In recognition of the VMFA Fellowship Program’s 75th anniversary, VMFA will exhibit the work of three past Fellowship recipients—Fiona Ross, Pam Anderson Sutherland, and Kendra Wadsworth–at Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, VA. This exhibition is part of VMFA’s Statewide program, a program in which the museum shares exhibitions and programming with partner organizations throughout the Commonwealth.
Reception on Jun 13, 6 – 9 pm, during the 2nd Saturday Art Walk.
Fiona Ross paints forms in radiant colors that feature both deliberate markings and evaporation markings. Some paintings are layered to create the illusion of three-dimensionality, or painted on the back to intensify colors, while others are created through an accumulation of droplets of paint. Through her work she explores the forces of change through the repeated evaporation and hydration of paints and pigments, and aims to create a feeling of balance and awareness of the constancy of natural forces. She constantly explores the physical boundaries and potential of her materials, from ceramic and concrete, to acrylic paint and watercolor. Her site-specific, large-scale drawing installations feature life-sized self-portraits and landscapes rendered from a single line, forming unicursal labyrinths.
Pam Anderson Sutherland is interested in the space between sentiment and pure formalism. Her works on paper, by appropriating and adding to the collected evidence of her life, pay homage to art’s unique ability to give permanence to the fleeting. Each of these collages contains a named gray paint square (intuitive, ponder, rock bottom) along with a letter i/eye. Autobiography housed in abstract narrative appeals to her. So does the textural juxtaposition of the flat with the dimensional, illusionistic space with the literal object, the drawn with the sculptural. It is often in the discarded test mark or the scavenged remnants of an art student’s drawer that the story is found, the sentimental suspended in the ordinary. Sutherland is a collector of minutes and hours, of people and days, of loves and losses, but also of the petty thesaurus scrap that would otherwise end up on the floor. Her art is a conscious organizing of the random, chaotic, or unintentional. It is how she makes sense of the senseless.
Kendra Wadsworth’s work explores the unpredictable nature of existence. Through observing the synchronized rhythms and dimensions of starling murmurations, she attempts to weave a fluidity of motion within stratospheric and geologic planes, changes, and textures.
EXHIBITION VENUE
The Workhouse Arts Center
Building W-16 McGuireWoods Gallery.
Lorton, VA
