Photography and Film
Guest Artist Lecture
October 15    2:00 pm
Commons Theater

907 Floyd Ave

In his photographs, Simen Johan explores darkly the human proclivity towards fantasy and our attempts, knowing or otherwise, to craft alternate realities for ourselves. Merging traditional photographic techniques with digital methods, Johan creates each of his images from as many as one hundred negatives, having first constructed or discovered each element and photographed it on film. Across his body of work, the viewer is urged to ponder the relationship between the real and the artificial or imagined.

Simen Johan is an internationally exhibiting artist with works in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Cleveland Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Denver Art Museum. In 2004-2005 he was the subject of a one-person museum exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, Norway, that also traveled to the National Art Museum of Lithuania and Stiftelsen 3,14 in Bergen, Norway. Johan has recently been included in group-exhibitions at the University of Iowa Museum of Art; the Neuberger Museum of Art; the George Eastman House; the International Center for Photography; and the Australian Centre for Photography. In 2003 Twin Palms published his monograph Room to Play. In 2002 he received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Simen Johan was born in Kirkenes, Norway, in 1973. He was raised in Sweden and has resided in New York City since 1992.

Jules De Baliincourt’s exhibition record includes solo exhibits at Zach Feuer, NY and upcoming exhibit at Thaddeus Ropac, Paris France. Group exhibits include Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA and MASS MoCa, MA.  For more information please visit: www.lflgallery.com/julesdebalincourt

Installation by Maya Hayuk
(with sound by Jonathan Coward)
and paintings by Alexis Semtner

Opening: Friday, October 3, 7-10pm
Show runs Oct. 3-31
Gallery hours: Thurs-Sat 12-5
or call for appointment

TRANSMISSION
321 Brook Rd.
Richmond, VA 23220
 804.200.9985

Image: Alexis Semtner, “Jewel,” oil on linen

Anti-Branding: Following the Work
October 8th at 10:00am
Fine Arts Building, Room 238
1000 West Broad Street

Kate Kretz’s work has appeared in over 30 International and 65 domestic newspapers including The Herald Tribune, The NY Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, & has been featured in ArtPapers, Surface Design, Vanity Fair Italy, ELLE Japon, and FiberArts magazines. Her controversial painting “Blessed Art Thou” received news coverage on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN & Fox networks, and hundreds of news sources around the world.

Exhibitions include the Museum of Arts & Design, Van Gijn Museum, Museo Medici, Exit Art, The Frost Museum, Wignall Museum, Huntsville Museum, Georgia Museum of Art, Penn State University, Morris Museum, Georgia State University, Telfair Museum, Agnes Scott College, Georgia State University, Catholic University, The Fort Lauderdale Museum, and The Fiber Arts Foundation.

Her lecture will focus on her work, which moves through drawing, painting, sculpture, and fiber-based media.”

Presented by the Department of Craft/Material Studies

“You don’t know what you’re in for. It’s a surprise that tells you something about yourself that you already know, but are not aware of. You experience what being human is all about.”
-Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran

“Kick off your shoes (literally) and step into a universe like none other. Informed by the monumental discovery of mirror neurons and created alongside world-renowned neuroscientists, (according to neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, “The discovery of mirror neurons is the most important unpublicized story of the decade,” doing for psychology what DNA has done for biology), Amy Caron’s beautifully complex two-room installation-performance drives multidisciplinary art headlong into new territory. Her warped lab/lecture/experiment gives a nod and a wink to hard science while cleverly activating her “test subjects” to cheer, cringe, and discover through experience, a new awareness of the profundity of our interpersonal world.

The Waves of Mu experience will offer a unique multidimensional education, demonstrating the scientific and empirical integrity of mirror neurons. It will also present thought-provoking connections between mirror neuron deficiencies and autism spectrum disorders, thereby challenging our cultural concept of normality and its effect on human evolution.

Waves of Mu is presented as part of Room, a commissioning program created by Performance Space 122 to encourage artists to collaborate with experts outside the traditional performing disciplines.

 from performance space 122

Sentiment and Sentimentality: Some Thoughts on Ree Morton and Robert Gober
Tuesday, October 7 at 3:45 pm
Life Science Building, room 155
(Northwest corner of Cary and Harrison Streets)

Curator Helen Molesworth is well known for (among other things) her highly acclaimed exhibition and corresponding catalogue of 2006 at the Wexner Center for the Arts titled “Part Object Part Sculpture”. In it, she reconsidered the Minimalist/Post-Minimalist paradigm assumed about post-war contemporary sculpture as assumed by art history. She served previously as contemporary curator at the Whitney Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Molesworth was recently appointed curator of contemporary art at the Harvard University Art Museums, including Harvard’s oldest art museum, The Fogg that opened to the public in 1895. Her visit to VCU will be an opportunity for Molesworth to present her considerations about sculptors, Robert Gober and Ree Morton.
www.psupress.org
www.boston.com/ae/theater
Presented by the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media.

