May 24–July 29, 2012
Opening reception: Thursday, May 24, 6-8 pm

Rosemarie Fiore: Fireworks
Curated by Ashley Kistler, Anderson Gallery Director

The gallery will feature a scintillating array of Bronx-based artist Rosemarie Fiore’s recent Firework Drawings, as well as a selection of her Smoke Domes, the latest of which were created this spring in collaboration with students from VCU’s glass program.

Fiore employs unconventional, process-oriented methods of production—most spectacularly, a spinning amusement-park ride called a Scrambler that she equipped with buckets of paint—to explore the tension between unpredictable and premeditated elements in her artwork. “I control my mark-making as much as I can,” she notes. “I keep in mind that it is a balance between chaos and control and that too much control suffocates the work.” Fiore’s interest in chance and performative aspects of art-making align her efforts with those of various modern and postmodern predecessors, including John Cage and 1960s performance artists like Vito Acconci and Chris Burden.

To render her densely layered and opulently colored Firework Drawings, Fiore uses the tinted smoke, made of fine particles of organic dyes, generated by live fireworks. Working in her backyard, she explodes each combustible item over large sheets of heavyweight Fabriano paper. Fiore performs her own brand of action painting as she quickly moves around the work-in-progress, manipulating her volatile medium in different ways. She may cover the ignited firework with a container, for instance, that she then pulls or pushes across the paper support to make vibrant streaks and circles of color. Extending this approach into three dimensions with her recent Smoke Domes, Fiore “blows” glass by inserting Smoke Bombs into the molten material, which then expands with each mini-explosion.

Fiore wrests an impressive repertoire of other gestural and chromatic effects from her arsenal of Spinning Carnations, Monster Balls, Magic Whips, Rings of Fire, Smoke Fountains, Dinosaur Eggs, and Sparklers. Her multiphase process yields exhilarating large-scale compositions in which color and drawing, surface and space dynamically coalesce.

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Rosemarie Fiore currently lives and works in New York City. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL and her BA from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. Fiore’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad including Art on Paper 2010 Biennial Exhibition, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC; Fire Works, Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, NJ; Pyrotechnics, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York, NY; and Anthem, Longwood Art Gallery, The Bronx Council on the Arts, Bronx, NY (2009). Fiore has been selected for the NYFA Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts, New York, NY; the BRIO Grant, Bronx, NY; the Yaddo Residency, Saratoga Springs, NY; the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program, New York, NY; the Special Editions Fellowship, Lower East Side Print Shop, New York, NY; Artist in the Marketplace, Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY (2001), the Workspace Grant, Dieu Donné Papermill, New York, NY (2001); and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, Skowhegan, ME.

Jennifer Steinkamp: The Vanquished

An installation on the Gallery’s second floor will introduce Richmond audiences to the captivating work of Jennifer Steinkamp. “This pioneering Los Angeles-based artist has received wide international acclaim for her immersive, digitally animated installations,” Kistler says. “They never fail to transfix.” Using large-scale video projections, Steinkamp creates motion-and-color-filled spaces in which lush virtual images of blooming flowers, dancing trees, or purely abstract forms sway and twist as if propelled by unseen forces.

The Anderson Gallery will feature one of her latest installations, commissioned last year for the New Orleans Museum of Art as part of the exhibition Prospect.2. The work was originally created for the ornate niche in the museum’s atrium that is normally reserved for Auguste Rodin’s sculpture, The Age of Bronze (1877),  also known as The Vanquished—the title borrowed by Steinkamp for her piece. She was inspired by the sense of dynamic movement captured by Rodin in the raised arms and contrapposto pose of his life-size bronze figure. In her annimation, Steinkamp adopts an overhead perspective that offers a view down through the undulating branches of a gently twisting tree, whose appearance continually changes as it cycles  through the seasons.
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Jennifer Steinkamp employs computer animation and new media to create projection installations in order to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and phenomenological perception.  Her digitally animated works make use of the interplay between actual space and illusionistic space, thus creating environments in which the roles of the viewing subjects and the art objects become blurred.  She has said, “As my ideas and the work developed, I found I could dematerialize architecture by combining light, space and movement.”

Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; and North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; and in group exhibitions at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; San Antonio Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; ARCO, Madrid;  and Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark.

She is represented by Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York.

Summer Mixer: From the Collection of Eclectic Electric
Curated by Traci Garland, Anderson Gallery Coordinator, and Michael Lease, Head of Exhibitions and Design

Cool indoor breezes, the whir of a milkshake mixer, and the sizzle of hot dogs on an electric rotisserie: all familiar summertime sensations that rely on readily available electrical current and other technological achievements that mark the first half of the 20th century. Summer Mixer: From the Collection of Eclectic Electric features small appliances—manufactured between 1920 and 1970—that range from the highly practical to the whimsically novel. These examples highlight the era’s unique design aesthetic and the mid-century American fascination with electrical appliances of all kinds. Summer Mixer includes nearly forty objects selected from Eclectic Electric, a collection of thousands of small appliances amassed by Richmond’s Osdene family over the past 25 years.