The sun, our sun, will expand to engulf the planet Earth in 5 billion years. Don’t bother setting an alarm or getting some extra SPF sunscreen, it won’t matter. Everything we have ever built, or will build, will vaporize and collapse to cinders. Everything. If it all...
Like Alice down the rabbit hole, it’s easy to get sucked into the fantastical world that Richmond-based painter Wingchow creates in her abstract paintings and illustrations. Her superb use of color and value create a hypnotic sense of dimension, drawing the eye to lines and shapes around the canvas. Wingchow has been drawing as long as she can...
Shopping malls were once the most popular social spaces in America, from their rise in the late 1950s to the golden age in the 1990s, up until their ever-rapid decay as online shopping began to take its place, malls played a major role in shaping our culture. Teenagers spent their days, not on their phones, but roaming the sticky floors and...
The darker side of children’s fairy tales come to life in a VCU Theater department production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods, showing now until the end of April, at VCU’s Raymond Hodges Theatre. Director Kikau Alvaro described the source material, by Sondheim and James Lapine, as a mash-up musical featuring characters from “the Grimm’s...
The grand reveal of the Institute for Contemporary Art last Thursday was a celebration of art at its most powerful. The inaugural show, Declaration, is a bold collection of works that confront and transform the viewer, delivering on the promise of the ICA as a place to have difficult conversations and build connections between the city and the...
In today’s world, people are constantly bombarded with visual representations in all aspects of their everyday lives. In the hyper contextualized world of Instagram and Facebook, it can be easy for a person to forget the refined authority of a trained photographer’s eye - one that can tell a comprehensive story. And given the ease in which a...
Patriarchy may celebrate the nude image of Titian’s Venus, but it gets uncomfortable when women take up the brush. Norfolk-based artist Alison Stinely became the center of a controversy in the city’s art community this year when a government agency censored her work for containing nudity. “There’s always been this tear between how people want me...
Nidaa Badwan lived in isolation for some 20 months in a tiny room in occupied Gaza, under a bare bulb and a single window. After her first hundred days of exile, she began a photographic self-portrait series, titled “100 Days of Solitude.” Fresh from exhibits across Europe and New York City, she’s making her Virginia debut in Declaration, the...
Combining starkly realistic photography with sculpture, interactive pieces, and a chilling audio/visual component, Virginia-based photographer Morgan Ashcom brings his solo exhibit, “What the Living Carry,” to life at Candela Books + Gallery. Like the Free Union native Ashcom himself, the exhibit is rooted in the south, depicting not only...
Returning to school can be a challenge for anyone, but for someone who has already spent years working and thriving in their field, it is an entirely unique experience. Such is the case for 48-year-old Nikolas Goodich, a local visual artist who’s decided to go back to school at the VCU School of the Arts to earn his BFA. For two decades, Goodich...
