonymously send him their secrets. Within one month, Warren received more than 150 postcards and today he has collected over 350,000 postcards…and counting! PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death and God takes its title from Warren’s fifth book, scheduled to be released this fall. The displayed postcards unearth a myriad of private thoughts concerning spirituality, religion and faith. Addictively compelling, the cards reveal our deepest fears, desires, regrets and obsessions. Warren calls them “graphic haiku,” beautiful, elegant and small in structure but emotionally powerful.

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Judit Varga

Judit Varga, Sign Language, 2008

March–April 2009

Squaring the Circle; Stretching the Clay

Squaring the Circle; Stretching the Clay features a selection of Judit Varga’s newest ceramic sculptures. A native of Hungary who now calls Washington, DC, “home,” Varga uses malleable clay to speak freely and engage in interactions in a place that does not understand her mother tongue. Varga’s vocabulary, she says, “has been built from basic shapes like squares, circles and their universal, symbolic implications to communicate.” Using the power of colors and the inflections of rich surfaces, Varga plays with the meaning of the spoken words and their straightforward interpretations, deliberately creating visual misinterpretation to juxtapose the lost value in translation.

Visit Varga’s website at www.juditvarga.net.

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Gregory Ferrand

Gregory Ferrand, El Fin, 2008
Gregory Ferrand, Yo, El Peor de Todos, 2008
Gregory Ferrand, Zona Urbana, 2009
Gregory Ferrand, That’s Our Boy!, 2008
Gregory Ferrand, The State of Things, 2009
Gregory Ferrand, Step Right Up!, 2008
Gregory Ferrand, El Fin, 2008

March-April 2009

La Vida Intensa

La Vida Intensa features Gregory Ferrand’s most recent works in acrylic. Ferrand’s background in film is evident in his strongly narrative paintings which usually capture a climactic moment in a character’s life. Through his exaggerated rendering and saturated colors, Ferrand aims to paint life. “No matter how exotic or mundane the setting of the painting or drawing,” says Ferrand, “I strive to tell stories about characters and situations that do, have and will exist…”

Visit Ferrand’s website at www.gferrand.com.

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Judy Stone

January-December 2009

Spirit

Spirit will feature a selection of Judy Stone‘s newest works. Interested in contemporary issues of ritual, iconic power and violence, Stone’s recent work integrates aspects of East and West culture. In Praxis (for Kali), a video installation, Stone combines the practice of mediation with discharging firearms, creating an integrated space between East and West. In another piece, her use of surveillance cameras connected to numerous televisions juxtaposed with meditation pillows invites the viewer to experience transforming fields of awareness and focus into sites of paranoia. Stone’s installations re-contextualize East and West identities and thoughts by merging them, thus creating an atmosphere in which one must re-consider their essence. One is then faced with a challenge to reconstruct and experience these essences in a new space.

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The Hechinger Collection

Jacob Lawrence, Carpenters, 1977
William Eggleston, Near the River at Greenville, Mississippi, 1986
Manuel Hughes, Work Dance I, 1988
Henryk Fantazos, Women in Labor, 1986
Claes Oldenburg, Three-Way Plug, 1965

January-February 2009

Tools for Change: Selections from the Hechinger Collection

By now, the Hechinger Collection might be better known that the hardware store that inspired its existence. The diverse collection started by John Hechinger in 1978 exceeds 375 works by 250 established and emerging artists mostly of the post-WWII era. The works were carefully chosen based on their varying tools motifs, all of which awaken our appreciation for the very tools that—as extensions of ourselves—allow us to construct and create or destroy and demolish.

Tools for Change: Selections from the Hechinger Collection, features 18 pieces of the Hechinger Collection that remove tools from their utilitarian, invisible state and in turn places them under the spotlight. The exhibition transforms the ordinary tool into an object of art to be admired, and above all, reminds us that our tools are a way of change—for better or worse.

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