Mesaros Visiting Artists

Thursday, February 14, 2013
"These Wild Ecstasies & Making Photographs to See What Photography Sees"
Horvitz Hall #220
11:10am-12pm

Alyssa Salomon
Since receiving a camera on her eighth birthday, Alyssa C. Salomon has been testing how photography collects and remakes her favorite parts of the world. She has been employing nineteenth century photographic chemistries on handmade surfaces for more than a decade to exploit their inherent potential for romantic abstraction and physical control. Salomon's work is in a number of public and private collections including those of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and The Valentine Richmond History Center; has been recognized with awards including two VMFA Professional Artist Fellowships; exhibited nationally and in Europe; and reproduced in print. She is represented by Page Bond Gallery, Soho Myriad, and Penland Gallery. Salomon apprenticed with daguerreotypist Bob Shlaer, and holds degrees from Kenyon College (BA) and University of Chicago (MBA). She teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Penland School of Crafts and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art Studio School. Salomon now lives and works along the Chickahominy River cypress swamp, not far from where Pocahontas saved John Smith. She's a compulsive, albeit late rising, bird watcher, a frequent kayaker, an obsessive bread baker, & still dj's a radio show, not unlike the one she did on WKCO. www.AlyssaSalomon.com

Thursday, September 27, 2012
"Notes from a New Flâneur: Visual Reportage 2008-2012
Horvitz Hall #202
11:10am - 12pm

Dowd ('83) had worked as a printmaker, illustrator and visual satirist for many years when, in 2007, he confronted a crisis: in the Age of Opinion, satire had lost its pwer to engage. Unsure of what to do, he turned to primary visual experience. Having never worked onsite, Dowd began to draw in shopping malls, waiting rooms, and national parks. he embraced reportage and visual journalism as a cultural practice, recovering and re-inhabiting a tradition that dates to the Civil War. Reflections on Charles Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life (1863), drawing the social landscape, and the rediscovery of primary experience.

Thursday, April 26, 2012
"Being-here, being-there"
Community Foundation Theater, Gund Gallery
7:00pm - reception to follow talk

Rebekkah Palov, 2011/12 Mesaros Visiting Artist/Manager of Technology in the Kenyon College Studio Art Department. "Being-here being-there," reflections on emerging media, contemporary spaces and political conditions. Rebekkah Palov will screen and discuss her moving image, sound, performance and print work, including new projects made during her year as visiting artist at Kenyon. Palov's work has screened and been exhibited nationally and internationally with recent exhibitions in Brooklyn, New Orleans, Paris and Beijing. Besides her sound and visual practice she has performed in plays and films, played bass in garage and metal bands and is researcher and curator for the Harald Bode Archive.

Sunday, October 30, 2011
"Remarks on Landscape"
Community Foundation Theater, Gund Gallery
7:00pm - reception to follow talk

Elisabeth Condon combines improvisational pours of paint, sketchbook drawings and digital projections in landscapes that overlay Yuan Dynasty scrolls with the Flintstones. Their compressed visual syntax conveys the collapse of time and space that occurs in frequent travel. Condon has been selected for the artist residencies Yaddo, Red Gate and Fountainhead. She is a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant recipient, whose work has been included in exhibitions at Songzhuang Museum, Beijing; Shenghua Art Centre, Nanjing; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Tampa Museum of Art, FL, Ft. Lauderdale Museum, FL and the Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT. Her work is represented by Lesley Heller Workspace, New York and Dorsch Gallery, Miami.

Thursday, September 22, 2011
Cheever Seminar Room, Finn House
7:00pm - reception to follow talk

Jeff Brouws - born in San Francisco in 1955, is a self-taught artist. Pursuing photography since age 13, where he roamed the railroad and industrial corridors of the South Bay Peninsula, Brouws has compiled a visual survey of America's evolving rural, urban and suburban cultural landscapes. Using single photographs as subtle narrative and compiling typologies to index the nation's character, he revels in the "readymades" found in many of these environments. More recently, he has also instigated an all-encompassing photographic investigation of decimated inner cities: abandoned manufacturing sites, low-income housusing, and other commercial ruins - residual public spaces left behind by the effects of de-industrialization, white flight, disinvestment, failed urban policy and overall societal neglect.