Movement, Order and Spirit
Virginia Russo & Rissa Berlin
Event Types: Visual Arts
Jun 1, 2024 6:00 PM — Jun 28, 2024 8:00 PM
Time Remaining Loading countdown timer...
Event Registration
Contact Information
Meredith B Skinner
(864) 421-5730
[email protected]https://www.woodbinestudio.com/https://instagram.com/woodbinestudio/Details
This show represents two artists’ work which harmonize visually while reflecting very distinct visions approaching the theme of the show.
Virginia Russo approaches the theme primarily from the direction of personal revelation and spirit; a journey into her own inner world that she sees as The Planet. This personal world is not bound by known terrestrial realities. In it, she explores and navigates the terrain of the wild unseen from the safety of the imaginary.
“Think of them as paintings, photographs, and explorer’s notes from a place you’ve never been, but one which feels immediately familiar. My pieces are built of layers of watercolor and ink. Long experience allows me to predict what the unleashed media might do, while staying open to surprise. Over the wet media (or occasionally under), I layer pencil, oil and chalk pastel, collage, and embroidery. The wet media attempts to reveal mystery, while the dry media expounds and interprets to me what I have painted, like notes in the margin of a well-loved book.”
For Rissa Berlin, the theme of birds and wildlife has long been a source of mystery and awe, representing freedom, movement, balance and the natural richness of creation. Rissa’s meaningfully connects with the natural world through the majestic beauty of winged creatures and other forms of life, expressing their irrepressible movement and spirit.
“I am fascinated when birds travel along their migratory paths, aligning themselves with magnetic field lines towards their destination. Solar and Lunar circles are part of this reality... My goal is to give subjects vulnerability, translucence and spirit; a bit dissonant from the abstracted and ordered atmospheric space in which they find themselves through my images.”
Her abstracted environments are like windows to alternate realities where color fields occur within spheres, rectangles and diagonal lines. The spheres have a ghostly, planetary quality. Diagonals appear like trails of flight across a plane; not chaotic and whimsical like that of a bird, but straight and directed like something of human or divine origin. Rectangles suggest an ordered human influence, with which the creatures must continually interact.
There is an abstract kind of poetry in this juxtaposition of the natural and the humanly ordered world.