Surface Paintings by Cindy Neuschwander  and Robin Braun Opens at the Page Bond Gallery October 3, 2008

The Page Bond Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by Cindy Neuschwander and Robin Braun. Neuschwander (MFA Painting and Printmaking 1987), continuing her exploration into the depth of the “two-dimensional surface”, reveals new works on paper. Combining an additive and subtractive process with the application of multiple mediums, each surface develops to reveal instinctive marks and heavily weighted colors. Braun, known for her airy oceanscapes of the Caribbean and Atlantic coasts acts as an interpreter and catalogs our relationship to the natural world during an era of raised environmental concern. These works by Robin Braun and Cindy Neuschwander will be on view at the Page Bond Gallery, 1625 West Main Street, with an opening reception honoring the artists, Friday, October 3, 2008 from 7 to 9 PM. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery from Wednesday October 1 through Saturday November 1.

The Page Bond Gallery, located at 1625 West Main Street, exhibits contemporary art in a wide variety of media and disciplines including painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture and ceramics. The gallery acts as a showcase for the work of emerging as well as established artists with local, national and international reputations. Work by Cindy Neuschwander and Robin Braun opens at the Page Bond Gallery with an opening reception for the artists on Friday, October 3 from 7 to 9 PM and will be on view through November 1, 2008. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 10 to 5 PM and by appointment.
www.pagebondgallery.com

Friday September 26, 2008, 8:00 pm - 9:30 pm
Singleton Center for the Performing Arts
Sonia Vlahcevic Concert Hall Monroe Park Campus

Besides being a virtuoso classical guitarist, Koster is widely regarded as this country’s leading authority on flamenco guitar.While still in his teens, Dennis Koster began his career as a flamenco guitarist. Today’s flamenco has become a jazz-influenced and infused art, but Dennis Koster carries on the tradition of concert-classical flamenco guitar first introduced to the music-loving public in Paris in 1927 by the great Don Ramón Montoya and brought to the world by his followers Niño Ricardo, Mario Escudero and Sabicas. Koster is one of the few guitarists ever to have learned this music directly from both Mario Escudero and the legendary Sabicas. He has celebrated this legacy in radio and concert performances throughout the United States, Japan, Spain and Latin America. A great virtuoso performer, Koster is widely regarded as this country’s leading authority on flamenco guitar, being the author of the internationally best-selling three volume flamenco method the Keys to Flamenco Guitar, its newly revised second edition was released this year by Mel Bay Publications.

Mr. Koster will give a free guitar master class on Saturday, September 27, 2008 at 11 a.m.in Singleton Center, Rm. B-15.

Tickets are $5 General Admission and $5 with VCU ID*.
Tickets may be purchased by calling the VCU Music Box Office at 804.828.6776.
The VCU Music Box Office is open from 2-4 p.m. weekdays, and 90 minutes before each ticketed event.

www.vcu.edu/arts/music

Thursday September 25, 2008, 8:00 pm - 9:30 pm
Singleton Center for the Performing Arts
Sonia Vlahcevic Concert Hall Monroe Park Campus
922 Park Avenue, Richmond

Hooten is an adjunct instructor of Theory and Aural Skills and jazz trombone at VCU. He performs with his own group, Ombak, as well as Fight the Big Bull and The Great White Jenkins.

Solvent Space is pleased to present the east coast premiere of Palms and Klumpen by John Bock. John Bock is a German performance artist and sculptor whose videos alter and transform reality through distortion and amplification. His video lectures combine pseudo-scientific, social, and political commentary to create “theatrical collages”.  For Palms Bock applies his “theatrical collage” aesthetic to the desert town of  29 Palms with captivating results. Additionally, Bocks’ video installation Klumpen explores the artists’ studio practice through rhythmic synergies.

Screenings begin Saturday September 27th from 1-3. and will continue on Tuesdays 1-3, Thursday 5-7, Saturdays 1-3 . On View through November 8th.

Solvent Space is an exhibition space located in the Plant Zero arts complex at 0 East 4th Street, between Hull and Fourth Streets, Richmond, Virginia. Solvent Space is a project of the School of the Arts and the Department of Painting and Printmaking, Virginia Commonwealth University in cooperation with Plant Zero. For more information please contact Belinda Haikes at 267-262-1619, or haikesb@vcu.edu.