The Exchange Gallery

Every month VAE highlights the work of four or five exemplary VAE artists in its Exchange Gallery. This highly visible retail space in the front windows of VAE's City Market Gallery is excellent exposure for artists and a favorite shopping spot of patrons. Artists are juried into the space annually. For more information contact Meredith Burgess at 919.828.7834 ex 6853, or meredith@visualartexchange.org.

Click here to learn how to apply for your own featured artist exhibition!

March 2010 Exchange Gallery Artists:

• Michelle Lyon
• Christopher Purcell
• Aditya Shringarpure
• Lisa Stroud
• Martha Thorn

Michelle Lyon

My hope is that through humor, I can make people think about serious subject matter. By using vintage textiles in many of my works, folks feel a sense of nostalgia and comfort. The softness of the fabric, the vivid colors and hand stitching pull people in to view what looks to be a familiar quilt or stuffed animal. I try to use these first impressions to draw interest so that a much more meaningful message can be conveyed. Humor is the way I choose to deal with controversial or uncomfortable situations. I find that if people can laugh at something they can feel at ease with an idea, and then are freer to examine their positions and beliefs.

Christopher Purcell

The work I am currently exploring can be described best as material language. Every tactile material is something that triggers our most sensitive of memories and can be used in itself as a language. The texture, color, craft, context, and source of these materials chosen in this recent body of work have been brought with me from my experiences in graduate school to the relationships I have with my peers presently. As usual I do not like to call them any more than experiments. It just happens to be that this time my experiments brought me to the model airplane section of a hobby store. And as I hope that you can see, the hobby store, Do It Yourself, aesthetic is something I love most dearly.

Aditya Shringarpure

My love of art stems from my early childhood in India, where I was exposed to a conglomeration of art ranging from traditional Indian to contemporary western. I find myself synthesizing images from places I visit into themes of urban decay, renewal, and everyday life. I am always attempting to find a pathway to incorporate these images into my work, bridging the gap between traditional and contemporary art. I create my own visual language, combining my interests in photography, printmaking and drawing into images that reflect both abstraction and realism at once.

Lisa Stroud

As an artist and a writer, I am always looking for the story. I step up to the easel and work intuitively with colors, shapes, and textures, and with time and patience and luck, a story begins to unfold on the canvas. My hope is that, somewhere between the obvious and the hidden, viewers will be enticed to create their own stories.

Martha Thorn

Line and drawing are the most important elements in my paintings. Texture and design follow, with color being only a vehicle through which I can persuade an audience to look at my work. Color is the only accomodation that I make. I am a process painter who paints as intuitively as possible.

I begin by setting parameters for myself through canvas dimensions or tools that I allow myself to use and then try to approach the work while breaking all other parameters set for me or by me in the past. This is the most critical and honest stage. Then I start to "clean up," hopefully reducing the chaos in a painting by just one degree so that it becomes a successful, cohesive painting bordering on the brink of disaster.

The dichotomies of chaos and peace, dirty and clean, and ugliness and beauty are recurrent themes in my work. These are certainly not new themes in the art world but are hopefully executed and presented in a fresh, authentic way.

Cy Twombly, Paul Klee and various street artists are representative of the people whose work I admire.

See previous featured artists:

February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007