Past Exhibitions - McLean Project for the Arts

APRIL 12 – JUNE 3, 2018

MPA@ChainBridge: Erratic Landscapes: New Works by Artemis Herber

Artemis Herber, “Polyphemus: After Casting Rocks,”
mixed media on cardboard, 2018

Using recycled cardboard—the material used for packing and shipping that is so omnipresent in our consumer society—German-born and Baltimore-based artist Artemis Herber creates intense collaged paintings that explore the complicated interconnections between human beings and the land. In her deep and wide-ranging research, Herber gathers ideas from multiple fields, including philosophy, archeology, economics and architecture.

Of critical interest to Herber is an investigation of deep time and human impact through the lens of the Anthropocene, which refers to the relatively short period beginning when human activities first started to affect the earth’s ecosystem.

Working with a three-point framework that includes land use, time and global positioning, Herber’s large-scale land and cityscapes employ expressive and energetic drawing and painting techniques and a self-invented torn and cut collage process including both construction and disintegration.

JAN 11 – MAR 3, 2018

MPA@ChainBridge: Methods of Inquiry: Fields of Discovery

Methods of Inquiry: Fields of Discovery featured six artists whose work is influenced by science. Both the methods of discovery and images and concepts related to fields such as chemistry, microbiology, neuroscience, physics and genetics are referenced. Commonalities that exist between science and art are embraced as both process and outcome in the works included in this exhibition. Exhibited together, the works of these six artists offer views from multiple angles of the wonder found in the natural world, both inner and outer, and the processes human beings employ in order to gain a greater understanding of them. Participating artists included Leslie Holt, Susan Main, Michele Banks, Spencer Dormitzer, Marc Roberge, and Atsuko Chirikjian.

NOV 9, 2017 – DEC 23, 2017

MPA@ChainBridge: Nature as Prototype

Photo credit: Elsabé Johnson Dixon

Nature as Prototype aims to examine the role of nature and biology as a source of inspiration for art and design. The artists included in this exhibition—Adam Nelson, Yoko K., and Grethe Wittrock—will collaborate to create an immersive environment that explores the changing nature of our relationship to the natural world. Additionally, Sarah Beth Oppenheim will choreograph a site-specific dance that she will perform in the space toward the closing date of the exhibition. Continuing the conversation about how we choose to co-exist in what is described today as the Anthropocene, the exhibition will examine how art and design are fundamentally linked to scientific, biological, mathematical, philosophical, and social investigations.

SEPT 7, 2017 – NOV 4, 2017

MPA@ChainBridge: Discordant Voices: Paintings by Madalyn Marcus

Madalyn Marcus, “Maestra”

Washington artist Madalyn Marcus will exhibit evocative large-scale paintings meant to be experienced holistically. Influenced by both textiles and jazz, these paintings create around themselves a field of active energy as color interaction and mark improvisation blend and riff off each other.

JUNE 15, 2017 – AUG 12, 2017

MPA@ChainBridge: Strictly Painting 11

This juried biennial exhibition presents the work of artists from throughout the Mid-Atlantic region exploring the medium of painting.

Juror: Anne Reeve, Assistant Curator at Glenstone, a private museum near Washington, DC devoted to modern and contemporary art.

APR 13, 2017 – JUNE 3, 2017

MPA@ChainBridge: With the Grain: Paintings by J.T. Kirkland

J.T. Kirkland, “Subspace_251”

This exhibition features multipart and shaped paintings on wood. Focusing on line, color, form and structure, J.T. Kirkland combines wood and paint into uniquely warm and abstract paintings in the minimalist vein. Using grain of the wood as both guide and essential component, Kirkland incorporates and contrasts the organic nature of the material with the crisp intentionality of hard-edged blocks of color.

MAR 15, 2017 – APR 2, 2017

MPA@ChainBridge: Youth Art Show

MPA hosted two Youth Art Shows celebrating works by Fairfax County Public School elementary, middle and high school art students from both the Langley and McLean pyramids.

FEB 2, 2017 – MAR 4, 2017

MPA@ChainBridge: Sculpture Now 2017 — Washington Sculptors Group (WSG) Juried Exhibition

WSG and MPA collaborated on a Sculpture Now show for 2017. The exhibition was open to members of the Washington Sculptors Group. Sculpture Now 2017 was a non-thematic exhibition of new works, finished within the last two years.

To learn more about the Washington Sculptors Group, click here.

JAN 12, 2017 – MAR 4, 2017

MPA@MCC Emerson Gallery: Construction Work: New Sculpture by Mary Walker

Mary Walker, “Catenary Curve Series: Theme”, mixed media

Baltimore artist Mary Walker exhibited wall-hung constructions that combined imagery and concepts from natural science, mechanics and the landscape. Found objects such as cable, screws, nuts and bolts are combined with painting, referring to the processes of building and constructing. An interest in the dualities of gesture and geometry, the man-made and the natural and chance and intention is also a key concept.

JAN 12, 2017 – MAR 4, 2017

MPA@MCC Atrium Gallery — Alice Kresse: Some Assembly Desired: The Printmaker as Jeweler

Alice Kresse, “Oh Pink Grotesk”, monoprint

Kresse highlights the similar sensibilities inherent in her monoprints and handmade jewelry in an exhibition that featured both approaches. Kresse brings her long career in graphic design to bear on her work in printmaking, creating images that are poetic, carefully balanced and multilayered. The monoprint process allows her to construct a piece much as you would an object, building layer upon layer with image and atmosphere emerging from the space beyond.

