About the Artists:
Derek Cote studied at Virginia Commonwealth University and Western Washington University where he received his BFA and MFA respectively. He has exhibitednationally and internationally including exhibitions at
the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington; Exit Art and Roebling Hall, New York; Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, Delaware; Contemporary Art
Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach; Scope Art Fair Special Projects in New York and Miami; Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey; and appeared on Artwave Radio in Athens, Greece. In addition, Derek was included in the
2007 Young Sculptors Competition and Exhibition at Miami University of Ohio, is a recipient of a Professional Artist Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and was Artist-in-Residence at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. www.derekcote.com
 
About his work, Derek states:  “My sculptures, installations, and drawings explore notions of memory and gestalt as a function of architectural relationships, geography, and place dynamics. Investigations into universal place as well as personal displacement are arranged by recreating familiar instances that employ scale shifts, the collision of metaphors, and posing interior versus exterior. The social and cultural landscape is a recurring theme that is at once personal and foreign. Through the investigation of general and specific sites, I present conditions that provide a platform for questioning individual place, displacement, and what it means to belong. By encouraging conceptual versatility and flexibility, I am able to employ a range
of relevant media from wood, plastic, and cardboard, to light, sound, and video, as a function of their inherent ability to communicate.”
 
Mia Feuer was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada.  She received her BFA with a
major in sculpture from the University of Manitoba in 2004 and is currently a 2009 MFA candidate in the sculpture program at Virginia Commonwealth University.   She is the recipient of numerous grants from the Winnipeg Arts Council and the Manitoba Arts Council.  Before moving to Richmond, VA to attend graduate school, Mia spent time living in the West Bank, an occupied Palestinian territory where she facilitated “on the street” sculpture workshops with Palestinian children using next to no resources.   Through her work, Feurer investigates the illusion of security and the idea of systematic dehumanization through architectural form.  Informed by time she
spent in the West Bank, Feurer searches for an understanding of barricades both as signs and as physical realities which restrict freedom and deeply affect people’s lives.   

Paul Shoemaker was raised in Virginia and is receiving his Bachelors of Fine Art this year from Virginia Commonwealth University.  In 2005, Paul was selected as a representative to the Tasmeem Design Conference in Doha, Qatar.  The following year he worked as an intern in the Photography Department at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden under Lee Stalsworth and Amy Densford.  In 2007, he studied abroad in Stockholm, Sweden for five months.  While studying at VCU he received the James Bradford Scholarship (2006), won the Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s Portfolio Review (2007) and the Richard Carylon Research Fund (2008).
For Here & Now, Paul is presenting his new work, Pennies from Heaven. 
Paul states:  “‘If you want the things you love, you must have showers,’ is a remarkable line that comes from my performance and installation “Pennies from Heaven.”  The desires and fantasies we all strive to fulfill or experience are continuously being bombarded by the realities of our lives.  Meaning is subjective but experience, especially in a live performance becomes a shared moment.  For my piece, this shared moment of a performance along with allusions to abstracted historical references is meant to be a bizarre and theatrical spectacle. The life of a dream is metaphorical to the ephemeral act of a performance while artifacts seemingly from a distant time period try to ground the piece into a familiar reality.”