Arlington Arts Center Founded in 1976, the Arlington Arts Center is housed in the historic Maury School. It is one of the largest venues for emerging and contemporary artists in the greater Washington DC area. The Center provides studio space for artists as well as operating the gallery.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 5pm
Arlington Arts Center 3550 Wilson Boulevard Arlington, Virginia 22201 (703) 248-6800
FALL SOLOS 2008 October 7 – November 29 Katie Creyts makes fantastic narrative-driven sculptures using glass and found objects. Her pieces are darkly humorous evocations of fairy tales—typically commenting on the infinite disproportion between those stories and actual lived experience. (Reading, PA) Lily Cox-Richard explores the intersection of pop-culture, pseudo-science, and biology with an installation employing images of Elvis Presley, Nikola Tesla, and lightning bolts (show description tentative). (Richmond, VA ) Ben Pranger is fascinated with codes, randomized operations, and blindness. His installation this Fall will include an ambitious, room-filling, floor-to-ceiling sculpture—a cloud of interlocking words all taken from the Book of Revelations and inscribed on separate pieces of wood in braille. (Roanoke, VA) Andrea Chung makes representational paintings, large-scale sculptures, and site-specific installations evoking human geography—specifically, her family’s connections to Africa, China, and India via Caribbean trade in sugar, cocoa, and rum. (Baltimore, MD) Morgan Craig makes large oil paintings of inaccessible architectural ruins—dilapidated, abandoned urban spaces. The paintings are reconstructed from photographs and memories generated while trespassing in condemned, structurally unsound buildings. (Philadelphia, PA) Robin Dana shoots and prints breathtaking large-scale color photographs of destroyed rural landscapes—razed by the mining industry. (Alexandria, VA) PERFORMANCE ART SERIES Every two weeks during this exhibition, one of the experimental galleries downstairs will host a new performance and its attending documentation. Featuring Virginia Warwick (Baltimore, MD), Judy Stone (Riverside Park, MD), and two other artists TBA.
Performance Art at the AAC October 30 7:00 to 9:00 pm -- FREE
Next Thursday night, come see--or even participate--as Baltimore-based performance artists Sarada Conaway, Judy Stone, and Virginia Warwick all perform simultaneously in different galleries inside the Arlington Arts Center.
Sarada Conaway will be offering free makeovers to willing volunteers--and shooting and posting before and after photos of her subjects. Conaway's piece echoes consumer culture's promises of better living and escape from oneself. Yet her makeovers will give each of her subjects a merely different appearance, not necessarily an improved one. The resulting images will reflect institutional uses of photography--for data collection, not glamor.
Judy Stone will continue her ongoing exploration of religion and weaponry. Her piece will include a two-channel video with images of sharpshooting and transcendental meditation, and a live two-person performance providing a literal expression of the Buddhist admonition: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."
Virginia Warwick performed her piece, Underwater Adventure 2008, during the opening of FALL SOLOS 2008. In that piece, the artist dressed as a sea turtle. She wheeled herself into the gallery on a low furniture dolly, declaring that she was hung over, lost, and desperately looking for the ocean--and made absurd demands on audience members as she tugged at their ankles and moaned.
Warwick will perform a different piece based on the same character on October 30. Her work generally has to do with pairing childish fantasy with traditional elements of performance art, such as endurance and audience involvement or implication. Warwick's works are both humorous and decidedly uncomfortable, as audience members try to imagine what sort of interaction is expected of them or even acceptable for them personally.
Documentation from all three performances will be on view in our experimental galleries on the AAC's lower level through the end of the exhibition.
Judy Stone performing her 2005 piece, "Good Job Brownie"
