Damon Arhos

I Love To Hate You

August 3 – September 2, 2018

What does it mean to concurrently love and hate something? To experience physical and emotional attraction and repulsion at the same time? How is it confusing to be affirmed and reviled? This disorienting state of affairs embodies the artworks in this installation: “The Antidote,” “Yesterday’s 30,” and “Trapped.”

The Antidote pays homage to Andy Warhol, who in the 1960s, used silkscreen prints to spotlight iconic American objects, among them electric chairs used to
execute those criminals sentenced to death. Today, two antiretroviral medications—tenofovir disoproxil and emtricitabine—combine to form a drug used to treat and prevent HIV infection. Sold under the brand name Truvada, the blue pills are taken orally. Although many at high risk for the disease take the medication for prevention (for pre- or post-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP/PEP), it does not offer a cure. I intend for these hand-painted, decommoditized halftones to reinvigorate and reemphasize many of the global issues connected to HIV/AIDS today. Most importantly, I want to accentuate the unjust stigma and shame that those who are infected or who may take Truvada as a preventative experience.

Yesterday’s 30 mourns the tragic loss of 30 transgender people in the United States in 2017. In an age when compelling gender issues are receiving renewed
attention, it is clear that many who authentically express their gender identity are forgotten. Further, as the LGBTQ media advocacy organization GLAAD reports, “Transgender people, particularly transgender women of color, face shockingly high rates of murder, homelessness, and incarceration. Most states and countries offer no legal protections in housing, employment, health care, and other areas where individuals experience discrimination based on their gender identity or expression.” I use Super 8 motion picture film for this installation— vintage technology that demonstrates the tenuous relationship between progress and regression.

Trapped offers an attractive dichotomy for each viewer: the rich allure of a lustrous surface versus the intended use for its materials. Rat traps are devices that contain their own narratives. While many find rodents to be frightening creatures, the traps themselves exhibit an inherently minimal and functional existence. Yet, who isn’t attracted to a shiny, bright red surface? What if the objects themselves simultaneously evoke suspicion or uneasiness or dread? I use this metaphor to describe the confusion that many LGBTQ Americans feel when confronted both with embrace and disdain. I combine these mundane objects into a tower—a symbol of strength and power—in order to confront and contradict discrimination, and to reclaim dignity and pride.

Damon Arhos (b. 1967) presents I Love To Hate You as an extension of his art practice, which seeks to expose the destructive nature of prejudice and
uses his identity as a gay American as its frame.

A native of Austin, Texas, Arhos explores how individual experiences influence gender roles, sexual orientation, and human relationships. This process questions stereotypes and assumptions that discourage individuality. Further, it investigates the implications of concurrent affirmation and rejection within disenfranchised communities. His interest in portraiture has developed with diverse expressions of the self as well as of historical figures who have overcome inequity.

A graduate of Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore with an MFA in Studio Art, Arhos lives and works in the Washington, DC metro area.

www.damonarhos.com

Standing on Rugs with Goose

July 6 – July 29, 2018

Standing on Rugs with Goose is a fiction based directly on Braxton Congrove’s
everyday life. She uses the materiality of performance and the staging of an
exhibition space to build and populate a nebulous world for the viewer to enter
and be immersed into. This world is created from a vocabulary of playful
color, perspective shifts and cozy textures. Within this world there is a
proposition of play, a return to adolescent self, in a sense, and the power of humor alongside the pathetic nature of these sculptural objects. Braxton employs discarded materials and mediums in attempt to echo and play with domestic hobby craft connotations of flocking and papiermâché. These craft processes are used to make nonfunctional objects that appear to invite use. This separation and closeness are like a screen of her own design for the viewer to see a more playful and wild world.

Braxton Congrove lives and works in Richmond, VA. She received her BFA from James Madison University and attended the Virginia Commonwealth
University Summer Studio Program. Braxton’s most recent solo exhibitions took place at VALET and Arlington Arts Center. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at ADA, Disjecta, and Not Gallery, among others. She has attended residencies at Bread and Puppet Theater, OTTO’s Abode, and c3:Initiative and is currently preparing for an upcoming solo exhibition at Random Access Gallery in Syracuse, NY.

braxtoncongrove.com

Farther Along

July 6 – July 29, 2018

In early spring, the children at my school became obsessed with spending all of their playground time digging in the dirt. They had never shown a serious
interest in digging before, but it was now a furious passion, as they had somehow come to realize that along with warmer weather and afternoon showers, there was an advent of earthworms to discover just below the playground’s surface. My students were completely fascinated by the slimy creatures they dug up. One afternoon a very precocious 5-year-old excitedly opened her hand and introduced me to their most recent pet, a grub they’d named Harry. “We are being very kind and helping Harry,” she told me proudly. “How?” I asked. “Oh . . . just by giving him food, and letting him take naps, and building him a house!” I tried to disguise my knowing smile as I agreed that this sounded very kind, but advised that they not keep him out of the dirt for too long. Just a few minutes later, as more noticed the excitement around the grub and came to get a look, a small mob of children with a few eager shoves brought Harry’s untimely demise. He was squished in my little friend’s hand, to her sorrow and mild disgust, and despite her purest intentions.

I am fascinated by children’s desires to collect and protect, which echo my own artistic tendencies. They are constantly picking up small objects to hide in their pockets—plastic litter, delicate petals, tiny living creatures—all treasures in their eyes. They want to touch everything they see, but aren’t sure how to interact with these precious objects. They want to possess everything they find, but can’t safely hold on to anything for long.

