05.03.2015 - 05.30.2015
In 1877 Jules Verne published his novel Off on a Comet! in which a comet collides with the Earth. The connection is brief, but the event has pulled people, architecture and a familiar geography to its new surface. The Comet, the Earth and the relocated people survive the catastrophe but all are faced with a new, surreal reality.
I am using this story as a departure point and swapping Verne’s Comet, Gallia, with the Asteroid Perses–twisting this story and playing it for optimistic dystopian space-horror. Asteroid Perses has collided with the Earth. The impact has collected people, molded new geographies, transferred vegetation, and embedded structures into the surface of the small planetoid. Perses, the once barren rock on a degrading orbit has briefly brushed against the surface of our planet and taken with it a small cross-section of our lives - cars, dumpsters, bicycles, fences, city blocks full of architecture. What does it mean to land on/live with/travel on a dead thing amongst ruins? How do you build an understanding of history while completely removed from the source? Can Society rise from the chaos of the Asteroid’s slow, violent, trajectory through space? Will Perses’ orbit cross with Earth’s again? Has anyone on Earth survived?
This work crosses an optimistic and fantastic look at potential end-of-the-world scenarios recent proposals and milestones of space exploration. NASA and JPL’s proposals to capture and explore asteroids, the recent landing on comet Rosetta, the private sector’s interest in Asteroid mining all smashed together with the science fiction of space exploration and the early fantastic travel stories of Verne. I am assimilating the storytelling and information design of Paul Laffoley, the diagraming of Dispensationalism, the engravings of Alfred Kubin, and the otherworldly and epic sci-fi imagery of Jack Kirby into my established visual language.
Christopher Kardambikis is exploring an absurd mythology for the future through drawings, paintings, and books. Currently a resident at Pioneer Works, he is continuing his ongoing Book-a-Month project playing with the book form while experimenting with materials, process, and space. He has co-founded three artist book and zine projects: Encyclopedia Destructica in Pittsburgh, Gravity and Trajectory in San Diego, and 90 Proof Press in Los Angeles. Christopher has been an artist-in-residence at the Art Students League, Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, and the Pittsburgh Center of the Arts. He received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and MFA from the University of California, San Diego. He currently lives in Brooklyn.
Hyperallergic Interview with Christopher Kardambikis.
Kardambikis is the cofounder of Encyclopedia Destructica and Gravity and Trajectory.
SCATTER/STRUCTURE
04.03.2015-04.18.2015
Scatter/Structure is an exhibition of works by VCU’s Crafts/Material Studies Fountainhead Fellows Sarah Nance and Heather McCalla. Considerations of perception, interconnectedness and ephemerality are central to Nance’s work. Sarah’s installations and spatial drawings challenge the notion of fixed states of being, investigating the shifts between presence and non-presence. Often she uses light-responsive materials whose properties are only fully revealed when viewers experience the work through extended time and physical exploration. Heather McCalla’s current body of work explores the complex feelings and relationships associated with home and family. By utilizing recognizable domestic objects, as well as architectural forms and materials, McCalla attempts to exploit the connection to the human body that is inherent in these systems.
Sarah Nance is an American artist working in installation, drawing and sculpture. Light occupies a central role in her work, as it is intimately related to considerations of perception, interconnectedness and ephemerality. In 2014, Nance presented at Third Culture Conversations, a conference bringing together artists and scientists whose research spans the crossover between the two investigative fields. She has also participated in artist residencies in Reykjavík and Skagaströnd, Iceland. Nance completed her MFA at the University of Oregon and is currently a Fountainhead Fellow in Craft & Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Disjecta and The White Box in Portland, OR; Loft 594 in Brooklyn, NY; FrontierSpace in Missoula, MT and SÍM Gallery in Reykjavík, Iceland; with an upcoming show at TRUCK Gallery in Calgary, AB.
