Sep
5
to Oct 4

Mythos | Susan Aparicio & David Askew

A Freeman Residency artist exhibition

Mythos derives from our sense of self, belonging, and the places we inhabit. It is a pattern of beliefs that symbolically shapes culture, offering both structure and possibility. A constructed system formed by politics, perception, and power which often lacks neutrality leaving many to be marked as different: people flattened into symbol, stereotype, or fantasy. Myth can also be a tool of reclamation turning towards feelings, memories, and the imagination to create new worlds and exceed the narratives imposed on us. “Mythos” strives to take our strained, yet precious memories of a place where we once felt ostracized and showcase how unified feelings can transform into new myths. These myths do not erase difference, but form a world built in defiance of repudiation.

Susan Aparicio is a visual artist from southeast LA working in glass, video, and installation. Her work explores memory, cultural preservation, and the influence of media and technology through a personal lens. Drawing from early 2000s pop culture, digital archives, and home footage, her works turn memory and upbringing into sites of reverence and reflection. Aparicio holds dual BA degrees in Studio Art and Cognitive Science from UVA, and earned an MFA in Art from UCLA. She is currently based in Pasadena, CA.

David Askew received their Bachelor of Arts in Painting from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia in 2022. Askew is a Black, Queer, Non-binary oil painter whose work navigates the complex intersections of identity, sexuality, and societal constructs. Through creation of human-bird hybrids, they explore themes of self-identity and the nuanced experiences of queerness, blackness, and racial ambiguity. These beings serve as powerful symbols, confronting the hypersexualization, animalization, and exoticization often associated with Askew’s identity in mainstream narratives. Their goal is to celebrate the beauty and uniqueness of their communities. Askew currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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AiR Film Screening: Hugo Ljungbäck
Sep
26
7:00 PM19:00

AiR Film Screening: Hugo Ljungbäck

Hugo Ljungbäck: Behind Closed Doors

 

Hugo Ljungbäck is a Swedish filmmaker, archivist, curator, and media scholar. His videos explore queer history, identity, representation, and sexuality through an autobiographical lens, emphasizing the possibilities afforded by found footage filmmaking in response to the ephemerality of queer history. By using appropriated text, photos, sound, and video to make visible the hidden, sometimes unflattering, and often unarchivable traces of queer experience, his work builds a makeshift archive of love letters, home movies, YouTube videos, sex tapes, spam emails, physique magazines, propaganda films, and selfies. This hour-long program presents the first survey of his work spanning the past eight years. Please note that some of the videos feature sexually explicit materials.

 

Hugo holds a BFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently a PhD Student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His videos have screened at film festivals, art galleries, and museums internationally and are distributed worldwide by Vtape and Light Cone.

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Jul
27
5:00 PM17:00

The Modest Puppetry Festival 3: Electric Boogalo

Come check out local artists performing puppetry for adults across a wide range of styles from shadows to felt to cardboard! This year's Modest Puppetry Festival will feature "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" performed with hilarious musical accompaniment by Staunton's own The Off Center! There will be new short performances by Charlottesville artists Ophelia Wild, AV Legere, Artist's Proof Editions, Adele Josephine with Soyboy and Susan Loquat, and Nettle Shirts Puppet Works. Between shows will be musical interludes by Benjamin Freedman, plus a tiny puppet show in a box for one viewer at a time from DC artist Cecilia Cackley. And you can make puppets yourself at Cecilia's "Tiny Worlds" puppetry workshop at the Scrappy Elephant (scrappyelephant.com/classes) the Saturday before the festival! *note: actual modesty is not guaranteed.

Contact: Miranda/ miranda.elliott.rader@gmail.com

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Mutual Aid Trivia Night with Lydia
Jul
17
7:00 PM19:00

Mutual Aid Trivia Night with Lydia

Bring a team of up to six people and a spirit of friendly competition for five-to-six rounds of

trivia to benefit Charlottesville Area Harm Reduction. There will be snacks, soda/juice, and a

small prize for the winner, but the real prize is the friends we made along the way and the

money raised for harm reduction (and bragging rights!).

Charlottesville Area Harm Reduction works toward a safer and more caring community

through the distribution of Narcan, clean syringes, and other harm reduction supplies.

Donate what you want!

