Wolfgang Staehle
March 21 – May 17, 2008
http://www.wolfgangstaehle.info/

spongespace

HOPE GINSBURG
Sound design by Stephen Vitiello
Wall design by Leah Beeferman

January 25th-February 23rd
OPENING: Friday January 25th, 6-8PM
Solvent Space
Plant Zero Arts Complex
Hull & 4th Streets, Richmond VA

Hope Ginsburg, a recent addition to VCU's Art Foundation Program, has tranformed Solvent Space into spongespace. spongespace is an immersive environment designed to host three Sponge workshops. Each Sponge workshop includes  hands-on projects, visiting experts, projected films, participant presentations, and the assembly of a Sponge Reader.

WORKSHOPS:
Visit  :http://www.spongespace.net   for workshop details & advance registration.

Feltmaking Sponge
February 2nd, 10am-5pm
February 3rd, 10am-5pm
Sponge Water & Sound
Feburary 9th, 10am-5pm
February 10th, 10-am-5pm
Meta-Sponge
February 15th, 10-am-5pm
February 16th, 10am-5pm

Stephen Westfall
Grand Opening
October 12 – December 1, 2007

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Stephen Westfall is an artist, writer, and curator.  He is represented by Lennon Weinberg Gallery, New York; Galerie Lock, St. Gallen (Switzerland); Galerie Paal, Munich; Galerie Zürcher, Paris.  Westfall’s writing has been published in Art in America, Arts Magazine, Flash Art, and other magazines. His work is held in the collections of Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk (Denmark); Albertina Museum, Vienna; Baltimore Museum of Art; Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute, Utica; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. Westfall was the recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2007), Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2006); two awards from American Academy of Arts and Letters; three fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts; and two fellowships from New York State Council on the Arts. Fellow, Humanities Council, Princeton University (2005).He is currently serving as co-chair of Painting at the Milton avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

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Polly Apfelbaum creates what she calls “fallen painting,” hybrid works of rare beauty that exist in a contentious, ambivalent space between painting, sculpture, and installation.  Apfelbaum’s overall forms are comprised of intricate, nearly psychedelic layers of dyed fabric, as if myriad smaller paintings have grown from a central cluster of shapes and colors to create a larger, unified installation.  LoveKraft finds Apfelbaum utilizing nor only her painterly forms, but also the existing space to create her site-specific installation.

Polly Apfelbaum is a graduate of the Tyler School of Art and has had numerous solo exhibitions including those at Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; D’Amelio Terras, New York; and Bowdin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine.  She currently lives and works in New York.

Rachel Hayes
Wow and Flutter
January 26 to indeterminate, 2007

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For Wow and Flutter, Hayes takes advantage of the wind and lack of color in the industrial landscape. She is hopeful that when the wind blows it will imply that colors are mixing together. The color is waving and beckoning.  Bauhaus Laundry Color Theory.  Hayes is drawn to fabric as a medium of infinite mutability. Whether her work speaks more as abstract painting or as minimalist-inspired sculpture is, at any given moment, up to Hayes. But Hayes, in turn, prefers to leave much to the individual experience of the viewer.

Rachel Hayes earned her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2006. Exhibitions include Sculpture Center, Long Island City, New York; Grand Arts and Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri; ADA Gallery, Richmond, Virginia; Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, New Mexico.  Reviews of these and other exhibitions have appeared in Art Papers, The Kansas City Star and Review Magazine. Awards include a one-year residency at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, The Charlotte Street Fund, and a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture.

www.rachelhayes.com

Margrét H Blöndal
Untitled
January 26 to March 10, 2007

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The works are stepping stones around the space inside the head; hummocks on which you can sit to catch your breath. They are road signs, sieves, wands, pennants, they are chiming sounds and the colours are life givers. They are drawings of various elements and the ballooning refers to breathing and gliding spheres. In order to activate this, it is necessary to keep tuning, turning, adjusting and selecting. Forcing is not an option and therefore one has to wait patiently for the elements to retreat of their own accord, shrink or show their individual characteristics. The works are not mementoes of a particular story, but pointers towards non-verbal space - and they flutter around the concept of being alive.