Heather McCalla is originally from San Diego, California, where she studied furniture design and woodworking while attending San Diego State University. She obtained her BA in Applied Design in 2006, and worked as a finish carpenter and independent designer for three years before moving to Wisconsin in 2010. McCalla received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2013, where she subsequently lectured in the furniture design and woodworking department before moving to Richmond. She is currently a Fountainhead Fellow in the Department of Craft an Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.
THE SOUL & THE PAWNSHOP
03.06.2015 - 03.15.2015
SEDIMENT accepted all submissions for our March exhibition in celebration of our 13th month! 72 artists near and far shared their work for The Soul & The Pawnshop.
The organizers of the exhibition, Claire Zitzow and Kim Zitzow, designed a book including all artists in the show. See our STOREFRONT page for more information.
Participating Artists:
Amanda McGough
Stine Bidstrup
Cathy Fairbanks
Brad Eisenhauer
Ric Bellizzi
Zhuxin Wang
Caitlin Crow
Caleb Kong
Criss Nichols
Brendan Coyle
Zhibang Liu
Paige Mostowy
Nic Desantis and Effie Naîma Yaman
Jordan Marty
Chris Mahonski
Osservalten
Joe Legzz
Joey Fitchett
Mackenzie Williams
Nina Preisendorfer
Nichole Speciale
Natalie Rae Good
Brannon Via
Kyle Falzone
Brian Bark and Lauren Rice
Julian Cline
Deaudrea Rich
Nima Jeizan
Jason Ly
Daniel Jennigan
Sara Clarken
Nikki Painter
Cosima Storz
Wes McQuillen
Inga Schunn
Iona Hall
Brendan Ginsburg
Jeff Plummer
Remy Bordas
Marisa Finos
Alyssa Delly
Roman Maris
Kylin Murren
Bonnie Staley
Eric Diehl
AC Wilson
Devin Balara
Mickael Broth
Emily Jones
Forest Kelley
Johnathan R. Fleming
Claire Zitzow
Kim Zitzow
Jon Duff
Sherezad Maher
Anna Tregurtha
Dana Ollestad
J Noland
Cathy de la Cruz
Janelle Proulx
Chelsea Wills
Kelly Eginton
Gary Stevens
Christina Macauley
Savannah Knoop
Glenn Porter
Andrew Gottschalk
Asim Waqif
PIN OUTS
Bonnie Staley and Catherine Fairbanks
02.06.2015 - 02.28.2015
"Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualism in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. … It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."
-Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto
Bonnie Staley's recent paintings playfully refigure the female body, possibly lending the cyborgian pin-up women super powers in their fictional world laden with disruptive humor and fantasy. Cathy Fairbanks' paper maché busts stand with an empathetic insistence of the figure as a mutable art object. Empathy is a state of recognition of the infinite difference of others, of ourselves, and it is the backbone of the cyborg. While Staley's women seem to aptly adjust to and even thrive within the environments of which they are both products and agents, Fairbank's cyborg is generally "sick"; ill but surviving. The cyborg allows us to think about the need to adjust to our environment. It is in some ways the form as it reflects the architecture of life and culture.
About the artists:
Bonnie graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a BFA in Fashion Design and minored in Sculpture. She currently lives and works in Richmond, VA.
Catherine Fairbanks, whose work is often a recognition of ephemerality and transformation, has had solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 and since then has attended residencies at The National Textile Institute in Iceland, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, The Wassaic Project, and Loop Arts. Fairbanks maintains a dual pursuit as a nurse and in 2013 and 2014 respectively was a visiting educator at Otis College of Art and UCLA Medical Center on the topic, The Aesthetics of Empathy.
PHARMAKON
(NYC/Sacred Bones/Chondritic Sound/Bloodlust!)
