Focus Exhibiitons: Joseph Barbaccia / Craig Kraft / Judy Southerland

Joseph Barbaccia: Currents
Craig Kraft: Unintentional Drawings
Judy Southerland: Borderland
 

January 9 – February 20, 2010
Opening Reception, Saturday, January 9, 5:30 – 7:30 pm
Gallery talk at 6:30 pm

Greater Reston Arts Center presents three Focus Exhibitions: Currents featuring Joseph Barbaccia’s fantastical, sequined sculptures, Unintentional Drawings comprised of Craig Kraft’s experimental, neon sculptures, and Judy Southerland’s mixed media, narrative prints in Borderland.

Currents, Joseph Barbaccia’s aquarium-like installation, takes the viewer on a deep sea dive into a dazzling underworld filled with magical creatures. Six glittering, biomorphic sculptures are set in a dimly lit, dark-green gallery. Their names, Praise, Ridicule, Happiness, Suffering, Loss, and Destruction, refer to six of Buddhism’s eight worldly concerns. While traditional teaching advises one to avoid these concerns, Barbaccia’s shimmering surfaces and erotic shapes make the effort nearly impossible.

Nationally recognized neon sculptor, Craig Kraft, departs from his iconic linear forms in a bold experimental project, Unintentional Drawings. Reducing his palette to shades of blue, Kraft expands the limits of neon by transferring his seemingly random doodles into drawings made of light. "Unintentional Drawing I", a free-standing eight-foot tall sculpture, features words like a commercial neon sign but it uses them in a haphazard way, as though the drawing was first conceived on the back of a napkin. Both "Unintentional Drawings II" and "III" continue the random, scribbling theme but as smaller, wall-mounted works.

Borderland, the title of Judy Southerland’s exhibition of mixed-media prints, refers to both her intention and her process. “To make a picture, I start with the space in-between,” she reveals. Southerland’s “in-between” is often an open field, a blue sky, or an empty wall. Into these nebulous places she combines human gestures with other images estranged by time and style. Gradually, like the artist’s laborious process of developing each screen-print, a narrative emerges.

Greater Reston Arts Center
12001 Market Street Suite #103
Reston, VA 20190
Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday 11am-5pm
703.471.9242