I am taken back to my own childhood experience in nature, which continues to influence me and re-emerge in my work. The experience begins with boundless awe and wonder: at the delicate natural environments all around me, at the creatures that expertly construct their homes within it, protecting themselves against the world yet still bravely exploring it. Intertwined with my awe is a
deep need to feel a part of it. I want to touch, find, pick up and take home, searching for relics to display on my bookshelf or hide in a collage. Like the children at school, part of me believes that my presence may help in some way, my curious interference a beneficial rather than destructive force. But then the unavoidable disappointment: a recognition of my clumsy inadequacy in the face of nature’s fragility, an understanding of our helplessness against our tendency toward destruction.

My recent work reflects this desire to protect through acts of collecting, preserving and embellishing. I try to understand and capture the feeling of a place through the small, intimate and ornamental refuges that I construct. As I go into the world and find beautiful things, I want to create spaces in which to preserve them. Ultimately, of course my instinct for protection is not put to true use; the insects here were found already dead, the bones and shells no longer needed for a life. What’s left is an intimate memorial for the things under my care, an imagined story of their lives and homes.

Mills Brown was born in Florence, South Carolina in 1993. She received her MFA in Studio Art from American University in 2017, and her BA in English
and Art History from Wofford College in 2015. Mills has shown work in group shows in Washington, DC and has participated in the GlogauAir Artist Residency in Berlin, Germany. Mills lives and works in Washington, DC.

www.millsbrownart.com

Audio Playback

July 6 – July 29, 2018

In her current installation, artist Veronica Szalus dramatically deconstructs a technology from the past to initiate a conversation that is very relevant today. Utilizing technology that, in its time was revolutionary and became a part of almost every household, yet which has now been all but rendered obsolete by time, Szalus places the common compact cassette tape of the 1970s through the early 1990s at the very center of her dialogue.

In Audio Playback, the cassettes present us with both an artifact and a basic visual form. In its day, the cassette tape, a small boxlike object, was used to record audio for everything from top 40 music hits to personal mixtapes to classroom and/or industrial scale teaching. As in the piece, its message and content reached upward and fanned outward, carried in all directions and sometimes ultimately resulting in chaos—as the tangled tapes show us, falling into disarray both near and far from their points of origin. All of this is underscored in the piece by the constant sound of the functioning technology itself, taking the viewer back to the beginning and the now obsolete mechanics.

And yet, in this visually straightforward portrait, Szalus asks the viewer to consider a larger, more pressing question—”the constant transition found at the
intersections of man-made materials with environmental factors and what that means to the viewer and their world.” Throughout the exhibit, the artist invites the viewer to consider the constant interplay between the tapes, which create a wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor construct, and the environmental factors of light, movement, sound, and time, and then contemplate the impermanence that results.

Air flow and the observer’s movements change the nature of the piece—causing motion among the tapes affecting light and shadow thus influencing the viewers
perspective; the raw sound of the cassette technology enhances this quality. Over time, the structure and nature of the piece itself will change, parts will be moved, the quality of tapes will alter and the piece—over long enough time—will ultimately deteriorate and/or be destroyed. These changes are all inevitable and
continuous over time, as the constant sound of the original, and now obsolete, technology reminds us. The result is a visually engaging, thought-provoking conversation, forcing the viewer to consider the impermanence, the constant transformation and change that occur at the intersections of these factors—here and in our own world.

Veronica Szalus lives in the Washington, DC metropolitan area where she creates installation art. In 2011 Veronica received a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and has shown her work at The Mansion at Strathmore in North Bethesda, MD, the Cade Art Gallery in Anne Arundel, MD, Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel, MD, the Arts in Foggy Bottom Outdoor Sculpture Biennial, the Buchanan Partners Art Gallery at George Mason University and at Gallery 42 at University of the District of Columbia. She is also a member of Studio Gallery in Washington, DC.

Veronica studied industrial design at Pratt Institute in New York and jewelry design at FIT. She has served as President of Artomatic, a large Washington, DC based multimedia arts organization dedicated to building community among artists, and has served as a co-chair of PIC Green, an American Alliance of Museums professional network focusing on environmental sustainability. She is employed at the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Association as the Executive Director.

www.veronicaszalus.com

Measuring the Weight of Longing

June 1 – July 1, 2018

There’s a different kind of returning that happens after both parents have died.

In my case, my childhood home shattered and their deaths brought so much stuff to me. My mom’s obsessive collecting of Delftware and my dad’s beloved tools, compelled me to dig.

In this work I sift through the leftovers of lives lived, and look for meaning. I use plaster and clay in this investigation because they are materials of memory and record the surfaces they come into contact with—the scratches and dings of time that illuminate and complicate. I yearn to hear the stories my parents wouldn’t tell, to hold my parents, to feel their touch.

I am exploring time, family relationships, traditional gender roles within the home, matter and death. I want to know how and why we hold onto our loved ones and our sense of self through the things they leave behind. What does this stuff help us to remember, and what do we wish we could forget?

Gayle Friedman is an artist who was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. Friedman studied Anthropology and Spanish at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. One summer, she did an archaeological dig on an island in the Tennessee river and since then is always looking for the hidden. She lives and works in Washington, DC, where for the past decade she has been a jeweler, teacher, and the founder of Studio 4903, a group art studio space. Friedman received a DC Commission on Arts and Humanities Fellowship Award in 2017. She has work in an upcoming show at WAS Gallery in Bethesda, MD. Friedman is an artist in residence at Red Dirt Studio in Mt. Rainier, MD.

gaylefriedmanart.com