MUTWAWA
(RVA/Ormolycka/Chaotic Noise Productions/Anti-Everything)
and
COTERIES
"Margaret Chardiet was born and raised in New York City. She has been making power electronics/ death industrial music under the name Pharmakon for five years. As a founding member of the Red Light District collective in Far Rockaway, NY she has been a figurehead in the underground experimental scene since the age of seventeen. Several projects emerged from the Red Light home/ venue during the four years Chardiet lived there including Yellow Tears, and Halflings amongst others. She points out that the environment there amongst so many other experimental artists inspired her to keep pushing herself and making increasingly challenging work. She describes her drive to make noise music as something akin to an exorcism where she is able to express, her "deep-seated need/drive/urge/possession to reach other people and make them FEEL something [specifically] in uncomfortable/ confrontational ways." The project is also an opportunity to exorcise her own demons and examine her own wild thoughts by pushing them outside of her head.
Four days before New York noise musician Margaret Chardiet was supposed to leave for her first European tour as Pharmakon, she had a medical emergency which resulted in a major surgery. Suddenly, instead of getting on a plane, she was bedridden for three weeks, missing an organ. "After seeing internal photographs taken during the surgery, I became hyperaware of the complex network of systems just beneath the skin, any of which were liable to fail or falter at any time," Chardiet said. "It all happened so fast and unexpectedly that my mind took a while to catch up to the reality of my recovery. I felt a widening divide between my physical and mental self. It was as though my body had betrayed me, acting as a separate entity from my consciousness. I thought of my corporeal body anthropomorphically, with a will or intent of its own, outside of my will's control, and seeking to sabotage. I began to explore the idea of the conscious mind as a stranger inside an autonomous vessel, and the tension that exists between these two versions of the self." Consumed by these ideas, and unable to leave her bed, Chardiet occupied herself by writing the lyrics and music that would become Bestial Burden, the second Pharmakon LP for Sacred Bones Records.
The record is a harrowing collection of deeply personal industrial noise tracks, each one brimming with struggle and weighted with the intensity of Chardiet's internal conflict. Bestial Burden was recorded at Heaven Street Records in Brooklyn, N.Y. with Sean Ragon (Cult of Youth, Venerence), who also recorded 2013's critically acclaimed Abandon. The album led to extensive touring with Swans, Godflesh, and The Haxan Cloak, as well as a litany of glowing press from the likes of Pitchfork (8.0 review), The New Yorker (full-page print feature), The New York Times, The Fader, The Wire, and more. As an avid listener of noise, industrial, and power electronics, Ragon understood that the usual rules of recording sometimes need to be thrown out the window to capture the best possible performance. He allowed Chardiet to experiment with a mix of live recording and tracking, and some of the vocals were recorded live with a small group of people packed into the studio so she could feed off their energy. The result of those sessions is the bar-raising follow-up to Abandon, and an invitation to go even deeper into the sometimes terrifying, always fascinating labyrinth that is Margaret Chardiet's mind."
2015 2015
Jihyung Yoon, Raven Cole, and Jerry Walters.
01.02.2015-01.24.2015
Stack Overflow: An Civil Engineer's History of Tupperware has been on everyone’s nightstand lately. It’s surely been on ours. It should have been the title of the shown work, but I was out voted and learned something I didn,t know about naming shows after titles of books being pretentious. I can,t agree with that, but I t doesn,t fit well on any customizable sticker we can afford from Uline. and you know what they say, if standardization is the key, then life is the burning fret board. So, by different alleys and avenues we have arrived at a similar conclusion: merry 2015 2015.
DON'T GO IN THE HOT TUB
An exhibition of works by Brianna Rigg, Allison Wiese, and Joe Yorty
11.07.2014 - 12.13.2014
Photographs by Joe Yorty and Brianna Rigg
The disease of imagination is desire. The folds of the carpet still have a stench. The author described the impossible and the artist decided to live it. Standing in the corner has never felt so good. You can pick your nose and you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose. Or maybe you did. You were dreaming of Q-tips and modernism. Earwigs eating up flowers. Reality forgot about you but you’re still here; I know you because I see that you did it.
