Graduating seniors from the VACA department are currently displaying a variety of visual arts in the Margaret Martin Gehman Gallery, which is adjacent to Common Grounds.
Robert Weaver’s work is a series of instagraphs, formed by digital imaging. All of his pieces were abstracted variations of a warm color palette, set in square frames and ordered in pairs. The soft textures and bright shades made this series reminiscent of peaceful flames or hazy memory.
Dylan Buchanan’s photos display a mixture of bright cityscapes of D.C. and crisp nature shots, all featuring water. In his city scenes, light from cars and street lamps is colorful and often blurred, contrasting with the precise detail of stationary roads and buildings. In his landscapes, blurred white water contrasts with the crisp green of moss on rocks and the vivid blue of sky.
Buchanan also has a video installation titled “Time in Motion.” This video starts slowly but speeds up over time. The scenery is the same as the scenery in some of his photos, flawlessly mingling cityscape with landscape. Hectic horn blaring and cars whizzing past the capitol building are juxtaposed with the figure of a lone man raising his arms beside a gushing waterfall. The sky is an otherworldly blue, almost too beautiful to be true. The same scenes are returned to over and over again, but pass by more quickly with each rendition. The clip begins with a waterfall and ends with a sunset fading to a starry sky.
In Nataliya Savulyak’s photos, ballerinas pose amidst rusted structures. Savulyak’s titles are ballet terms with definitions, giving each piece a unique touch. Perhaps ballet is important to this artist’s life and leads her to create something more than just photography: frozen choreography that opposes its geography. The contrast between female athletic grace and industrial decay forms a visual paradox that speaks to the human condition: the inevitable decline of our civilization does not prevent the flourishing of our youth.
Anna-Louise Cecil is showcasing two different photo collections. The series I saw first featured portraits of women with reflections that are not cast naturally, but are layered on top of the photo, lending a surreal effect to her work. The women in her photos are interacting with various cosmopolitan settings, both indoors and outdoors, looking at the camera and looking away. Her second set of photos contains more natural reflections, but with a twist. A man’s reflection in water appears rightside up while the actual person, standing on the edge of the road, is upside down. In two other photos, reflections appear sharply focused in clear globes while the background, the real world, appears as blurred as we might expect reflections to be. Her photos have a common color pallette of silver, grey, and blue with accents of pink and orange.
Julian Bussells has put together a short film about a college student, Kyle, who is obsessed with boy bands. The video is comprised of interviews of Kyle, his disgruntled friends, and his boy band CD “dealer.” In the end, there is an intervention and poor Kyle is forced to come to terms with his addiction.
Overall, this art installation features a wide variety of work. Even though the official gallery opening is this Friday, April 20 at 4 p.m., it is already open for public viewing and is one of the art events being celebrated during the ACE festival.
