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Art and the Dialectic of Possibility

Art and the Dialectic of Possibility
by Timothy Brown, Hillyer Director

Elaine Qiu, Kim Richards, and Alexandra Chiou are three solo artists who offer a dialectic of possibility when faced with difficult moments in life. Dialectics start with oppositions that can leave us at an impasse, but each artist finds a way to work through challenging situations by finding peace through personal and collective reflection, guidance when life is unbearable, and joy when overwhelmed by loss.

Elaine Qiu in her exhibition “Every Place We’ve Been” embraces the duality of personal and collective loss, using scrolls and overlapping narratives to unite us across boundaries, while providing space for visitors to grieve and interpret meaning in their own way. As the artist states:

“I create works not just to express but to connect. I am interested in exploring dichotomies, such as power and vulnerability, reality and fiction, rebirth and decay, mystery and conviction, belonging and displacement.”

The liminality of the in-between space that Qiu alludes to is an invitation for viewers to connect across time and space. Scrolls are hung from the ceiling in undulating patterns that make it difficult to determine where the story begins or ends. The binary framework of the personal and the collective is reflected in her use of translucent paper that is painted on both sides. The scrolls thus serve as intersections, spaces where “verso” and “recto” merge, but which are revealed as a shared space of infinite possibilities.

“I want to invite the visitors to reflect on the fluid and dynamic essence of time and identity, and discover that the past is not fixed but a narrative in constant revision.”

In her exhibition “Into the Wilderness,” Kim Richards identifies the universal human condition of hopelessness and/or “impossible situations” we find ourselves in, and offers Biblically inspired paintings to remind us that we are not alone—God is there to lead us and help us find peace.

Most of the paintings feature a solitary figure, a young African American woman (her daughter in real life), who at first appears lost, alone, or abandoned to her own thoughts. The viewer may sense that there is an opposition at work that separates the subject from her objective conditions—a state of mind that places her “in the wilderness.” Similar to the liminal space in Qiu’s work, Richards employs the use of symbol and metaphor to extend the narrative. For example, in her painting “Rest,” Richards includes a raven and a rotten bag of fruit. The raven represents God and the holy spirit, and the fruit serves as a metaphorical way of laying down our burdens. Through these juxtapositions, the solitary figure is guided beyond the finitude of her corporeal existence by the everlasting presence of the holy spirit. As the artist states:

“The paintings in this exhibition embody a narrative of being called by God to help us face the unexpected challenges that lie ahead, so that we can travel through the wilderness, restored and at peace.”

In her exhibition, “Remember/Renew,” Alexandra Chiou celebrates the life and legacy of her late father and her healing journey after his passing. The challenge for Chiou is giving material form to abstract ideas and feelings such as hope, love, joy, and wonder when confronted with an overwhelming sense of loss. The passing of her father was compounded by her family’s decision to move to another location, leaving behind cherished memories.

Through her intricate use of painted cut paper, assembled in complex layers, Chiou uses her art to work through loss and separation by recognizing the dual value of memories and nature. In her piece, “Rebirth,” Chiou recalls a moment in her father’s life when he immigrated to the United States from Taiwan. Recognizing the fluid, boundless, and courageous nature of her father’s migratory experience, Chiou sought in this work to capture movement and transformation. Similar to Richards’s quest for peace, Chiou finds tranquility in the resuscitation of memories and their realization through nature-inspired, abstract forms. As the artist states:

“I hope that viewers can come here and find a sense of healing and a sense of stillness. Also I hope that viewers just remember to be kind to themselves and to celebrate life and all the small moments, big moments, and everything in between.”

The artwork by Elaine Qiu, Kim Richards, and Alexandra Chiou offers a dialectic of possibility that transcends trauma, loss, and abandonment. Through their art, viewers discover peace and beauty amid the “wilderness” that is encountered in our personal and collective experiences.

Newly Selected Artists: Elaine Qiu, Kim Richards, and Alex Chiou
March 2–March 31, 2024

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Newly Selected Artists, July 2022

Gabrielle Lajoie-Bergeron

Mascha-Le Gros Party

 

Mascha – Le gros Party questions the notion of celebration in the intimate, public, and political space. Highlighting evocative traces of a past event, this vivid new corpus allows us to imagine a universe in itself. Inspired by the figure of the “mascha” — the etymological root of the word “mask,” also meaning witch in Low Latin — the exhibition marshals a vast diversity of works, including a number of faux-visages (false faces) made of various materials. “Le gros party” is a French expression meaning, in common parlance, “the big party.” Inspired by festivities and their rituals, the project questions notions of overflow and excess, and the flashpoint at which fiction and reality overlap. It is about identity, power, and relationships. If the party makes it possible to become someone else — to live a rite of passage — what happens when the event overflows beyond the dancing, the singing, the feast, and the simple drinking? The big party invoked by Lajoie-Bergeron refers to the capricious masquerade that we offer in our time, when the celebration begins to lose its glamor and to lurch into incipient violence and other abuses.

