Bonnie Crawford Kotula

April 7-30, 2017

Versions

Bonnie Crawford Kotula is not interested in, nor does she believe in a world that makes sense. For her, concept is process. She conducts idiosyncratic research making connections across historical medical texts, body horror films, poetry, fiction, political discourse, and her own personal history. She researches results in further inquiry rather than clarity or a discernible thesis; following a thread, it leads to a plate of spaghetti. This approach informs her choice of materials and formal considerations when making art.

Crawford Kotula create sculptures, installations, and drawings using a combination of fine art materials, cheap craft supplies, and semi-scientific equipment. This exhibition will feature bodies of work: Light Emitting Studies incorporate tiny blinking electrical circuits that respond to the environment, Viewfinders is comprised of small hand-held souvenir scopes containing three-dimensional assemblages. Additionally, the exhibition will feature small drawings inspired by the Insomnia Drawings of Louise Bourgeois. Often awake in the middle of the night, she draws by the light of her phone and then photographs the drawings against the backdrop of her bed sheets using the phone’s camera. The images and objects that result from her practice represent a deliberately poetic and tender psuedo-science that further obscures the specificity of experience.

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A fourth generation South Carolinian, Bonnie Crawford Kotula now lives and works as a sculptor in Baltimore. She became interested in using electrical circuitry as an art material when a problem with the electrical tissue in her own heart required surgery. She received her MFA from the University of Maryland Baltimore County in 2008 and her BA in Studio Art from the University of Maryland College Park in 2001.

www.bonniecrawford.com

April 7-30, 2017

Point of Origin

Everyone has a point of origin—a geographical location, a personally held belief, or a cultural allegiance.  Our points of origin shape and affect each of us in ways that last a lifetime. The installation, Point of Origin, addresses this theme and is part sculpture, part theatrical set, and part visual journey that the artist and the viewer share together.

Pratt’s point of origin is rooted in Central Virginia, specifically the Piedmont region of the state. It is approximately 100 miles west of Washington, D.C. and slightly east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The region holds a complex memory of historic and political power, Civil War battles, slavery, and the practice of Eugenics that is paradoxically mixed with the great natural beauty of its landscape. Point of Origin explores the memory of this evidence.

The installation is constructed mainly of paper and paper-related materials, including Lenox 100 paper, acrylic paint, and wood. Through the installation, a descriptive or narrative environment is not intended, but rather it is an attempt to convey a strong sense of psychological impact.

Visitors are invited to take a pre-cut shape from a stack of paper cut-outs, write or draw something about their point of origin on the paper, then place the cut-out over a spindle. During the course of the exhibition a new, intermingled totem will evolve made up of multiple hand-written or visually drawn messages that invite each person to share their point of origin.

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Judith Pratt holds an MFA in Painting from American University, and an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History from Christie’s Education, New York. She also served as a curatorial assistant in the Modern and Contemporary Drawing and Prints Department at New York’s Morgan Library and Museum. Her work has recently been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Hillyer Art Space, Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Gallery, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, The American Institute of Architects Headquarters, Brentwood Arts Exchange, and The Alexandria Commission for the Arts, City of Alexandria, among others.

The Jewish Museum in New York recently announced that Pratt’s thesis on American Modernist artist Florine Stettheimer will be included as a source for the Stettheimer retrospective scheduled to open at the Museum in May 2017. The thesis, titled Orphée des Quat’z’ Arts: A Personal Passage into American Modernism, supports Stettheimer’s performance and sculptural work as pivotal in the rise of performance art during the postmodern era.

Pratt was awarded a VCCA-France Fellowship in October 2014 to Auvillar, France. In September 2014, Pratt and thirteen Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellows exhibited their multidisciplinary work in an exhibition titled AXIS at D.C. area’s Brentwood Arts Exchange. The Alexandria Commission for the Arts, City of Alexandria Virginia, also selected Pratt’s work for two solo exhibitions in 2012 and 2013. Pratt received a Purchase Award for her work juried by Olga Hirshhorn for Abramson & Associates, Washington, D.C.

During the summer of 2013, she was selected to join a group of international artists in the inaugural Art Lab Residency Program sponsored by the University of Virginia’s Mountain Lake Biological Station, with emphasis on combining the visual arts and science in a mutually experimental inquiry. Her work has also been featured in four editions of the literary journal Raritan: A Quarterly Review, published by Rutgers University in 2013.

Pratt’s work has been reviewed in Artnews, The Washington Post, and The Washington Times. She has lectured at Christie’s Education, New York, taught at Trinity College and American University in Washington, D.C., and lectured at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She participates as a mentor for emerging artists at the College Art Association’s Annual Conference. She served as a panel member for the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities for artists’ grant awards. Pratt lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area.

judithmpratt.com

April 7-30, 2017

In Bloom

Growing up, flowers bloomed wild and untamed in the pastures at Jarvis’ family farm and in her mother’s garden. Eighteen years later, at her father’s funeral, flowers became a symbol of love and memorial. For Jarvis, flowers represent nature’s beauty, memory, and love.