Don’t Go In the Hot Tub is a group show by Brianna Rigg, Allison Wiese and Joe Yorty; three artists who share in common the impulse to traverse cultural landscapes by investigating Americana through strategies of re-contextualization. Composed primarily of sculpture, or of two-dimensional artworks that flatten the object, Don’t Go In the Hot Tub explores how the patina of domesticity, travel, leisure, and labor, rubs up against the physical reality of the body.
Brianna Rigg treats material exchange as a vital form of experience. By examining, disrupting, diverting, manipulating, and re-distributing the artifact, Rigg is reaching for a sense of place; for connections with unmet strangers; and for a glimpse of history as interpreted through the myths of today. The object, to Rigg, is not merely a signifier, but a vessel of energy. Rigg’s effort is to orchestrate relationships between objects to enliven their energy making it felt in the viewer.
Allison Wiese’s sculpture creates poetry out of common things, repurposing or repositioning common materials to make new meaning. Her past work has employed firewood, fruit, highway signage and a whistled theme-song, but also uses shards of common language – literal texts like slogans, maxims or exhortations and symbolic language such as flags or football “fight” songs. Fascinated by the way in which we look at our surroundings through invisible cultural and political lenses Wiese attempts to subvert inert or oppressive objects, languages and signs by remixing them.
Joe Yorty is largely drawn to all things related to the American domestic interior (and the front and back yard too). Through the use of both found and artist-made objects, Yorty’s sculptures, collages, and photography bring to attention the pathos of the well-weathered throw pillow while holding in high esteem the persistence of the rusting barbeque grill. It is no coincidence that he sources much of the material for his work from home improvement stores. In fact, he has made a conscious choice to explore the possibilities of critique through an active engagement with interior design theory and making work that quite literally functions to decorate the home.
EXPANDED CITIES
An interactive installation across three cities by artists Ela Boyd and Aaron Farley
10.03.2014 - 10.10.2014
Expanded Cities is an interactive installation that occurs within three galleries in different cities simultaneously. SEDIMENT, Richmond, Virginia, Gazelli Art House, London, UK, and Mexicali Rose, Los Angeles, California, all host a light installation of atmospheric color fields through the month of October, 2014. Much like being inside a smoky color gradient photograph, the gallery visitors within one’s field of vision become silhouettes–bodies in space. Along the walls are what appear to be photographic prints that mirror both live and prerecorded occurrences in each cities’ gallery space. One is never sure if they are interacting with the present or the past and begins to realize their own image is beaming into other spaces–causing the same spatial and temporary confusion for gallery visitors in the two other cities. Expanded Cities involves variable programming throughout the exhibition as live performers, dancers, sound artists and performance artists choreograph gestures within the gallery that reverberate through-out the three cities.
View the Expanded Cities website HERE.
Aaron Farley is a photographer and video director based in Los Angeles. He is also the partner and curator of THIS Gallery in Los Angeles.
Ela Boyd is a recent graduate of the UCSD Visual Art MFA program. She is originally from Hollywood, CA and received her BFA from California College of Arts in San Francisco. She currently lives and works in London, UK. In her work, she explores issues of the relationship between media, representation and visual perception with the interplay of light, space and time. Her methodology involves collapsing spatiotemporal modalities using photographic images, sculpture and new media installation works. Her work has been included in the Pacific Standard Time Exhibition, Phenomenal Light, Space and Surface at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego Museum of Art, Oceanside Museum of Art, LA Center for Digital Art, Lawrence Ascher Gallery, Barnsdall Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and Pharmaka Gallery. She recently attended an artist residency at Wassaic Project in New York, Est Nord Est in Quebec, and has been included International exhibitions in Canada and Portugal.
SMOKE SIGNALS
An exhibition of collaborative works by Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas and Genevieve Lowe
09.05.2014 - 09.27.2014
Recognizing the present day—at the turn of a fully technological era—as an ideal moment to investigate printmaking’s extra-ordinary associations with dissemination, information, and transformation, artists Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas and Genevieve Lowe began a dialogue of visual communication on paper. The exhibition at SEDIMENT entitled, Smoke Signals, displays the results of an extended long-distance volley of imagery, investigating modes of communication and successful translation. Utilizing printing techniques, beginning with a variety of initial material prompts, the artists enacted an exploration into historical (analog) and modern (digital) methods of printmaking’s evolving forms - echoing many of the advances in daily communication. The ongoing material discussion of artistic authorship was structured around five prompts posed various manners of expression relating and responding to printmaking methodologies.