 

Gabrielle Lajoie-Bergeron (she/her) is a French-Canadian multidisciplinary artist, curator, teacher, and cultural worker living and working in Baltimore (USA). Lajoie-Bergeron holds a master’s degree in visual and media arts from UQÀM (2014) and has been honored with many international awards and grants (MSCA/ Grit Fund / Plein Sud / Canadian Council for the Arts / Quebec Arts and Letters Council / Argentina Art Council). Her work has been exhibited in Canada, USA, Europe, South America, and Africa, and has been published in multiple magazines and newspapers. Over the past ten years, Lajoie-Bergeron has offered numerous cultural mediation workshops.

My practice questions the mechanisms used in the construction, reproduction, circulation, and normalization of history and images. A broad segment of my work deals with the history of painting and the way in which everything is thrown together. There is a need to reflect on collective and individual narratives through intergenerational and multicultural dialogue. Taking a feminist approach, my explorations bear on the concepts of territory — wild, intimate, public — and belonging, to oneself and others. How should we think about the territorial conquest and appropriation today? How do we delve into them, extract ourselves from them and smash them? Through a series of paintings, drawings, small sculptures, embroideries, objects – found or given – and snippets of written texts, my practice calls into question our interpretations and segmentation of the world, of the body, of history – both in its smaller and larger stories.

Kate Fitzpatrick

There is no anagram for the word anagram 

An anagram is a word formed by rearranging the letters of a different word, using all the letters. Any word that exactly uses those letters in another order is called an anagram. Whether as a literary game, cipher, mysterious verse, or poetry, anagrams provide a channel for making new meaning out of fixed ideas. Anagrams are anchored to their assigned positions and are limited due to their language rules, which are based on a collectively agreed-upon system.

There is no anagram for the word anagram playfully explores the idea of language and meaning by using an imaginary sign system to take the form of text, images, and objects, to break down the construction of our own arbitrary reality. The graphic potential of a sign invites the viewer to consider the possibilities that exist in arrangements that fill in the gap between image and text to explore meaning. In this exhibition, paintings, games, video, and objects offer a dynamic by which to wonder and to create personal meaning through indecipherable signs, which become a vessel for schema and a pathway to search and interpret.

 

Kate Fitzpatrick is an artist and educator based in Alexandria, VA. Fitzpatrick received a BFA in painting from Clarion University of Pennsylvania (1997), an MA in art education from University of New Mexico, and an MFA in drawing and painting from George Mason University (2020). She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship (2016), through which she spent a semester in India working on an art curriculum with local arts teachers. Fitzpatrick is also an art educator who was honored by the Northern Virginia Magazine as a “Northern Virginian of the Year” (2014) for her creation and implementation of an art and yoga program for youths in the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Center. In addition, Fitzpatrick received the Washington Post’s Agnes Meyer Teacher of the Year Award (2013). Fitzpatrick exhibits her work throughout the US and teaches for Arlington Public County Schools.

Sign systems play a crucial part in the social construction of our reality and we often cannot separate these systems from our own experiences. We take understanding these signs for granted and don’t often think about how we came to recognize these signs or if others see them as we do. However, sign systems can take the form of words, images, sounds, body gestures, and objects. All signs communicate something that we may or may not understand based on our own culture and experiences in the world at large. I explore the gap that exists between image and text. The basis of my work centers around my own sign system to create interpretive spaces filled with unknown letter forms. Repetitive glyphs appear as mantras or broken language, glyphs gather and float away, thread is stitched or rolled into a ball, and paint is scraped away to reveal new worlds.

Kristin Adair

Unconditional

Unconditional is a multimedia exploration of the legacy of love that we carry within us as human beings. We are the accumulation of the relationships that came before us, that brought us into the world. Through the pandemic, I have investigated my love map through the lens of a box of letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother while he was stationed in the South Pacific for three years during World War II. I weave a tapestry of images in both paper and video form, including archival images that my grandfather made during his deployment and other found materials, with visual explorations of my own body, examining the experience during the two years of the pandemic of isolation and my own search for connection and true love. The series Unconditional uses both physical and digital manipulation to combine old and new photographs with archival and new audio, weaving stories of the past — those that live inside of me, the present, and the future of my own latent lineage.