Nature is a source of solace and a reminder of individual strength. Jarvis’ drawings present nature in the form of abundant flower blooms, rendered exclusively in Prismacolor colored pencils and spread across large sheets of paper. Each drawing depicts only one kind of flower, repeated in varying sizes and from differing vantage points until the myriad flowers begin to exist together. The drawings are built-up and discovered over time, somewhat unpredictably. They are composed of small crosshatched areas that begin in a localized region on the paper and are replicated, expanding in all directions from the point of origin. Size and direction of the crosshatches influences which way the composition will grow. In a sense, each drawing is an endurance project of marks advancing across the paper. The more time spent on the drawing the more realized and exposed the composition becomes. These drawings motivate the creation of themselves. The drawings embody how family and nature have impacted her life.

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Zoe Linn Jarvis was born in 1993 in Seoul, Korea. As a Korean-adoptee raised in the United States, Jarvis fully identifies as both American and Korean. Jarvis holds a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and currently resides in Middleton, Wisconsin. Jarvis independently continues her pursuit of fifteen years as a classical pianist. As a passionate artist and musician, Jarvis emphasizes the importance of a strong work ethic to fuel progress in her various professional and personal practices.

www.zoelinnjarvis.com

March 3 – April 2, 2017

Subconscious Billboards

Osvaldo Mesa is a Cuban born artist living and working in Baltimore, MD. Growing up in Miami, he started taking painting classes at the age of ten with a Cuban artist who had studied in Spain, so his training has been very traditional. In college he was introduced to Abstract Expressionism and began to reject much of his previous training breaking up the canvas stretchers and tying them together with canvas, and then adding paint to the surface. He moved to Baltimore to attend graduate school at Maryland Institute College of Art Mount Royal.

In Miami, Mesa lived in a prominently Latin environment, and moving to Baltimore he began to notice that he was different from his “American” classmates, and describes it as “culture shock for this Cuban boy.” Mesa began to investigate his own culture and personal history, recalling Sunday dinners at a surrogate grandmother’s house where he would sit in a rocking chair and stare at her household Santeria shire. He loved trying to figure out what all the different components meant. Recalling the local botanicas and the smell of incense that would travel out into the street, his work developed to include deconstructed canvases and wood, with spiritual elements, especially those with an Afro-Cuban feel.

Mesa continued to work this way for several years after graduate school, and grew into more sculptural and installation work. A few years later he began teaching full time at a community college in Baltimore, and says he remembers “watching my students paint still-life scenes and saying to myself ‘hey, that looks like fun,’ and at the same time I felt that my work had hit a wall and wanting to move in a different direction.” He says he did not care about style, period, or technique; he painted what he enjoyed, mixing Latin American Baroque with Surrealism and Abstraction. These changes led to this series of paintings, Billboards, bringing together what makes sense to him visually and demonstrating who he is as an individual.

osvaldomesa.com

March 3 – April 2, 2017

Ellyn Weiss
Sondra N. Arkin
Thomas Drymon
CURATORS

We have been thinking about a subject that initially rose for us in the context of the art world, but which we see reflected and magnified in the broader society around us. We began to notice that many of the art world’s most distinguished exhibitions today see more focused on the artists’ “practice” and what the art is “about” than on the artwork itself. This phenomenon can be illustrated by comparing the lengthy and abstruse wall texts to the art they accompany. The wall plaques describing the work are often more consequential than the work itself. The effect can be to overshadow and even diminish the art.

The assumption that viewers need a lengthy wall plaque education before they can appreciate the work seems demeaning to both the viewers and to the art. Moreover, the third-party interpreter distances the work from the audience and cements the role of curator/mediator as a necessary intermediary and interpreter.

The parallels in the world beyond art are everywhere and can perhaps best be seen in the rise of the commentariat – people who make a living telling us what we should believe about everything. For example, while the “news” once concerned itself with describing events, a great deal of what now calls itself “news” consists of people offering an interpretation of events through the lens of their own conclusions. It increases the distance from the primary sources. This leads to the atrophy of our human evaluative and creative muscles.

In “Preconceptual”, we take this tendency to its logical conclusion – a purposeful disconnect between the creative and the interpretive functions. The artists selected have been given one of nine categories that span trends in contemporary art: identity, social justice, abstraction, figuration, appropriation, landscape, process, inner landscape, and minimalism. The assignments were made with a view to encouraging the artists outside of their usual patterns. We, the curators, then created the PRECONCEPTs knowing nothing about the work except for the category. Those PRECONCEPTs follow and link to the exhibition pages.

Susana Almuiña
Mamie Archibald
Jessica Beels
James Cassell
Richard Dana
Elsabé Johnson Dixon
Justyne Fischer
Michael Gessner
Laurel Lukaszewski
Megan Maher
Zade Ramsey
Albert Schweitzer
Anne Smith
Ira Tattelman
Helga Thomson
Ruth Trevarrow

preconceptualism.com