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Mixed-Media Exhibit ‘Liminal Alchemy’ Opens at Gallery5

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Tonight, Gallery5 hosts the opening reception of art show “Liminal Alchemy” in conjunction with RVA’s First Fridays. The show is a collaboration between three Richmond artists who use a variety of diverging forms, media, and materials to explore ideas of perception and reality, as well as “the transitional and artificial nature of surface and identity.”

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Artist Tamara Cervenka said it was about finding the common ground in their work, which despite superficial differences, has an undercurrent of unity and cohesion. “It really came together organically,” she said. 

The exhibit exists in tiers of abstraction, as it transitions from Cervenka’s work to fiber artist Michael-Birch Pierce and painter Jane Winfield. “It’s almost like this sort of unwrapping of something,” said Cervenka of the exhibit. “[You go] into the room where Jane is and it’s a whole other world of complete abstraction.”

Despite the contrast of style, Cervenka and Birch-Pierce found commonality in some of the material. As Cervenka experimented with bones and animal pieces, Birch-Pierce said that furs and leathers are staples of his works in this showing. Likewise, nature plays a heavy influence on Winfield’s pieces, a testament to her work’s fluidity and dimension.

“The Alchemy is the whole melding of all the different elements together,” said Cervenka. “Between the three artists, it really did feel like an alchemy, in itself. Not just the materials…all three of us really just took these elements and put them through a rigorous process to make them into something new.”

Cervenka is a mixed-media artist. She creates collages and sculptures, sometimes using them to deal with issues of feminine expectation and projection. “In the most recent stuff I’ve been doing, there has been a story. The stuff that I make now is so much more alive to me, so much more important, than anything I’ve made before.”  

Using materials like images from vintage pornography magazines, and 1960s housewife periodicals, she juxtaposes them to explore the “hypocrisy and the absurdity” of expectations placed on women. “There’s a lot of universal imagery in my work,” said Cervenka. “There are these associations that people carry with them with these very specific images. I kind of like the idea of people making their own stories with these images.”

Birch-Pierce is a textile artist and adjunct professor in fashion design at VCU, with a background in couture embroidery and fashion design and embellishment. “My work is all a re-contextualization of that medium,” said Birch-Pierce.

“My research in graduate school was all based on identity, was all based on artificiality. And all of my work is about the sense of self, sense of gender, sexuality, and identity, public-self versus private-self, and how all of those lines and boundaries between people and identities blur together,” said Birch-Pierce. “I get to focus on the things I love about fashion, the things I love about the creation of objects, and get to ignore all the bullshit I didn’t.”

Winfield, whom RVA Mag interviewed in 2017, also likes to remain unlimited by the boundaries of any medium. Her work is an eclectic mix of materials and found objects, often inspired by the world around her. “I use everything from my two-year-old son’s toys to thick, moldy paint to flowers from the kitchen. Clay, baseball display cases, tree branches…you name it, I’ll see what I can do with it,” said Winfield. “I think it’s a poor artist who blames their tools. I also think that you have to be inspired by everything that’s around you, and I certainly am.”

Winfield said she likes to work outside as nature and uncontrollable elements often act as inspiration. “Eventually, I can choreograph these mistakes that have happened over time to create really, really specific surfaces. And I’m always just trying to control the uncontrollable, which is fluidity.”

Like Cervenka and Birch-Pierce, Winfield uses this show as a chance to skew expectation, and to encourage, even if just for a little while, a shift in perspective.

“My goal is usually to make something that’s hung straight look like the walls are crooked, for just a second,” said Winfield.  “I don’t expect anybody to get some sort of epiphany or cerebral, prophetic thing happen to them when they see art, but I do want abstraction to be friendly, and I think the best way to do that is to be playful, and I think the best way to be playful is to try to turn things on its head. If for some reason someone wanted to straighten the picture out, then I think I hit my goal.”

The art show opening starts at 7 p.m. and goes until midnight at Gallery5’s gallery, live music, and marketplace location at 200 W. Marshall St. The show runs through March 28.

Top Photo By; Tamara Cervenka

VA artist brings new life to decayed street posters in collage work

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For Matthew Grimes, growing up in a beautiful old house in Winchester, Virginia, deeply influenced his view of the world.