The resulting artworks, made using traditional as well as digital printmaking techniques, highlight the intra-dependency of art and technology. The artists discovered and embraced both communication lapses inherent to a separation of subjectivities, as well as surprising moments of clarity that suggested a presence of collective unconscious connection. These prompts and their results spring from an interpretation of smoke signals - one of the oldest forms of visual communication.
Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas is a visual artist living and working in Richmond, VA. Originally from Denver, Colorado, she received a BA in liberal arts from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Before moving to Richmond in August of 2013 to teach at VCU, Paloma was a Dean’s Scholar at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI where she earned an MFA in Printmaking. Her work adapts and appropriates the vernacular of the many regions she’s called home and traces the self-conscious search for cultural roots as a first-generation American.
Genevieve Lowe currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Genevieve was born and raised in the mountains of Idaho and received her BA from Colorado College in Colorado Springs, CO. In 2013, Genevieve received her MFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. Concerns around wilderness, the portrayal of the American landscape and environmental health weave throughout Genevieve’s work as she explores what combination of elements (geologic, living, and atmospheric) must converge in order to form and convey a sense of place reflective, in particular, of the American landscape.
RVA Noise + SEDIMENT Present:
JASON LESCALLEET
(Intransitive, RRRecords, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon, Chondritic Sound...)
"Lescalleet's sound world occupies a space between noise, contemporary composition, and minimal electronics. Using decidedly primitive tactics and equipment (e.g. antiquated reel-to-reel recorders, damaged tape, etc.), his work focuses on extreme frequencies and microscopic audio detail".
ttps://www.facebook.com/JasonLescalleet
https://lescalleet.wordpress.com/
http://pitchfork.com/features/the-out-door/8940-double-time/3/
Lescalleet performs and screens his film, Trophy Tape– a curated collection of videos from various artists produced for his album.
Trophy Tape Trailer:http://vimeo.com/91550867
With local support from:
PHOTOBLASTER
RVA Noise + SEDIMENT Present:
GENEVA JACUZZI
(Los Angeles CA)
http://www.genevajacuzzi.com/
"Geneva Jacuzzi (born Geneva Garvin) is an LA-based songwriter, musician and visual artist who is known for her unique style of synth driven bedroom pop recordings, theatrical stage personas and retro style video art. Her lyrics describe blood being thrown onto fire, clown-like machines in search of sadness and the raging monologues of future/past elemental beings. Her videos and live performances portray the story of a once abundant Self being shattered into a variety of other personas such as Dracula, Mime, Zygote, Rozbo, etc. all being played by Jacuzzi, and all cannibalizing-commodifying their rape revenge upon the idea of an original Self which is now lost if not mythical, somewhere in the Islands of the Jacuzzi".
With Special Guests:
KARACELL
http://www.soundcloud.com/karacell
IKAGURA
http://www.soundcloud.com/Ikagura
RVA Noise & SEDIMENT present:
CONTAINER
(Providence RI/Spectrum Spools/Liberation Technologies)
"Container is one of the most intense acts making techno right now, or “weird techno” as he may describe it....or maybe even “post-techno.” Container makes a chaotic wall of disgusting sonic layers all built over a techno beat, and it is a unique and intense listening experience".
https://soundcloud.com/gentledefect
TIMEGHOST
(Providence RI/full length LP forthcoming on Load Records)
"Symbol-laden angular electronic meditation, synchronized to flickering lights and altered by prosthetic sensors".
