Friend of the Anacostia Community Museum local artist Sheila Crider has an exhibit up at the Honfleur Gallery on Good Hope Rd SE called Volume. It features beautiful paper sculpture assemblages and mixed media prints. Sheila is a lifelong East of the Riverite, and participated in several projects with ACM. Please join her for an artist talk on November 15 @ 2 pm @Honfleur Gallery.
My practice focuses on making objects that challenge notions of decorative and fine art, questioning what real value and purpose these objects and “the artist” serve in the 21st century. It is centered by study of the varied languages of art movements since Modernism to construct contemporary pictures, using texture, pattern, line, color, form, sequence, and now, volume, with a goal of integrating image, object, and frame.
-Sheila Crider, September 2014
Also of interest is the PHOTOBOOK exhibit at Vivid Solutions Gallery next door in the Anacostia Arts Center. PHOTOBOOK asks how the presentation of a photographic image influences its effect on the viewer. How do we consider an image seen in a book that we hold as opposed to a photograph in a frame hanging on the wall? Featuring the work of 7 artists, the exhibit is tightly curated and offers an easily accessible framework in which to ponder these questions.
In the last 20 years photo books have become highly collectible and coveted objects. Martin Parr‘s and Gerry Badger‘s history of Photobooks in 3 volumes explores the use of photo books, the myriad way photographers have re-represented their work within them, the changes made in the advent of self-publishing, more affordable methods of offset publishing, and the rise in popularity of the handmade artist book. The photo book allows affordable entry into the world of fine art collecting. And first and limited editions have been known to appreciate greatly in value. Ask anyone who has their hands on a first edition of photographer Robert Frank’s seminal photo book The Americans.
The books represented by the artists in Vivid Solutions Gallery’s PHOTOBOOK exhibit represent many of these ways of interpreting the photo book. Kristin Gudbrandsdottir’s Faces of the Fallen is a handmade artist book utilizing an acordian fold and cut-outs to represent the human waste of war. Leda Black’s Mimesis examines three categories of objects: plant, animal, and human-made. She prints out inkjet prints and had them hand bound into a book locally, offering yet another version of the handmade artist book
Luke Strosnider’s I Wish You Where Here depicts images made during a European sojourn. His book appears to be one made from one of the many companies offering offset printing in small publishing runs, companies that include Blurb and MyPublisher.
PHOTOBOOK presents the work of Anna Agoston, Jordan Baumgarten, Leda Black, Kristin Gudbrandsdottir, Jay Turner Frey Seawell, Tatiana Shukhin, and Luke Strosnider.
Honfleur Gallery
1241 Good Hope Road SE · Washington DC 20020 · 202-365-8392 · arts@archdc.org
Hours: Tuesday – Friday noon to 5pm · Saturday 11am to 5pm
Vivid Solutions Gallery
1231 Good Hope Road SE · Washington DC 20020
(Inside Anacostia Arts Center)
202-365-8392
Hours: Tuesday – Friday noon to 5pm · Saturday 11am to 5pm