ELLIPSE ARTS CENTER
Friday, September 22, 2006
  Project Mobile Ellipse: Visiting Artist Series
As part of Project Mobile Ellipse, Conversions artist Susan Eder presented slides of her photographs and discussed her work this afternoon to Yorktown High School art students.

Susan Eder brought her experience as a working artist and teacher of fine art for eleven years in the New York and Massachusettes college systems, to the Yorktown classroom. Since 2001 Eder has collaboratively photographed unusual aspects of common subjects. By recording what is available to the attentive eye, her work expands upon the viewer's own everyday experiences.

"It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious"
-Alfred North Whitehead
 
  Conversions Artists' Talk
Last night Conversions' artists discussed their work with an enthusiastic public.

Renee Butler quotes Virginia Woolf to describe her piece Movement in B Flat. “Life is a Luminous Halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

Susan Eder stands in front of her work Which Image Never Fades Away?, which was made in collaboration with artist Craig Dennis. These photographs of letter-shaped cloud formations "illustrate the universal human tendency to perceive meaning in abstract shapes."

Amy Glengary Yang's Phosphor series – cyanotypes mounted in lightboxes - stems from a “recent resurgence in both alternative photographic processes and figurative art… [She has] returned to processes that are created entirely by hand and require a labor-intensive methodology.” Yang states that, "Phosphorbox, in particular, also uses a human-scaled mirrored box to refract the lightbox glow in a way that multiplies and confuses the images, and supports an assemblage of totemic sculptural elements: an antique bell jar with pressure apparatus and a sea urchin skeleton lit with a neon element. The use of lightboxes also creates a juxtaposition between cyanotyping, an antique process that predates electricity, and fluorescent lights ---- an omnipresent and symbolically charged modern fixture. The drawn figures themselves are rendered using a contour technique. This hyper-emphasizes the flatness of the image in a way reminiscent of silkscreen or woodcut prints, postmodern anime-inspired art, and other forms of art that place an emphasis solely on the contour line."

Kathryn Cornelius’ work responds to the spaces left between what is said and what is silent. She is concerned with addressing common, overlooked behaviors and collective emotional states that cross cultural boundaries and link individuals in ways that are outside the polarizing polemics of politics, ethnicity, race and class. To explore these themes, she extracts her material from the everyday and employs traditions of performance art, mixed with the methods and subversive agenda of conceptual art. Many of the works utilize repetitive examples of black humor and irony as devices to push perceived levels of comfort and open channels toward reflection and self-awareness. Through the use of video, photography, installation, sound, and sculpture, Cornelius aims to achieve a form through which the viewer can undergo a loss of time in the exploration of universal concepts hidden within the thin lines of purpose that attach us to histories, traditions, and social identities. The intention is to let go of the skin and surface, and slip into a state of challenging silence.

M. Sedestrom Guthrie talks to the public about her photographic series Through the Glass. This body of work documents the graceful passage of time between a window washer and the artist at her day job.

 
Friday, September 15, 2006
  Street Scenes at the Ellipse Arts Center
Art Not Ads, the premier project of an ambitious new public arts program called Street Scenes, launched today at the Ellipse Arts Center. Street Scenes: Projects for DC has been established by local independent art curators to mount temporary public art interventions in and around the DC area. The mobile billboards will be outfitted with banners and high-resolution video displays that will showcase paintings, drawings, video art and poetry from internationally and locally known artists. This project was sponsored in part by Arlington Cultural Affairs, Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources. For more information on this project please visit www.streetscenesdc.com.


DC artist Ian Whitmore, displayed his work on both sides of a mobile billboard, where ads would usually be seen. The mobile billboard drove around Arlington County this afternoon, before it headed into the District.

“Layers factor into Whitmore’s work in image and context. Inspired and informed by the language of art history, Whitmore creates a horizontal sense of movement by referencing paintings by Washington Color Field masters Morris Louis and Gene Davis. Over this imagery, he places such humorous representational imagery as an elephant and apple. Finally, he takes a mop of colors to the whole work.” -Nora Halpern, Art not Ads co-curator

Whitmore used mud as a medium on top of his billboard sized image.

As the sun set in Arlington County, the Street Scenes video truck prepared to launch into the metropolis. Video art by Colby Caldwell, Brandon Morse, Jose Ruiz and Conversions artist Kathryn Cornelius could be seen as the truck cruised around Arlington County on Friday evening.

Brandon Morse’s digital work, non sequiter, 2006 (8 minutes) is a colorful play of movement, reminiscent of computer game images and film effects. Interested in work that is ‘situated somewhere between a specific narrative and a non-event,’ non sequiter moves through its sequence with one shape influencing the movement of the whole. As pedestrians and cars interact around the piece, the artwork will serve as a prism-like mirror to its city environs.” -Nora Halpern, Art not Ads co-curator


“In another twist on language and image, Jose Ruiz presents wifebeater, 2006 (3:55 minutes). Referencing a slang term for the undershirt made famous by Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowolski in A Streetcar Name Desire, Ruiz presents us with a T-shirt seen hanging in a kitchen, filled with a ball and continuously being punched and left swinging. The machismo usually connoted by the garment is ironically bled away in this depiction.” -Nora Halpern, Art not Ads co-curator
 
Ellipse Arts Center is a 3,000 square foot visual arts facility managed by Arlington Cultural Affairs, Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resourses. Our mission is to provide a diverse schedule of high quality programs in the visual arts, providing opportunities for visual artists, as well as developing an engaged and appreciative audience.

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Location: Arlington, VA
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