“When I was younger, I played outside a lot. We were raised in a rather old-fashioned environment,” Grimes said. “We were taught how to hunt and fish, but it wasn’t about what goes up on the wall. It was about the commuting with nature, nature’s lessons that were focused on, as in patience, seeing, listening, getting outside of yourself.”

                                      Photo by Matthew Grimes

Through those lessons, Grimes found connection from the natural world to the artistic world through clay, specifically pottery.

“I realized, ‘wow, I can draw, I can paint, I can focus on the surface just as much as the full round entity,’” he said. “The element of fire was always a huge draw. You have control over it, yet at the same time, you almost never have full control over the flame and the alchemy of burning.”

After receiving his BFA in ceramics from James Madison University, Grimes apprenticed at a studio in Nelson County with Kevin Crowe. Grimes never found reason to leave Virginia. “Virginia is just a fantastic state. It’s culturally diverse. He moved up to the Northern Neck, then settled in D.C. His wife, who is Chilean, moved the two of them down to Chile, which is arguably where Grimes’s prime work began.

With a background in photography, Grimes photographed his travels throughout Central and South America. “The collage came about within my travels, moving around, or just simply checking out destinations, which quite often happened because of [ex wife’s] work,” said Grimes. “I was finding papers in the streets, and it wasn’t at all about their messages. It was simply just the composition, just the raw color and design and sense of place that they offered.” Thus began Grimes’s work in collage.

Using found objects from his travels, specifically carteles, or street papers, Grimes would mix spray paint, house paint, graffiti markers, billboard paper, and more. His work sparks images of bustling streets, years of wear, tear, weathering, and multiple artists’ work piling on top of one another. Faces, letters, lines, and shapes take up the space beside blocks of color and papers, sometimes with faces staring back. “That slow absorption of the shape, the lines, the volume of an object just gradually makes its way into me, and then is reinterpreted either through clay or nowadays in the collage,” said Grimes.

                                           Photo by Matthew Grimes

Grimes found that his passion for working in the three-dimensional with pottery was translated into the works of bringing the three-dimensional of found objects into the predominantly two-dimensional collage.

“You can say there’s a degree of sculpture in the collage. There’s also painting, drawing, additive, subtractive, action. I think that culmination is what drew me into collage and, for the time being, away from ceramics,” he said. Because working with a kiln can often be dependent on how the pieces come out of the fire, Grimes was used to allowing time, nature, and the work itself taking him in the direction it needed to go in.

Receiving the $8,000 professional grant in mixed media from the VMFA Fellowship Program was a huge “shot in the arm” for Grimes. “It helped me realize…in the art scene, there’s no predetermined route. There’s no ladder of succession. It’s not about the monetary gain. It’s just about being able to have the choice to continue to do so,” he said.

“The world collage has allowed me into, in showing venues and other artists, are completely different from the clay world.” What appealed most to Grimes about receiving this grant was the flexibility of its use.”

“The biggest aspect of that was simply confidence, realizing ‘no matter how I go about this, if I feel good about it, if I’m at the edge of scraping against an idea that’s so far from me that I’m coming away with the tools to push and to realize that this is a good thing. This is real. This is something I can do.’”

Seven artists manipulate everyday images into art in Candela Books & Gallery’s exhibit, ‘CHOP SHOP’

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Through various processes of manipulation, six international and one Richmond artist aim to transform everyday images in Candela Books & Gallery’s latest exhibit, CHOP SHOP.

All of the works in the group exhibition have been altered through digital manipulation, but each one has been “chopped” or changed through some medium whether it be illustration, deconstruction, collage or surrealism to present a new perspective.

“The current show is a little bit of an outlier. It’s half and half [outlying and traditionally what is done],” said Gordon Stettinius, owner of Candela Books and Gallery. “Sometimes we say, ‘we like so-and-sos work a ton, let’s see if we can get that work in the gallery,’ and it really is a solo show or a two-person show comes around because we admire someone’s work.”


Ayumi Tanaka “The path,” from the series Wish You Were Here. 2014. 16″ x 20″ Silver Gelatin Print

Stettinius added the gallery is hoping to introduce notable artists from all over to Richmond to try to “bring a little more awareness to what contemporary photography is.”

