This year’s InLight Richmond at VMFA was a success judging by large crowds on both Friday and Saturday nights.
Small protests by Virginia Flaggers of the Confederate Chapel being used as part of the art installation didn’t amount to much at all. For the most part, people were wondering what all the fuss was about.
Today 1708 Gallery announced the winners of this year’s InLight Richmond: Best in Show went to artist Alice Pixley Young’s “Lightgeist” which was selected by juror Alex Baker, director of Philadelphia’s Flesiher/Ollman Gallery. And, selected by the InLight audience, the New Market People’s Choice award went to local artist Eva Rocha and her Object-Orientalis (pictured above).
Here’s more from the press release on the winners and their work:
Alice Pixley Young studied at Ringling College of Art and Design and the New York Studio Residency Program, and received an MFA from the University of Maryland and an MA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Her work has been exhibited at Bullseye Projects in Portland, Oregon, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the 21c Museum in Cincinnati and Louisville, and the Currents International New Media Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In Young’s work, ideas of nature, place and memory are experienced through the layering of media and visual information. Lightgeist addresses the idea of systems, cycles and the change of light within the season. Through a small cityscape “set” and a projected video of flocking birds, she explores the way memory effects the construction of both our psychic and physical environments. Video projection marks autumn moving into winter, overcast days and crepuscular hours- dimming late afternoons and evenings and murky dawns.
In Object-Orientalis, Rocha explores the correlation between the de-humanized commercial relationship we have developed with the contemporary art object and the ways we have allowed ourselves to objectify other humans. Rocha is interested in how object-oriented views relate to other social issues, particularly the objectification of women and its implications for human trafficking.
Eva Rocha, a multimedia artist from Brazil, is a graduate student in the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She brings together her studies and her early experiences as an actress in avant-garde theater in Sao Paulo to create her current work, which utilizes video performance and mapping projection to explore the relationship between objects and cultural perspectives. She was awarded the Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts in 2015. Her work is in prominent private and public collections in the US and Brazil.