https://soundcloud.com/nexykl
With local support from:
MUTWAWA
FLESH CONTROL
Video projections provided by CIVIC TV
RVA Noise + SEDIMENT Present:
JEROME
(Providence RI/Chapel Hill, CGI Records/ex Lazy Magnet)
"Having fully devoted the better part of 2 decades tearing music apart from every conceivable angle and putting it back together as only he can, the wanderer also known as JEROME has constructed some of the tuffest house abstractions using only what will fit in the backseat of his '81 Rabbit. Not much is known about this lazy magnet but his sound is indeed magnetic, huge round bass lines ground the unrestrained dubby house experiments happening around it. The results produce a hypnotic and moving dancefloor experience."
https://soundcloud.com/mr-lazymagnet
CLAIRE
(NYC/Atlanta/RVA Acoustic Division/ex Featureless Ghost)
"Techno that sucks the air out of the room and charges the void with an inescapable atmosphere of enchantment and control. Distilled from smoke and mirrors and spun from the hypnotist's lyre, her machinery leaves its trace everywhere, as fragments of desire dissolve into the presence of total submission. An intoxicant of the most refined beauty..."
https://soundcloud.com/claireelisetippins
Visuals provided by Fantastic Lands
http://fantasticlands.tumblr.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/FantasticLands/videos
WOVEN Community
06.13.2014 - 06.28.2014
RVA Noice + SEDIMENT Present:
PEDESTRIAN DEPOSIT (LA)
"The music of Jonathan Borges and Shannon Kennedy of Pedestrian Deposit could best be described as highly composed, focused and dynamic, experimental music that draws on their widely varying music talents. From Borges’s interest in such areas as electronics, tape loops, sampling, field recording, and feedback, to Shannon’s use of classical instruments, contact mics and manipulated metal objects, the duo combine elements of musique concrete, ambient, drone, classical and harsh noise."
http://pedestriandeposit.bandcamp.com/
Local Support from
SCANT
CREEPING
With Special Guests
La La Jacuzzi (Boston)
La La Jacuzzi is from Boston and residents at the Smokey Bear Cave. Some of the members are from LSDV and Fume Hood. "We aim to cleanse the pores, relax the rumpus and soothe the soul with a combination of warm massaging jets, and a self cleaning filtration system."
POSSIBLE FUTURES
05.02.2014 - 05.17.2014
THE SMILE FACE MUSEUM
03.20.2014 - 05.17.2014
The Smile Face Museum was founded by Mark Sachs in 1992 in his Silver Spring, Maryland basement. It operated for 2 years in that location, with over 400 hundred items on display.
In 2014, The Smile Face Museum will be installed in Brooklyn, New York in the basement of a private garden apartment. Its collection now encompasses more than 1000 objects, and it will be on display March 30 - April 27. The official website was developed to catalog The Museum and make its collection available for viewing World Wide.
The spring 2014 presentation of the Smile Face Museum is organized by Adrienne Garbini, and hosted by 228 1/2. It will feature the founding collection, and the collections of Rita Mageary and Emily Stebbins. The Museum will also present exhibitions of contemporary artwork.
The Museum will host several events, including a tour, a panel discussion, and a film screening. For more information, check the Visit page. Please note our limited hours.
During the run of The Museum, there will be a satellite exhibition of duplicates from the collection and special editions from our shop at the new artist-run space SEDIMENT in Richmond, Virginia.
SENSATIONS
04.04.2014 - 04.26.2014
SEDIMENT is pleased to present Sensations, an exhibition of over eighty drawings by Bryan Lewis Saunders and Nicole Bailey. The exhibition includes forty drawings produced between Saunders and Bailey that explore shared experiences of pleasure and intimacy. These drawings, created simultaneous to physical experience, explore both artists' perception of sensation. Viewed in totality, the project speaks to similarities and differences in the experience of touch, pleasure and intimacy between persons of different genders, ages, and life experiences.