Artists from all over were asked to contribute their work including Nadine Boughton, Tom Chambers, Peter Brown Leighton, Lissa Rivera, Ayumi Tanaka and Maggie Taylor, and Richmond’s own Blythe King.


Lissa Rivera, “San Jose, California,” from the series Absence Portraits. 5″ x 7″ Archival Pigment Print Courtesy of ClampArt

Ashby Nickerson, Associate Director at Candela Books said they started talking about the idea about six months ago and she said the owner was able to narrow down what artists to showcase.

“Gordon travels around and goes to a lot of portfolio reviews and photography gatherings across the country,” she said. “So he had met a couple of people who he had seen their work in a couple different ways and had kind of brought them to the table. There were a few that I knew, one Blythe King, who was a Richmond artist.”


Nadine Boughton, “Wingtips,” 2015. 15″ x 15″ Archival Pigment Print

Blythe King’s work is similar to her counterparts in the show in that she creates new images through the recycling of older ones. What sets her apart is her collages and how it incorporates her affinity for old catalogs from the 1940s.


Blythe King, “X-Ray Vision,” 2017. 20″ x 16″ Image Transfer, Collage, and 23K Gold Leaf on Illustration Board

“I happened upon an old Montgomery Ward mail order catalog from the 1940s at a yard sale in my neighborhood in Church Hill,” said Blythe King, a local artist originally from Pittsburgh. “I have been really captivated and fascinated with the imagery in these old catalogs ever since. I’ve amassed a huge collection of these catalogs and feature the fashion models from these catalogs in my work.”

Candela Books & Gallery held an artist talk March 2 and during the talk, King mentioned her work is a seamless culmination of her interests.

“[I] talked about how my work is this interesting combination of three of my seemingly unrelated interests: popular culture, religion and Japanese art.”

King’s work can currently be found in galleries across Virginia including a piece in the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in the New Wave Show.

The artist explained to RVAMag and audiences at the Art Talk how her take on photography mirrors her talent for collages and design.

“The way I manipulate images is through image transfer, which I combine with elements of collage photography and calligraphy,” she said.

Peter Brown Leighton describes his creative endeavors as “running alongside the emerging digital technologies to make art.”

“Throughout the 20th century, photography, like a one-celled organism, evolved on a relatively linear path from one stage of development to another,” he said. “The advent of digital imaging alternatives upset that equation.”


Leighton, “Man Lives Through Plutonium Blast,” 2014. 10″ x 7″ Archival Pigment Print

Brown’s work has frequently been shown in exhibitions held in Candela Books and Gallery. One of his pieces was bought for the personal collection at the gallery and landed him the connections to be brought back for Chop Shop.

His attention to his craft has led his work to be shown internationally. “This coming June I’ll have 40 prints showing at the Promenades Photographiques de in France,” he said.

The gallery also incorporated the artwork of Tom Chambers, a Pennsylvania native who worked for years as a graphic designer, into the exhibit which frequently features his daughter or her friends and aims to catalog or capture the growth of an adolescent girl into a young woman.

“The oldest piece of mine is Springs Landfall, 2006, which depicts a girl in a boat of flowers ‘landing’ in a Winter field,” he said. “My newest image is, “Edge of a Dream,” which depicts a white tiger walking down a village street. Both images employ magic realism, which expresses a realistic view while also adding magical elements.”


Tom Chambers, “Glass Flower,” 2010. 14″ x 14″ Archival Pigment Print

“The thoughts about the work sort of command when you think about all these people in the room together- the work of these different artists somewhat support each other, somewhat challenge each other,” said Stettinius. “There are a couple of people who arguably may not even be photographers but they sit very comfortably in this show we feel.”

This non-traditional photography has sparked quite a bit of conversation and questions with guests, according to Nickerson.

“I love when people come in here and ask, ‘how is this a photograph’, we get that a lot,” Nickerson said. “That is always exciting because we get to explain whether or not if it’s an old process or new process, however they are doing it to say that this started somewhere in photography and they are taking it somewhere else. They are adding to it.”

“Chop Shop” will be on display at Candela Books & Gallery at 214 W. Broad St. through April 22.

Top image: Maggie Taylor “What remains?” 2016. 22″x 22″ Inkjet Print