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!

May 2010 Exchange Gallery Artists:

• Jeff Bell
• Sara Botwick
• Natasha Johnson
• Bruce Mitchell
• Micah Mullen

Jeff Bell

My studio practice is focused on gathering preexisting objects, dismantling them and then creating sculptures from those elements. The materials I work with come from everyday things, and my references are to other commonplace objects and to popular culture. My goal for each sculpture is to bring together elements from different backgrounds to create a new object that lives in the precarious area between the known and unknown. They allude to a variety of sources and concepts but never too literally. As a result of the decisions I make a tension is created in the work. Ultimately I get at something new but also something that reflects its previous language: a sculpture that at first glance reaffirms assumptions of everyday objects but at further examination resists those notions and lives outside of my understanding. The finished work strives to be both more poetic and allusive.

As I'm working, I constantly reconsider the references I build into the sculptures and their contexts. These allusions are drawn from a wide variety of sources: toys, furniture, fairy tales, cartoons, cars, architecture, as well as to the work of other artists. Ideas and forms emerge through the creation of the new object. I continue to experiment with what I am creating and to push the sculpture beyond my initial conception -- cutting and shaping, sanding and gluing, drilling and welding until the parts converge and the content is merged with the form.

Sara Botwick

Sara Botwick received a BFA from School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and recently an MBA from Kenan-Flagler Business School in Chapel Hill, NC. Her images reflect the quiet imprint we leave on inanimate objects and the larger imprint left by our manipulation of the natural environment. While photographing pattern, texture, and obsessive repetitive action, the work that evolves explores themes like change and nostalgia. Sara currently lives and works in Raleigh, NC. Her studio can be found at 311 W Martin St.

Natasha Johnson

I strive to capture the grace and elegance of the world around me by documenting the brief, often overlooked, moments that so many people don't stop to notice. I'm intrigued by a wide variety of subjects and themes -- and by simple, everyday moments in life.

I shoot exclusively digital photography. My knowledge of the "digital darkroom" allows me a greater flexibility than shooting film. The first stage of the process begins in the field when shooting. The second stage begins when I bring the photos to the computer to begin the process of digital editing.

Bruce Mitchell

My paintings are about being in this world at this time. For me this means living in the built environment most of the time, and that is the proximate subject depicted in most of my recent representational works. I make paintings of commercial and street signs, utility poles, buildings, vehicles, and other elements of our environment partly because these are so ubiquitous and familiar that we tend to take their presence for granted even as we use them in our day-to-day lives. Signs guide us to our destinations or indicate where we can obtain goods and services, while the core infrastructure represented by utility poles makes possible the online world on which we have come to depend.

Our built environment and the ways we interact with it are constantly being transformed. This ongoing transition to new and different ways of living is being documented in remarkable detail using new media as well as old media. My paintings are a part of that dialogue. New media are wondrous but ephemeral, volatile, and so voluminous as to be overwhelming. A painting, on the other hand, has a lasting physical presence. There's nothing like old-fashioned oil paint to capture the now for the ages. To me, these paintings are rich in allusions and metaphors relating to our civilization and the connections between us. That said, my own primary interest is more painterly. Regardless of the proximate subject, my paintings are explorations of the relationships between light and shadow, figure and ground, color and space. Ultimately, I seek to create paintings that are capable of evoking an emotional response. Their physical properties, as well as the allusions and metaphors, support that aim.

Micah Mullen

My paintings reflect my perspective of the Carolina landscape in a style that involves creating a complicated background of hundreds of grids of varying colors. When done the background will loosely look the intended composition, From there I concentrate on adding detail to segments of the painting. This method allows me the most expression because different parts are all done at different times. For example a typical landscape composition might have twenty different trees. Painting all the trees during the same session will tend to create too many similarities and thus a boring composition. Patience and time allows my paintings to reflect my varying emotions and moods and in a strange way create a sense of balance and harmony in what are sometimes very detailed and confusing compositions.

See previous featured artists:

April 2010
March 2010
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