Along with the collaborative works are forty drawings of the self-portrait series Bryan Lewis Saunders began almost twenty years ago. Since March 30th, 1995, he has created at least one new self portrait every day, an immense archive that to date includes over 8,000 works. Saunders is renowned internationally for his drawings, in particular the series Self-Portraits Under the Influence, as well as his spoken-word performances he calls "stand-up tragedies". He has been interviewed by the Huffington Post, The Guardian, Wired, and DisInfo among others, and exhibited internationally at Catalyst Projects, D.C., MIKA Gallery,Tel Aviv, and Mediamtic, Amsterdam.
bryanlewissaunders.org
From the Artists:
"I chose to exhibit the Sensations drawings for the similarities in perceptions of good sensations between people of different sexes and genders. These drawings show a consenting, loving relationship outside of the porn and television industry, 'Family Values' politicians, the Church, evolutionary psychology scenarios, and celebrity paparazzi photos.
As I wasn't responsible for the concept of illustrating sensations, I used many of my drawings as opportunities to "feel out" myself in space to challenge my body image issues.
The similarities in the sensations between someone who draws himself every day, with clear perception of himself, and someone younger, who avoids mirrors and has had fewer life experiences, is the pleasant, unexpected result."
- Nicole Bailey
"On March 30th 1995 I started drawing at least one self-portrait everyday for the rest of my life. One of the discoveries that emerged from this act was the awareness that every single physical sensation that occurs spontaneously inside my body is to some degree painful. With the exception of ticklish itches on the surface of my skin, I have never had the experience of one of my bones, muscles, joints or internal organs just randomly start emitting feelings of pleasure. The body doesn't work like that. As a solitary creature my body only creates sensations when it wants to let me know something is wrong. When all is right I feel nothing. That along with the fact that every pain asks me to make sense of it, or take meaning from it, makes pain seem dominant and controlling and yet totally absurd. Positive pleasurable feelings must always take effort and need to be prompted or provoked.
As an intimate social creature things are different and one can easily be overwhelmed by pleasurable sensations inside the body when interacting with a partner. Over a period of several weeks Nicole helped me document this awareness by drawing these sensations 'in the moment' (while we were experiencing them) often with beautiful, exciting and playful results."
- Bryan Lewis Saunders
RVA Noise + SEDIMENT present:
JOHN WIESE
John Wiese is an artist and composer living in Los Angeles, California. He works primarily in recorded and performed sound with a focus on installation and multi-channel diffusions, as well as scoring for large ensembles. He has toured extensively throughout the world, covering the US, UK, Europe, Scandinavia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. He is also a founding member of the concrète grindcore band Sissy Spacek.
www.john-wiese.com
Local support from:
Broadcastatic is the work of Tommy Birchett a long standing figure in the local experimental music community. Broadcastatic, originally a local richmond collaborative radio show, is an audio/video project focused on active manipulation of input/output routing using a combination of improvisation, mechanical manipulation, feedback loops, and randomization.
I.G.M. is the work of Ian McColm, a multi-instrumentalist and composer based out of Richmond, Virginia. A drummer since the age of 8, he was admitted to Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Jazz Studies under the tutelage of master drummer Billy Hart. McColm has performed nationally and internationally in a variety of ensembles including the drone/ambient duo, Nagual, as well as under his solo moniker, I.G.M.
www.igmnoise.com
YOU GET WHAT YOU GET
03.07.2014 - 03.28.2014
You Get What You Get is a survey of recent works by San Francisco-based artist Whitney Lynn. The exhibition incorporates an opening night performance as well as a selection of works utilizing a variety of materials and mediums from sculpture, photography, video and works on paper.
Mining American history, popular culture, and art historical tropes, the works on display at SEDIMENT include sculptural traps, an archive of hand-painted signage, and spatial subjects that share titles while expanding their specific meanings. Lynn’s work is both dark and humorous; diagramming social, political and historical relationships, exploring themes of disjunction within systems of value, context and reenactment, and calling to question places where boundaries are in flux.
