National Fly Killin' Week by Chance Murray

National Fly Killin' Week

June 21 - August 4
First Friday Receptions: July 7 & August 4
Artist Talk: TBD

  One day I walked into my house and it was full of flies. “ have mercy, I am going to need a whole lotta fly swatters” so I made some, 100 to be exact. Later that same day, the interior of my house looked like World War two for flies. The next thought was, there ought to be a national damn holiday for this. So I now present you with how opening day for National Fly Killing Week would look, kinda like Disney world if it was opened by your Uncle Bubba. complete with parade, a celebratory hornworm drop at midnight, souvenir fly swatters and pointers on how you may wish to decorate your own home for National Fly Killin week.
 
National Fly Killin’ Week is real. Believe it. If you still don’t believe it, come see for yourself. After all, there’s a week for everything else…

ARTIST BIO

Chance Murray is a Southerner first, and an artist second. Using skills grafted from farming his large-scale mixed media works cobble together traditional painting, woodworking, and pure redneck engineering, producing vivid and slightly skewed scenes of rural life. these conjured images often come from a place both hard to describe yet somehow familiar, casting the viewer into a crudely altered world. Roughly scribbled text, often severing as comic relief, sprawl across the surface enhancing these scenes, sometimes providing description while sometimes, or simultaneously, flipping the image on its head, changing and confounding any sense of meaning. Chance is the recipient of the 2011-2012 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artist award, He lives and works in Cedar Grove, N.C.
 

Brian Davis "Elevation V2"

Elevation V2

December 21, 2016 - February 3, 2017
First Friday Receptions: January 13 (Do-Over) & February 3, 2017 6-10pm

Brian Davis lives and works in Northern Virginia. Born in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, Mr. Davis was raised in Guam and South Carolina. He has taught New Media and Sculpture at The George Washington University and American University. Mr. Davis has a B.F.A in General Studio from Winthrop University and an M.F.A in Sculpture from the University of Florida.

From his roots of skateboarding and playing guitar for a punk band in the Deep South, he has embraced the D.I.Y. aesthetic. These social and creative endeavors, activities like organizing punk shows and collective ramp building, led to an interest in sculpture, video art, and to the current work that explores connectivity, interaction, and the possibilities of effecting change in the surrounding world.

Davis’ artistic practice is varied and experimental and includes elements of public sculpture, multimedia installation, and virtual applications. His work and research explores cross-discipline techniques and practices to exploit the medium’s connection to the viewer and the surrounding space. While focusing on viewer experience, Davis also strives to create a dialogue with the history of sculpture and video art.

Elevation V2 is a multipart installation consisting of a variety of interconnected elements. The central element is a tripod structure on which two segments if a wooden chair are propelled towards the ceiling of the gallery space. The mechanism that propels the chair segments upward is controlled by a gallery visitor who must stare intently at their own disappearing image in a computer monitor. Only while this person is actively interfacing with the monitor will the mechanism continue to operate; as soon as the connection is broken, the chair separates and is guided back to the gallery floor. While the work is active, the interfacing individual cannot view the active space behind them.

Eunjung Park: Prism of Choice

April 20 - June 4, 2016
First Friday Receptions: May 6 & June 3, 6-10pm

Many people set up displays in their homes for visitors and passersby to see—figurines, photographs, and other knickknacks arranged on shelves and tables. Such displays seem governed by each arranger’s own individual sense of ‘rightness,’ her sense that things look best when arrayed in a specific way.  In studying these, I have come to regard shelves and tables as symbols for the spaces in which people draw out that sense of ‘rightness’ through the selection and display of objects.

My recent work explores the relationship between supportive structures—like shelves and tables, but also clothing racks and the rhyme schemes of poems—and the items they display.  I am interested in the moments when this relationship becomes complex or ambiguous, when a supportive structure itself is displayed or displayed items play a more structural role.  I am also interested in the ways that structures built of different materials—especially everyday materials—enable diverse forms of display and arrangement that correspond to equally diverse aesthetic sensibilities.   I wish to understand the symbolic potential held by these different forms of arrangement, and how they might be meaningfully employed.