Review: Emerging Virginia Artists at Peninsula Fine Arts Center (PFAC)
Mark St. John Erickson | Daily Press | August 2014
If you've never noticed the simple, everyday kind of scenes that so often seem to catch Virginia Beach photographer Jason Stick's eye, you probably haven't been looking.
From solitary signs on wooded hillsides to bathers standing on the shoreline, they're all sights that most of us have come across countless times — then forgotten almost instantly as we've moved on.
Just take a look at "Roadside Sign" or "Man in Ocean," both of which can be found in a portfolio of eight photographs on view in the Peninsula Fine Arts Center's new exhibit on emerging Virginia artists.
Deliberately direct and straightforward, Stick composes and then crops his images for maximum effect, making you focus intently on the strategically centered sign — "ONE NATION UNDER GOD!" — or the commanding figure of a man as he looks past the other bathers out to sea, his back to the camera and his legs calf-deep in the wave-tossed water.
No matter how lightly you may have regarded these images at first, they stop you and make you think — even if you suspect they may have been contrived from nothing. And when you begin to reflect on what they might say or mean, you may find yourself puzzling over and perhaps even admiring them for an unexpectedly long time.
Not every talent showcased in "NEXT: Emerging Virginia Artists" has developed as fully as Stick, who began attracting attention as far back as 2006, when curator James Warwick Jones included his work in a Charles H. Taylor Arts Center survey of some three dozen Hampton Roads photographers.
But there's no doubt that the 10 artists selected by Pfac Curator Diana Blanchard Gross from across the state provide the chance to explore some fresh and often compelling contemporary talent.
Most of them are still studying or only recently out of school — and they're still making their way as artists. Few have established reputations, though Stick and fellow photographer Pat Jarrett of Staunton — whose photojournalism has been published by the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times — have certainly made an early mark distinguishing their efforts.
"What I like about these artists is that they're all still experiencing and experimenting with things," Blanchard Gross says.
"And I was very intent on getting all new work — not something that had been shown or that I'd seen before. So it's all very fresh."
Jarrett's photographs are a departure from his previous focus, in fact, and represent the first time he has made himself and his family the subject of his camera.
Spurred by the slow decline and deaths of his elderly grandparents, they're intensely meditative and personal images — and he pumps up those qualities still more by pairing each photograph with a simple but evocative narrative.
That gives disarmingly straightforward pictures such as "Last Meal" — which captures his deceased grandfather's favorite dish in a close-cropped, funeral luncheon shot — much more impact than they might have had without such explanations.
It also makes such beautifully composed images as "The Fall" — which depicts his wheelchair-bound grandfather kissing his daughter under the portentous shadow of a wall clock — ring with genuine pathos.
"It's a heart-wrenching story," Blanchard Gross says.
Viewers in search of a more purely visual experience will find it in the intriguing finger paintings of Virginia Commonwealth University art student Matt Jaeger, whose most accomplished combinations of luscious gesture, found images and reverse glass painting conjure up some of the most mesmerizing passages in the show.
Ditto for the vibrant canvases of Newport News-born Kelsey Witt, who mixes bold, unmodulated colors and a deft feeling for the expressive potential of dots, zig-zags, Xs and other graphic marks to create eye-catching expanses of movement and pattern.
NEXT: Emerging Virginia Artists
July 12 to October 12, 2014
(Above left, photograph by Jason Stick and right, Kelsey Witt, Untitled, mixed media)
NEXT: Emerging Virginia Artists provides a platform for artists coming into their own, all with ties to the Commonwealth. The group exhibition will explore new ideas in both traditional and nontraditional mediums, including site-specific installations by Hampton Boyer, Kelsey Witt and Stacia Yeapanis. The artists provide a peek into what’s next in art as PFAC shines a spotlight on their new endeavors.
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