A return to Richmond, Lynn graduated from VCU’s department of Sculpture + Extended Media before receiving her MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has an upcoming exhibition at the Torrance Art Museum and has previously shown work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Catharine Clark Gallery, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. She currently lives and works in San Francisco and is Visiting Faculty at SFAI in New Genres and the History and Theory of Contemporary Art.
http://www.whitneylynn.net/
MIND THE GAPS
02.07.2014 - 02.28.2014
Before embarking on a journey travelers are prompted by a message to “mind the gap”. That is, to be aware that there is a potentially dangerous area between our step from solid ground to that of a moving system of parts we rely upon to transport us to another place. This gap is a real space wherein a stiletto may slip, pocket change may drop, a cell phone, grocery list, or love letter may disappear. It is just one distance we must mind in the world of objects. What other spaces do we cross both physically and psychologically, in trust they do not widen in mid-step and leave us suspended, or worse–to fall?
Compressing, widening, and reorienting the stuff of the world is what artists can do. Shifting spaces between the real and simulated, the poetic and overly definitive, the humorous and desirous, between missing the point and embracing the beauty in not-knowing. Mel Bochner wrote, “ In a world which is probably not more dehumanized than ever before, awareness of distance is a principal matter in functioning. Between objects are distances, not separations.” While discrete and autonomous objects denote separation, Bochner states that distances imply detachment which requires interdependency and a contextual relationship.
Our inaugural exhibition at SEDIMENT features five artists currently living in Richmond, Virginia. The work of Jon Duff, Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas, Courtney McClellan, David Kenedy, and Ryan Crowley span a variety of mediums and processes. The interludes between their distinctive works become a net of connections that allow for a multiplicity of perspectives on each piece and the exhibition as a whole. We are aware to mind the gaps.
Artist Bios:
Jon Duff was born in Oconomowoc WI and received his BFA from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He exhibited his sculptures and paintings throughout Minneapolis, including shows at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Minnesota Center for Photography, and the 1419 gallery. In 2012, Duff received his MFA from the Mount Royal School at the Maryland Institute College of Art. While in Baltimore, his work was shown at City Arts, School 33, the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art as a finalist for the prestigious Walter and Janet Sondheim Award. Duff is a 2011 alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and attended the Triangle Artists’ Workshop in 2013. His work has been published in New American Paintings, and he is currently a part of the juried group show, Live Amateurs, at MINT gallery in Atlanta.
Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas is a visual artist living and working in Richmond, VA. Originally from Denver, Colorado, she received a BA in liberal arts from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Her interest in printmaking led to an internship at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California where she became an Artist in Residence and instructor. Before moving to Richmond in August of 2013 to teach at VCU, Paloma was a Dean’s Scholar at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI where she earned an MFA in Printmaking. Her work adapts and appropriates the vernacular of the many regions she’s called home and traces the self-conscious search for cultural roots as a first-generation American.
Courtney McClellan is an artist and writer from Greensboro, N.C. She received her BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008, and her MFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2013. She has shown nationally and internationally. Currently, she is the Fountainhead Fellow in the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Much of her practice begins and ends as text. Enacting what critic Claire Bishop calls “uncreative writing,” her intermedia studies result in hybrids: performing objects, objectified text or performative writing. Her work lives in gray areas, tension and a disbelief in absolutes, searching for a more complex relationship between work, artist, and viewer.
David Kenedy grew up in Virginia and was raised by parents in the Unification Church, brought to America in the 70’s by Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Photography is his primary medium of choice for visual communication; fluctuating between both fictional and non-fictional subject matter as a means of reporting his own individual human experience. His early introduction to photography came through his first point-and-shoot film camera given to him by his grandmother when he was very young. David has no formal training in visual arts, but rather has spent the last 10 years self-educating. Along with fine art photography, Kenedy works within a range of music and lifestyle editorial and alternative photojournalism. He is based in Richmond, Virginia.
Ryan Crowley was born in 1983 in Boston Massachusetts. He received is B.F.A from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and his M.F.A from Virginia Commonwealth University. He currently lives and works in Richmond Virginia.