Margrét H Blöndal has exhibited widely, including solo shows at The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland and Villa Minimo, Hannover, Germany.  Group exhibitions include The Nordic Biennial, Goteborg, Sweden, the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, and Galerie 5020, Salzburg, Austria.  She has also won numerous awards including the Richard Serra Prize in 2002. Margrét H Blöndal lives and works in Reykjavik, Iceland.

www.margrethblondal.net

Cory Arcangel
Sweet 16

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Sweet Sixteen  is a multi-channel video installation of the first 64 measures of the Sweet Child of Mine music video by Guns and Roses.  The two video channels, playing simultaneously, move in and out of phase creating a new version of the song that moves pop culture into the realm of the meditative.  Cory Arcangel also performed three pieces from his Born to Run: Glockenspiel Addendum.

Cory Arcangel is a digital artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.  His work is concerned with the relationship between technology and culture.  Arcangel is perhaps most widely known for his Nintendo game cartridge hacks and his subversive reworking of obsolete computer systems from the 1970’s and 80’s.  Arcangel has exhibited in galleries around the world.  His work was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and has also been exhibited in the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.

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Harrell Fletcher’s The American War is a re-presentation of The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, which is a memorial museum for what is referred to in Vietnam as The American War. Fletcher used his digital camera and took the shots hand-held at off angles to avoid reflections. The images have an oddly casual quality but are still accurate representations of the material depicted at the museum - with all their horrifying qualities.  To supplement the photographs presented, Fletcher also organized a public forum for discussion that included local Vietnam veterans, people from the Red Cross, and others personally effected by the events of the war.

Harrell Fletcher has worked collaboratively and individually on a variety of socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for over a decade. His work has been shown at SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, and Yerba Buena Center For The Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Sculpture Center, The Wrong Gallery, and Smackmellon in NYC.  Fletcher exhibits in San Francisco and Los Angeles with Jack Hanley Gallery, in NYC with Christine Burgin Gallery, in London with Laura Bartlett Gallery, and Paris with Gallery In Situ. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In 2002 Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, an ongoing participatory web site with Miranda July. A book version of the project will be published in 2007 by Prestel. He is the 2005 recipient of the Alpert Award in Visual Arts. His current traveling exhibition The American War originated in 2005 at ArtPace in San Antonio, TX, and traveled in 2006 to Solvent Space in Richmond, VA, White Columns in NYC, The Center For Advanced Visual Studies MIT in Boston, MA, and PICA in Portland, OR. Fletcher is a Professor of Art at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.

www.harrellfletcher.com

Cece Cole
Lure of the Lore

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Lure of the Lore was a site specific installation composed of a series of smaller installations that formed the progressive transformation of Solvent Space. Because there were elements within the system that resembled or contained living organisms and because the cobbled together structures were subject to the effects of human impact and uncontrollable circumstances such as climate change, this installation required care and maintenance.  Cole used unexpected materials, such as Styrofoam packing material, plastic bottles, water, tubing, and electrical cords to create a cave-like environment blooming with resolved points of delicate, sometimes shocking beauty.

Cece Cole was born and raised in Louisiana.  She received her BFA from the University of Louisiana with a focus on video and installation.  After graduation she lived in New Orleans, Connecticut, Seattle, the Adirondacks and North Carolina before settling in Iowa City, Iowa where she attended graduate school.  At the University of Iowa she earned her Masters of Fine Arts in painting.  Her exhibition record includes the University of Iowa Art Museum, the Coe College Gallery, Midwest Exhibitions in Chicago, and a number of garages in Iowa City.  She also exhibited at the Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, VA in the Spring of 2006.  Cece Cole was the first recipient of the prestigious annual VCUarts Painting/Printmaking Residency Fellowship at Plant Zero and is currently an Assistant Professor in the VCU Painting and Printmaking Department.

www.cececole.com