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Jun
21
to Jun 22

Community Yard Sale

If you are interested in contributing to the Mutual Aid Market/Yard Sale, please bring your items on Saturday. We’ll be at Visible Records from 9-4 and we ask that you bring things that could be loved and used by another. No trash or dirty clothes please! We’ll be set up on day 2 as a vendor at the Fruit Market on Sunday from 11-4. We won’t be able to accept item donations on Sunday but we’d still love to see you! Our sale is pay what you want and all funds will be gathered for local mutual aid groups. Chat with us at the market to learn more!

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Jun
13
6:00 PM18:00

Opening Night | Return of the Triumphal Mother • Dani & Sheilah ReStack

Visible Records is pleased to present Return of the Triumphal Mother by Dani and Sheilah ReStack. This new work, made specifically for Visible Records, continues their imagining of queer family, desire, relationship and fantasy. In their newest projection installation the viewer is invited into an image and constructed set for the shared meal with members of the ReStack family. At the table there is a teenager and an older woman who is bent over with her hand outstretched towards the ground. Food sits obedient while objects, colors clutter the ground. A spill occurs.

What is wrong with this woman who is responsible for the family? Why is she dripping and folded while her children carry on with their meal; oblivious? 

DANI AND SHEILAH RESTACK have embarked on an artistic relationship that is formally and emotionally adjacent to their domestic lives, a quotidian zone they share with their young daughter[s] Rose, [and Sky]. Both artists have established careers on their own. Neither Dani’s video work or Sheilah’s multimedia performance and installation work could exactly prepare us for the force of the women’s collaborative efforts. – Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope, 2017. 

Shameless Light is an ongoing performance that invites LGBTQIA+ and non-binary people to read love letters they have written under red neon lights. Shameless Light begun in 2016, in Carrizzozo, New Mexico after the US election. At that moment in United States politics, we were reeling - trying to find a way to fight back against intolerance and fear.

ReStack collaborations have shown at the Camden Arts Centre, London, UK; 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY; Iceberg Projects, Chicago, IL; Toronto International Film Festival, Toronto, Canada; Images Film Festival, Toronto, Canada; Leslie Lohman Project Space, New York, NY; Gaa Gallery, Wellfleet, MA; New York Film Festival, New York, NY; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Camden Arts Centre, London; Enjoy Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, among others. They have received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, UnionDocs NYC and Visual Studies Workshop. They have been residents at the Headlands, Visual Studies Workshop and MacDowell. They have created the Feral Domestic trilogy from 2017-2021 (Strangely Ordinary This Devotion, Come Coyote and Future From Inside) and published an accompanying text with Visual Studies Workshop in 2022. In 2024 the ReStack’s work will be featured in exhibitions at the Inter Media Art Institute, Düsseldorf, Germany, Curated by Nele Kazmareck; The Blue Building Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; and Western Front, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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Jun
13
to Aug 23

Return of the Triumphal Mother Dani & Sheilah ReStack

〰️

In The gallery

〰️ In The gallery

Return of the Triumphal Mother

Visible Records is pleased to present Return of the Triumphal Mother by Dani and Sheilah ReStack. This new work, made specifically for Visible Records, continues their imagining of queer family, desire, relationship and fantasy. In their newest projection installation the viewer is invited into an image and constructed set for the shared meal with members of the ReStack family. At the table there is a teenager and an older woman who is bent over with her hand outstretched towards the ground. Food sits obedient while objects, colors clutter the ground. A spill occurs.


Gallery Hours:

Tuesday-Saturday: 11-5pm

or by appointment

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Poetry Workshop With akeylah wellington
May
9
6:00 PM18:00

Poetry Workshop With akeylah wellington

Join us Friday, May 9th from 6-8:30 for a free poetry workshop led by akeylah wellington! This workshop will respond to the themes in our current exhibition, rooted in themes of abolition through the lens of acrostic & concrete poetry.

akeylah wellington is a sculptor and tapestry maker based in Columbus, Ohio. Her work is concerned with humor as both a noun connoting comedy and a verb meaning to endure. Working with found media from the 2000s, her attention to technological and political developments is an attempt to make sense of her personal experience of carceral-related displacement, loss, girlhood, generational inheritances, and time. Her work has been shown nationally, but most notably at Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Ferrara Showman Gallery (New Orleans, LA), and Dream Clinic Project Space (Columbus, OH). She works as a Lecturer in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University.


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