 

Kristin Adair is a Washington, DC-based documentary filmmaker and multimedia artist with a background in law and nonprofit advocacy, as well as a lifelong commitment to the work of justice, healing, and creative transformation. She is the founder of Unchained Stories, a social impact production company that uses collaborative film, video, and multimedia art to help create a more just world. Her creative and impact work bridges documentary film, photography, and multimedia. Kristin believes visual stories are the most powerful means to encourage dialogue, promote connection and compassion, and inspire social change. In her personal practice, she explores photographs and moving images as a unique language to build poetic narratives that are intimate, emotional, and transformative.

As a filmmaker, multimedia artist, educator, and advocate, I believe visual stories are the most powerful tools we have to encourage dialogue, promote connection and compassion, and inspire social change. I am committed to collaborative art- and media-making that creates pathways to inner and outer transformation through self-reflection, personal and community healing, and restorative justice. We are living at a transformational moment. The way we will dismantle systems of oppression is through art and stories that reimagine a different world. I continue to deepen my work and collaborations towards this vision for a radical way of healing and safety within ourselves and in our communities, justice built on love rather than retribution.

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Nine Patch: Q&A with Olivia Tripp Morrow

Olivia Tripp Morrow received her BFA in sculpture at Syracuse University, graduating cum laude in December of 2012. Her most recent works are video and sculptural installations that address concepts relating to beauty, intimacy, memory, sexuality, and the commodification of women’s bodies. Morrow’s work primarily utilizes found and donated textiles as material, which are imbued with social and cultural values as well as personal histories. Through her work, Morrow draws connections between status quo notions of beauty/luxury and the perpetuation of harmful social norms and expectations placed on women and girls.  Morrow’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has permanent installations and works on-loan at the National Institute of Health’s Clinical Center in Bethesda, MD, the Anacostia Arts Center in Washington, DC, and the Arlington Art Center in Arlington, VA, where she is a current Resident Artist.

www.otmorrow.com

Your work addresses the human body and the experiences of human bodies through abstract installations. Can you tell us a bit about how you arrived at this theme?

The core of my work and studio practice comes from a personal context. I was twelve when I discovered that my body was perceived by my peers as a mishmash of individual physical parts entirely separate from each other, and which could be rated according to a numerical scale. In high school I learned that my value as a person could be defined entirely by my physical appearance. As an adolescent, my appeal for perfectionism mutated into a crippling fear of making mistakes or being perceived by others as inadequate—physically or otherwise. (This was before smart phones or Instagram, so I would imagine it’s only getting harder for young girls today.) Grappling with notions of beauty, bodies, and intimacy, as well as social structures that attempt to exclude and invalidate people who don’t fit neatly into conventional measures of beauty, have been important to why I create work and what I want it to do.

It’s practically impossible to filter out the incessant bombardment of media and advertisements that reinforce harmful and equally narrow definitions of beauty, bodies, and gender-appropriate behaviors, all of which normalize obsessive fixations on so-called imperfections and breed exclusivity. Once I realized what I was looking at I saw it everywhere: relentless reminders to buy whatever product or thing that would seem to simultaneously present and offer solutions to the apparently boundless inadequacies of my appearance. This subliminal conditioning can be highly effective, but knowing what strings these industries are trying to pull at can at least give us a chance to resist them.

What is the purpose of using donated materials in your work?

For the past few years my work has been driven by donated women’s clothing, undergarments, bedsheets, and other used textiles that I began collecting in 2015. Along with these donated items, many women shared personal stories associated with them: Fond memories of family, travel, and past lovers were contrasted with darker recollections such as an outfit that someone was wearing when they were assaulted. Like much of my favorite work by Sonia Gomes, Shinique Smith, and Senga Nengudi, whose found and donated materials seemed dense with meaning upon arrival, the donated textiles I received were imbued with personal history, familial tradition, social narrative, and political context.

