Hillyer Art Space > Past Exhibitions
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Ass Against the Wall by Martha Jackson-Jarvis
Exhibition Dates: Nov 6 - Dec 19, 2009
Ass Against the Wall is an installation by Martha Jackson Jarvis that explores points of resistance, endurance, and markings that pattern our lives. It is a compelling place of power where forces change, heaviness, strain, anxiety, burdens and the weight of difficulty into something else.
In a chance encounter in the mountains of Tajikistan Jarvis discovered an incredible being in a moment of clarity that bridges the void between animate and inanimate form. A moment when plants, animals, and minerals are one, even the rocks conspire to a fluid and connected greatness.
Work by Tom Wolff
Exhibition Dates: Nov 6 - Dec 19, 2009
This exhibit will feature a variety of Tom Wolff’s iconic portrait work from his years on assignment for various magazines and commissioned portraiture. From political figures to cultural producers, Wolff’s eye focuses on the essential and considers the subjects within the frame of his large-format works to be collaborators.
Multiplying the Body by Susan Serafin
Exhibition Dates: Sept 4 - Oct 31, 2009
Landscape, ethnography, and the body are recurring themes in Susan Serafin's work. Serafin delves into concepts of gender expression and performance in her latest installation; Multiplying the Body.
Questioning systems of cultural memory and Virtual Reality's residual effect on the collective conscious and identity, the work in Multiplying the Body represents the idea of the body as a remembered experience. Serafin seeks to capture the unacknowledged moments in our lives when we question what we know and experience an altered perception in between the cracks of our waking lives.
Colossus by Nekisha Durrett
Exhibition Dates: Sept 4 - Oct 31, 2009
Colossus is a full scale installation by Nekisha Durrett inspired by a poem of the same name by David C. Ward. The poem and the installation visualize a land deforested by Colossus, a metaphoric representation of industry and civilization.
Six in the Mix: Selections by Renee Stout
Exhibition Dates: July 3 - August 26, 2009
Six in the Mix: Selections by Renee Stout brings together a divergent company of D.C. and Baltimore’s emerging and mid-career artists for Hillyer Art Space’s summer program. This show will feature the work of Cianne Fragione, Kenyatta Hinkle, Adam Griffiths, Marc Roman, James Swainbank, and Gilbert Trent. Stout has set out to create a mixed bag of local talent not based in the obligatory conceptual framework predominantly exhibited in group shows. Instead of the varying inspiration and ideas behind the individual bodies of work, it is the “natural dialogue that may occur between these works” which Stout would like the audience to experience.
Post Secret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God
Exhibition Dates: June 5, 2009- June 26, 2009
In November 2004, Maryland resident Frank Warren launched a community art project that would soon become a worldwide phenomenon known as PostSecret. By handing out postcards and leaving them in public places around Washington, D.C, Warren invited strangers to anonymously send him their secrets. Within one month, Warren received more than 150 postcards and today he has collected over 350,000 postcards…and counting! PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death and God takes its title from Warren’s fifth book, scheduled to be released this fall. The displayed postcards unearth a myriad of private thoughts concerning spirituality, religion and faith. Addictively compelling, the cards reveal our deepest fears, desires, regrets and obsessions. Warren calls them “graphic haiku,” beautiful, elegant and small in structure but emotionally powerful.
Squaring the Circle; Stretching the Clay
by Judit Varga
Exhibition Dates: March 6 – April 24, 2009
Squaring the Circle; Stretching the Clay features a selection of Judit Varga’s newest ceramic sculptures. A native of Hungary who now calls Washington, DC, “home,” Varga uses malleable clay to speak freely and engage in interactions in a place that does not understand her mother tongue. Varga’s vocabulary, she says, “has been built from basic shapes like squares, circles and their universal, symbolic implications to communicate.” Using the power of colors and the inflections of rich surfaces, Varga plays with the meaning of the spoken words and their straightforward interpretations, deliberately creating visual misinterpretation to juxtapose the lost value in translation.
La Vida Intensa by Gregory Ferrand
Exhibition Dates: March 6 – April 24, 2009
La Vida Intensa features Gregory Ferrand’s most recent works in acrylic. Ferrand’s background in film is evident in his strongly narrative paintings which usually capture a climactic moment in a character’s life. Through his exaggerated rendering and saturated colors, Ferrand aims to paint life. “No matter how exotic or mundane the setting of the painting or drawing,” says Ferrand, “I strive to tell stories about characters and situations that do, have and will exist…”
Spirit by Judy Stone
Exhibition Dates: January 9 – February 27, 2009
Spirit will feature a selection of Judy Stone’s newest works. Interested in contemporary issues of ritual, iconic power and violence, Stone’s recent work integrates aspects of East and West culture. In Praxis (for Kali) – a video installation – Stone combines the practice of mediation with discharging firearms, creating an integrated space between East and West. In another piece, her use of surveillance cameras connected to numerous televisions juxtaposed with meditation pillows invites the viewer to experience transforming fields of awareness and focus into sites of paranoia. Stone’s installations re-contextualize East and West identities and thoughts by merging them, thus creating an atmosphere in which one must re-consider their essence. One is then faced with a challenge to reconstruct and experience these essences in a new space.
Tools for Change: Selections from the Hechinger Collection
Exhibition Dates: January 9 – February 27, 2009
By now, the Hechinger Collection might be better known that the hardware store that inspired its existence. The diverse collection started by John Hechinger in 1978 exceeds 375 works by 250 established and emerging artists mostly of the post-WWII era. The works were carefully chosen based on their varying tools motifs, all of which awaken our appreciation for the very tools that – as extensions of ourselves – allow us to construct and create or destroy and demolish.
Tools for Change: Selections from the Hechinger Collection, features 18 pieces of the Hechinger Collections that remove tools from their utilitarian, invisible state and in turn places them under the spotlight. The exhibition transforms the ordinary tool into an object of art to be admired, and above all, reminds us that our tools are a way of change: for better or worse.