Artist Talk at 801 Gallery

Artist Talk with equal/lateral Artists Nina O’Leary, Prerna, Anna Van Voorhis

Nina O’Leary
After the passing of my grandmother, my tendency to pre-mourn my family members, specifically my parents, intensified. I became desperate to preserve the way their living room felt, how their hands looked, their everyday hobbies, and the books they read. This compulsion expanded to include my three older brothers and their families; each are married with children. The photos work through themes surrounding Cherokee identity, the military, raising children, the Christian faith, and the quotidian.
https://ninafrancine.com/

Prerna
I question our need to conceal unseen systems. I am creating relief prints of 4’x8’ sheets of drywall that were used as my studio wall for four consecutive months. All the hangable work was hung in that period. The matrix was then treated as needed: spackled, sanded, marked, and drilled into, documenting all movements. The work questions the idea of “complete representation” of all works without revealing the works itself, but through showing every mark made by each piece. In doing so, my practice relies heavily on the materiality of institutional space and works to make invisible labor visible. I often consider the wall as a metaphor for transparency. Though it is commonly thought to block or segregate, my laboring on, replication, documentation, and illusory presentations of the wall seek to blur the line between falsehood and reality.
www.prernaunknown.com

Anna Van Hoorhis
A few years ago I began thinking of photographs as “time transects:” small slivers shaved from reality that represent a single, decontextualized moment in time. Regarding photographs this way prompted me to wonder if it were possible to expand the amount of information a surface could archive. Instead of documenting my experiences of time with a camera, which typically records less than a second, could I use other means and technologies to represent durational, lived experiences? This line of inquiry led me to cyanotype: a slow, photosensitive chemistry, most famous for its use in reproducing architectural drawings, i.e. blueprints. Cyanotype’s relative insensitivity to light made it the perfect candidate for recording longer periods of time and ultimately allowed me to capture the choreography of shadows that bodies, objects and the sun cast onto the surfaces of my kitchen, my kitchen table in particular. To record this dance, I coat a circle of paper with the sunny yellow of unexposed cyanotype emulsion and lay it down on my kitchen table. Then I wait. Over the course of a three-day exposure, the surface darkens from lemon to chartreuse to dusky blue, depending on the intensity of the sunlight that reaches it. As the paper exposes, it captures traces of daily motion: the meals I eat on the table, the mail that stacks up, the sun as it arcs across the sky. After the piece finishes exposing, I remove the paper and wash it to remove excess chemistry. Then it becomes blue and white paper ghosts, archives of three days spent in my kitchen.
https://annavanvoorhis.com/

Art at 801 Gallery, in 801 Washington Lofts, promotes art and music to neighborhood residents and art lovers thru periodic openings and gallery presentations.

Beware there is historic street construction happening so we recommend parking ramps on 10^th Avenue & 3rd Street or Washington Avenue North & 10^th Avenue

Aesthetic Committee
Jeremy Bue
Dave Lewis
Natalie Auger
Chris Everette
Kathya Cibelle Abreu De Sousa Dawe
Jan Elftmann, Contact
janelftmann@gmail.com