In the context of the current exhibition at Hillyer, Crochet II is a single-channel looped video that utilizes a blanket that was crocheted by my great-grandmother. The significance of the blanket itself lies in its personal and familial sentimentality, and implications of domesticity. The intricate, open floral patterning of the blanket and mesmerizing shapes that at times resemble female genitalia might give the initial impression that it is delicate and decorative. However, its actual strength and durability defy these assumptions once it’s discovered that a person is moving around underneath, pulling and stretching the fabric to its limit. Similarly, the five printed photo quilts in Nine Patch are comprised of thousands of selfies taken while underneath used crocheted blankets, and simultaneously conceal and reveal my body.

While I grew up using crocheted blankets and handmade quilts as functional objects that were made by family members and passed down over generations, I never saw them being made by those family members. By the time I was born, the generation that labored over these textiles had passed, and their tradition and skill set largely disappeared with them. It was only as an adult that I began to consider the labor that went into their creation, and all the implications of that labor in the context of times and places that I never lived in.

Do you plan out your ideas meticulously before making an installation, or are you more improvisational? Can you take us through your creative process?

My materials and their physical properties guide my formal decisions while creating new work. I spend a lot of time experimenting with and discovering the limits of materials, such as how much something will stretch or bend, the weight something can hold, the shapes it can take, the way it might transform in different spaces. Even when I have a clear idea about some new piece or body of work, I rely on my intuition and remain willing to abandon parts of the work in exchange for a potential discovery that I might not find otherwise. Executing procedural steps has never been very exciting to me, so it’s often the curiosity about “what would happen if...” that leads me forward in my studio. There’s freedom in this process; permission for boldness, taking risks, and failure from which better ideas are (sometimes) born.

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You entered art school to study painting and illustration. What drove you to make a shift into abstract installations?

Having started my early work as a painter, I am influenced by formal techniques of painting: color used to create receding or expanding space, light that reveals/conceals, and the varied expressions of human emotion. But as a freshman in college I found working exclusively with paint and 2D surfaces limiting. I wanted to get lost in experimentation with new materials and processes, so I transferred to the Sculpture department. I am also captivated by the potential for artwork to completely transform my relationship to objects and physical space. Exploring scale and spatial relationships and considering the ways we navigate spaces translates well into this medium. In my third year as an undergraduate student, I realized that it was possible to essentially make “paintings” that people could walk under, around, or through, and which could be experienced differently from a multitude of perspectives. Installation has dominated my practice ever since.

What concepts are you currently exploring in your studio, and what kind of work can we expect to see from you in the future?

Lately I’ve been working really hard to push past certain comfort zones in my studio practice. The photo quilts in Nine Patch and the work I made for a simultaneous two-person show (called Within/Between, with artist Jen Noone at the Arlington Art Center) were an important departure from that comfort zone. While making work for Within/Between, one of the things that both Jen and I were reflecting on in our own way was materiality and function. One of my pieces (Ribbon House, 2018) is a large, shelter-like structure that is robust and meticulously constructed using scrap and found wood. Instead of hardware or glue, the structure is held together with materials normally considered decorative or inane: ribbons and beads.

It was a huge challenge to put these two exhibitions together within a week of each other, but the works in each were influenced by each other, so it feels really good to have them open simultaneously. Right now, I am in the middle of changing studios, but I’m excited to start a new residency at the Arlington Art Center and to get back to work.

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Measuring the Weight of Longing: Q & A with Gayle Friedman

Gayle Friedman is an artist who was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. She lives and works in Washington, DC. For the past decade she’s 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. In addition to her solo exhibition at Hillyer, Friedman also has work in the exhibition “Intimate Gathering” opening June 2, at WAS Gallery in Bethesda, MD. Friedman is an artist in residence at Red Dirt Studio in Mt. Rainier, MD.

gaylefriedmanart.com

You often present your ceramic work in tableaus inside boxes, much like jewelry. How has making jewelry informed your work?

I actually see a lot of jewelry in my work—some of it shows up in the techniques I use that are taken directly from metalsmithing, such as incorporating soldered chains in a piece, or using rivets to cold-connect things. I also use sterling silver and even gemstones in some of my work. Several of the pieces in this show incorporate wire to attach or wrap things—all common in jewelry-making.

In this show I’m working with a lot of previously used things—I find their historical and emotional content very compelling. I do the same thing with a lot of my jewelry. In fact, I love working with people who want me to take something they’ve got and transform it into something more relevant or that they can use in a new way. Several years ago I made a series of reclaimed fur pieces that began when a friend gave me a collar from one of her grandmother’s fur coats.

Finally, I think I pay attention to minute details much as a jeweler does, which is easier to do when a piece is small. However, I’m excited to be going larger and breaking free of some of the size, weight and even balance restrictions necessary when making functional jewelry.

