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 Rachel Berry at 919.828.7834 ex 6854, or rberry@visualartexchange.org.

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

April 2009 Exchange Gallery Artists:

• Tarrah Goforth
• Michelle Harrell
• Scott Renk
• Shawnda Rossi
• Lora Stager

Tarrah Goforth

My works content grows from my life experiences. Its aim is to capture memories and impressions from my life, travels, and surroundings. As an artist I experiment with materials. Oil paint, watercolor, and oil pastels are vehicles for my expression. I focus on vivid and embellished color, textures, and contrast. Most recently I have been inspired the elegance of beta fish, their relatively simple lives, and the metaphor they hold for human existence. The themes of journey, movement, progress, and change, are motifs I continually investigate. I strive to tell a story in each painting, and I hope to communicate my ideas in new and inspiring ways.

Michelle Harrell

Scott Renk

Shawnda Rossi

As an artist, I am immersed in a creative environment and I am inspired by my students' creativity and willingness to explore any possibility. My motivation also stems from my love for vibrant colors and influences from the German Expressionist artist Franz Marc.

I create every painting with expressive color and texture which brings life, uniqueness and fun to ordinary objects. I wish to remind viewers of the simplicity of life. Through this use of exaggerated light and color, loose and repetitive brush strokes and increased contrast, an energy and joyful experience is created for the viewer.

Lora Stager

I am a painter as well as an art instructor. My goal when creating art is to offer the viewer an experience. Edgar Degas said it best when he said, "Art is not what you see, but you make others see." Through my art and my teaching, I believe that I have helped others to see the world in a new way.

My work is influenced by the power and mystique of the world around me. I'm inspired by the brilliant colors that appear naturally, the ripple of a wave, a tree swaying in the breeze, or by light magically glistening off water. I bring these influences out in my work by enhancing color and contrast and by adding a sense of light. I capture a place that is calm and inviting; a visual escape. My style is a painterly form of realism and my hope is to capture the viewer and bring them into my world and way of seeing.

"Life is not measured by the breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." -Anonymous

See previous featured artists:

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