Ani Hoover Rubber Garden
April at the Linda Matney Gallery Features New Exhibitions and a Film Screening
The Linda Matney Gallery and John Lee Matney, LTD invite you to participate in our spring projects focusing on works by artists from China, Chicago, New York, Hampton Roads and elsewhere.
Our April schedule features two new exhibitions along with events on the 25 and 27 at the gallery and the Peninsula Fine Arts Center. Also, note that April 19 is the final day of Transposition at Highpoint, 3300 West Broad Street, Richmond. All of our April events and exhibitions are shown below:
Zhengyang Huang's Image At Surface Installation, April 13-20.
Opening Reception, Saturday, April 13, 2-4pm
Walk-in hours April 18-20, 11am-5pm or call for appointment April 16 and 17
Materiality is not limited to touchable objects. The image a video/film creates is also a moving material, like fluttering fabric. When we see a material, the visual information triggers our tactile cognition and a sense of materiality so that we recognize how this material will feel if we touch it. This phenomenon happens with digital images as well. Giuliana Bruno, who studies surfaces in different media, says that an image is a material that manifests itself on the surface of media. For me, a video has virtual materiality, but a video does not manifest its materiality in the same way as a physical object. For instance, in the videos I made for Majiang Project, the filmic settings lack a sense of space and seem flattened. The floral patterned and saturated red and green colors in the background makes the video’s image bright. The cut between scenes is smoothly connected with body gestures. The red seamlessly transitions into the green as if two pieces of fabric were stitched together. The whole video triggers a sense of materiality, similar to that triggered by fabric. It is not touchable like physical fabric, yet as virtual materiality, it influences us on a sensory level.
However, I do not intend to just make videos. I am more interested in connecting this virtual materiality with the physical materiality in the physical space we approach. The whole work is to be a continuum of surfaces on which the materiality manifests itself. This continuum is formed as the digital surface and the physical surface are stitched together. In one of my video installations, a video shot with a peephole lens is projected onto a sink full of black-dyed water. The black-dyed water is so still and reflective that it almost becomes a solid, while the projected light layers a soft, moving and absorbing image on the dark solid surface. In the video, the peephole lens is constantly being touched, blocked, wiped, blurred, stained, and cleaned, as if the membrane of water is touched from beneath. What is being touched is both the surface of the lens in the video and the surface of the physical water, as the two share one connected surface. The video’s virtual materiality not only can be connected with a physical materiality but also can connect the physical space we move through. In another installation, four sets of objects and projected videos are set up in four different rooms, where the viewer walks to each room to see the whole work. As the videos are synced up with each other, what’s been seen in the video in one room continues in the next room. From the first to the fourth room the four different videos connect different space. In these and many other ways, we perceive and sense the virtual materiality physically.
Accumulate: Works by Ani Hoover, Opening Reception, Saturday, April 27, 3-6pm
Meet the Artist and Enjoy Refreshments
Linda Matney Fine Art Gallery, 5435 Richmond Rd, Williamsburg VA
Ani Hoover is a professional artist working in the field for over 20 years. She began her art career as a painter and received both a BFA and MFA for painting. Around 2010 her work began to shift to focus on sculpture, installation and fiber-based practices. Her process embraces recycled materials and low-tech methods for creating art. She favors materials and processes that link her the DIY movement and craft making culture. Hoover’s work is in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the University of Buffalo’s Anderson Gallery, and in many public and private collections around the country.
Meet Michael K. Paxton at the Screening of Peter Hartel's Film, Work at Hand at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center
Art After Dark, Thursday, April 25, 6:30 pm -8 pm, Cash Bar
101 Museum Drive, Newport News, Virginia
ABOUT THE FILM
Work At Hand chronicles the life and work of the artist, Michael K. Paxton. From his humble beginnings in the hills of West Virginia to his time as an art student at Marshall University in the gritty, industrial town of Huntington, to graduate school at the University of Georgia, Athens. During the heady heyday of the emerging scene of punk music, theater and performance art, and the era of bands like R.E.M., The B-52’s, and Pylon, Michael dove into the mosh pit of experimentation and free expression while working jobs at factories, on the railroad, and as a newspaper printer. Later, his battle to overcome stage 4 cancer would become an integral part of his story and a testimony to a sense of urgency and empathy in his paintings. Michael's working-class, Appalachian roots continue to inform his art today.
Read more about the artist and film-makers Peter Hartel and Libi Hake at WorkatHandFilm.com
Michael K. Paxton
Michael K. Paxton is a Chicago-based artist and sixth generation West Virginian with a career that spans more than 40 years. Michael has produced one-person exhibitions, received national and international grants and fellowships, private and public commissions and much critical support for his work. His supporters include the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Inc., Illinois Arts Council, Air le Parc, Project, and Research Center, Jentel Artist Residency Program, Chicago Federation of Labor, Marshall University and Columbia College.
Michael is an adjunct faculty member of Columbia College, Chicago since 2005. He holds a B.A. in Art from Marshall University, 1975, and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from The University of Georgia, 1977
Final Week of Transposition at the Highpoint, View or Select Works April 15-19, 9am-5pm or call us for Updated Information. View Works on ARtsy.
Transposition continues through April 19 at the Highpoint at 3300 West Broad Street, Richmond, Virginia Works can be reserved at the gallery or via www.artsy.net/linda-matney
Transposition is a collection of works curated in conjunction with Landmark Arts & Cultural Exchange, an American group that helps coordinate opportunities for important contemporary arts and artists to travel between countries and facilitates for meaningful cultural exchange.
The Transposition works display this freedom, featuring an array of subjects, moods, and methods, from landscapes to figures, the deeply personal to the cautiously socio-political, and the serious and contemplative to the whimsical and ironic, all presented in varying degrees of realism and abstraction. Working in oils, the artists maintain a conscious connection to Chinese ink painting traditions while utilizing modes familiar in Western art such as naturalism, expressionism, and surrealism.
Thank you to our sponsors: McKim Williams, Casa Architecture, Tusk Creative Agency and Lou Ann Zell
A few thoughts on Transposition From David Morrison and Claire Accardo of the Highpoint
In contrast to the solo shows that we host, having a selection of contemporary work by various artists bound by their shared nationality provided us with a diverse selection of styes and interpretations. It was interesting to study the the western influence on the artists' work and to see their interpretation on the various modes of expression and the influence they brought to the traditionally western styles. Attendees to the opening reception were struck by the wide range of styles and expressions and there wasn't one person that left without finding something that resonated. Most stayed far longer to view the work than previous shows
Lou Ann Zell and Chip Goldstein at the opening reception
Travel Beijing Brothers
Claire and I particularly enjoyed the three works by Chunsheng Yeng. Apart from the masterful technique, the composition and coloring really gave you a feel for artist's interpretation of the subject matter.
The Dream
There were more than a few people who had traveled to China and had very personal reactions to paintings of locations. One particular guest, Kevin Trinh, seemed to recognize the location of "The Dream" by Peng Lie Hong
Speaking to the the difficulty in simply getting this work here, we never would have had the opportunity to host this work had it not been for the work and effort of Lee Matney, his gallery, and all the sponsors. It was a privilege to showcase such a varied and fine collection of works.
Wind, 2017
We Are
Baylee Wang, Xiaofei Gao, and Lee Matney at the Opening Reception
View of the exhibit at the Highpoint