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Tools are a dominant motif in your work. Can you talk a little bit about your fascination with tools in general?

The tools go way back to my early childhood. Summers in Alabama are hot and I’d go down beneath my grandparents’ house to the dirt-floored basement to cool off and play at Papa Izzy’s workbench. I can still smell it—that kind of musty, iron aroma. He owned a hardware store before the depression and had quite a collection of tools. Just the objects themselves fascinated me. I remember being especially fond of the vice and his hammers. After he died, dad got all of his tools and created a really cool shop in our basement, where I’d often go to seek refuge. Dad was always doing projects around the house but he never showed me and I never asked how to use any of his stuff. It sure made an impression on me, though.

And after he died, what I most wanted were some of his old tools. At the time I had no idea what I’d do with them. All of the work I’m doing now began when I made a mold of dad’s ball peen hammer and began casting clay replicas of it.

What does your process look like when making your Delftware pieces? Does your photography of decomposing and broken plant materials inform how you treat porcelain?

I studied Anthropology in college and did several digs in Alabama during and after school. I spent a lot of time in the dirt, searching for the tiniest pieces of information. Almost everything we found was broken.

Many of the things I make feel like artifacts, and while they’re not necessarily dirty, I often tear or break them because I figure that just about everything ends up that way. Sometimes I’ll break something on purpose and glue it back together again. Many of the delft pieces in my mom’s collection broke over the years, and one of my dad’s chores was to glue them back together. In fact, this week, a vase he had repaired broke apart again and I had to re-glue it. It was so strange to think that he was the last person to have paid close attention to this crack; his hands were the last to touch the glued surfaces and now I was revisiting them. It felt so intimate, like we were having a conversation.

I’m enamored with my compost pile and find the decay to be quite beautiful. The rust I use in many pieces is a part of that process of decay in metal. We tend to think of metal as dead, but I really like how inanimate materials also have a sort of life that shows up through time and their disintegration or exposure to oxygen.

Tell us about your experiences with Studio 4903. Does sharing studio space with other artists impact your work?

I am so happy to work in shared art studio spaces. I founded Studio 4903 12 years ago because I didn’t want to work out of my home. I wanted to be part of a community of people who I could problem solve with, bounce ideas off of, be inspired by. I also have a firm belief that many together can accomplish much more than an individual on her own. Interestingly, I’m now in two shared studio spaces! I’ve been doing an artist residency at Red Dirt for about a year and a half, and it’s there that I’ve expanded my process beyond creating jewelry.

I find it really interesting how working in proximity to others can affect my work in subtle ways: I’ll try a color of paint I’ve never used before, or tear something and realize that one of my studio mates tears and cuts a lot of her work. And then there’s the conversations we have, sometimes in structured meetings or critiques, but often over a quick lunch or chance encounter. The dialogue helps shape who I am as an artist. I’m curious by nature so I want to know what others think and feel—about what they’re doing as well as about my work. These moments give me ideas, things to incorporate or reject, often a new or better way of looking at my work. They can be very challenging and even crazy-making, but I love it all!

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How has your work evolved over time? What are your next steps in your body of work?

Many people don’t know that I was making ceramic sculpture back in the 90’s. I got lured away from the studio to help found an alternative school, Fairhaven School, in Prince George’s County, where I spent 7 years. When I left the school I knew I wanted to immerse myself in a creative practice again, but didn’t really know where to begin. My ceramic pieces had begun large but had gotten smaller over the years, so it seemed natural to explore jewelry. I loved the idea that I could create these intimate art pieces that people would literally carry on their bodies. Early on I made more conceptual jewelry, such as a series on waste and luxury. One example from that series is a pair of plunger earrings made of silver and terra cotta clay, with a tiny diamond hidden up inside the clay part of the plunger—as if any plunger could tuck away something as precious as that! But I really wanted to have a larger audience for my jewelry, so I began making more functional, accessible work.

More recently I’ve realized that I have different kinds of questions I want to try and answer. That’s where I feel most engaged right now. I’m interested in how people in other cultures treat, use and discard family items and heirlooms. I’m going to spend time doing some research on that and see how I might be able to collaborate with anthropologists and artists.

I’ve also been interested in doing more mantel installations. I think there are lots of people who’ve stored things in boxes because they don’t want to throw them away, but don’t know what to do with them. I’d love to collaborate with them and their stuff—to open those boxes and reimagine those things in new ways.

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