JAN 12, 2017 – MAR 4, 2017

MPA@MCC: Power Poles: Sculpture by Alonzo Davis

Alonzo Davis

Deeply influenced by his international travel experiences, Alonzo Davis makes freestanding, wall oriented and suspended sculpture. The imagery and energies of the American Southwest, Brazil, Haiti, West Africa and the Pacific Rim are all present in these works, combing bamboo, wood, paper, paint and LED lights.

DEC 8, 2016 – JAN 21, 2017

MPA@ChainBridge: Moving Through: Works by David A. Douglas

Working at the intersection of drawing, painting and photography, David A. Douglas creates large-scale works that explore the power of place. Depicting personally significant landscapes on a monumental scale, Douglas offers the viewer the opportunity to enter the works on their own terms and experience the highly charged potency that lies within the ordinary moment. Amplifying the inner beauty within the ordinary, Douglas’ works resonate with the intense simplicity of a poem, simply stated yet somehow glowing with life from the inside out.

A native of Northern Virginia, Douglas has works in numerous public, private and corporate collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Chrysler Museum, and the Academy Art Museum. His work has been shown in various solo and group exhibitions, including exhibits with Chuck Close, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, and Sally Mann. Douglas received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Virginia Intermont College and a Master of Fine Arts degree in paining from James Madison University. He teaches painting, drawing and photography at the Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia. Read more about the artist.

NOV 17 – DEC 23, 2016

Emerson Gallery: Abundance: Works by Mei Mei Chang, Amy Boone McCreesh, Leslie Shellow, and Jungmin Park

This curated exhibition features four artists whose inclusive approaches combine ideas and materials in a swirling, exuberant, “more is more” manner to create works that unabashedly claim and own their space. Using both traditional and scavenged components, these works flourish both on and off the wall as they move into and through space with an elegant, imaginative, experimental and experiential energy.

Atrium Gallery: Above the Horizon: Works by Nikki Brugnoli

These abstracted and expressionistic drawings and prints center on a post- industrial, post agricultural landscape as they explore memory and experience, vastness and the precision of proximity. Light, abstraction, transparency and glowing color come together to create works that offer a meditation on safety, separation and the deep familiarity of place. Called to return again and again to the image of an abandoned silo, Brugnoli creates an impactful visual symbol imbued with a longing for the past, the comfort of the present, and the endless adventure of imagination.

Ramp Gallery: In Process: Photographs by Ajay Malghan

The large- scale, evocative, and innovative photographs on display by Baltimore artist Ajay Malghan incorporate time as a formative element. Inventive in both conception and process, the works gather light, form and space into both calm and energetic compositions that transport the viewer into the atmosphere of elsewhere. Color glows and radiates, proposing mood and eliciting response, creating a new and intriguing landscape in which to experience and enter the day.

NOV 22 – DEC 23, 2015

The Same but Different: Creative Morphology

This curated exhibition features works by artists who make use of the processes of observing, sorting and classifying as a prelude to creating shape, structure and color. The exhibit will highlight the inherent conceptual and procedural similarities between scientiﬁc and artistic pro- cesses. Works by Susan Eder, Laurel Lukaszewski, Richard Dana and Tom Green are included.

McLean Art Society Juried Exhibition

Ramp Gallery

Works by members of the McLean Art Society in a variety of styles and media will be exhibited. This year’s exhibition is juried by nationally-known watercolor artist Chris Krupinski. The McLean Art Society, established more than 50 years ago, supports and encourages regional artists and art education.

Wanderer: The Travel Journals, Works by Maria Karametou

Atrium Gallery

These mixed media works are based on visual observations the artist has collected while wandering in different parts of the world. Karamatou has saved these visual glimpses as a way of synthesizing and interpreting her experiences, encasing them in small plastic sleeves, like an archival photographic display. Hung together they present an open-ended story with both personal and universal impact.

JAN 8 – MAR 7, 2015

Manifesting Phenomena: Drop, Hover, See-through, Lean…

Emerson Gallery

This curated exhibit will include work by three artists who are interested in investigating the many and most basic concepts of physical science. Ranging from sculpture that inhabits physical space in unusual ways in order to better understand and demonstrate force, motion, energy and matter, to works depicting the patterns of the earth and its cycles of change, the artists in this exhibit explore natural phenomena in ways both literal and conceptual. Included are Joan Belmar, Annie Farrar and Barbara Josephs Liotta.

Out For a Spin: Mixed Media Paintings by Jean Sausele-Knodt

Atrium Gallery

Beginning with loose references to flora and fauna, Sausele-Knodt creates shaped paintings that deftly move the viewer through a series of shifting and fragmented picture planes. Animated images and energetic color conversations come together to form constructions that depict a fresh personalized sense of time and place.

Contemporary Scrolls: Works by Laura Litten

Ramp Gallery

Laura Litten will exhibit long, scroll-like drawings in the Ramp Gallery. These are expanded, fabricated landscapes that impart to the viewer a sense of vast space coupled with lovingly rendered participants in the natural world