From July 7-27, New City Arts presents the 2022-23 New City Arts Fellowship exhibition, Soft Spot, featuring work by Aidyn Mancenido, Audrey Parks, Eileen Johnson, Kia Wassenaar & Rachel Austin.
New City Arts' Welcome Gallery
114 3rd St. NE, Charlottesville, VA 22902
First Fridays
July 7 from 5-7:30PM; Artist reading and performance at 6PM.
Free and open to the public. All ages welcome.
Gallery Hours
Wednesday-Saturday from 10AM-5PM
Exhibition Events
Fellowship Open Studio with Eileen Johnson: Jan 28 at 2PM
Sonic Exploration with Rachel Austin: March 9 at 7PM
Sonic Exploration with Rachel Austin: March 11 at 7PM
Psychogeography: A Poetry Writing Ritual with Audrey Parks: May 16 at 6:30PM
Covid-19 Visitor Policy
Please do not come to Welcome Gallery if you have been exposed to COVID-19, are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, or have been advised to isolate or quarantine.
About the New City Arts Fellowship and 2023 Theme
The 2023 New City Arts Fellowship invited a select group of artists to make work responding to the annual theme, Soft Spot, written by Fellowship Guest Curator, Marisa Williamson. Following an open call and competitive application process, this year’s Artist Fellows were selected by a community panel. During month-long Fellowships that included a studio space grant and a stipend, these five artists considered the ways their work reveals unseen openings, sites of ongoing growth, unfused structures, and delicate parts that require gentleness and care.
This call invited artists from across disciplines into creative fellowship in order to cultivate and share their soft spots. The New City Arts Fellowship culminates in this group exhibition that honors and investigates the power of this tenderness curated from what the artists produced.
Exhibition Statement by Marisa Williamson
Environmental sounds and voices recorded in Visible Records during Rachel Austin’s residency wrap the listener in an audible archive. Austin guides us to a softer space: the before- and after-life of sound. Her queer refracted abstraction hums: we are here today, echoes and waves tomorrow. While you may miss details of the mix during the opening reception, one of many beautiful things about Austin’s soundwork is its power, on loop, to bore, cut, enlarge, and create a sonic mise en abyme of retreat and return with subsequent listening.
Kia Wassenaar’s works, some with video embedded, are soft and dense. The references to soft play space, retro interiors, and nature are upfront. Beneath, these tufted sculptural landscapes are networked. Wassenaar took a long walk through Spain this year–connecting, disconnecting, reconnecting with people, `possessions stowed away. She was exhausted at the end of each day, exceptionally grateful for soft spots to rest. Memories and family, a mesh of personal histories secure and animate each piece. I imagine them growing inside her rhizomatically while she walked: a network of mobile homes made for the pilgrimage from one spot in the mind to another.
Aidyn Mancenido describes this performance as one of endurance. With the performers in their fixed footholds, the peripatetic impulse shapes and disciplines their bodies. We talk about how intimacy, committing to something or someone for the duration, produces softness. Mancenido’s score is devised around this as well as themes of miscommunication, misrecognition, violent impulses, and ethnographic studies of resistance. The performance is improvised and will happen the night of the opening. What remains will take shape around that event horizon; a spot beyond which the vision softens.
Eileen Johnson forages in magazines, newspapers, and coffee table books, using what she finds to cook up dreamscapes in which femme bodies, animals, nature, and technological elements stew in uneasy discourse. It’s easy to find yourself lost in Johnson’s worlds. Looking for breadcrumbs I step back and find that each work is one in a constellation of cairns. In aggregate, the images whisper in urgent tones about how vulnerable we are to the subsuming gaze of others. And yet, by marking the path in the way she does, with familiar signs reassembled as surreal visual poetry, Johnson retraces soft steps in a creative path she is bravely carving for us through this perilous world we all inhabit.
Audrey Parks’ words, written on the wall, read aloud, woven throughout the exhibition, are drawn from acute observations of everyday life and language refracted through a well-hewn lens of shadowy humor and humanism. Parks’ poems about everyday grief and dread speak to me. Pithy and crafty, wry and often regular in form, lines with formal patterns (ending with a palindromic sequence of words) can be surprising and intense. There is plenty of soft word play to sink into. Some of Parks’ poems, like Emily Dickenson’s Escape is such a thankful Word, are worth committing to memory:
I held my wildest dream
I felt my wildest dream leave if
my wildest dream
takes me I’ll get
Going
A soft spot in the prison wall or in the routine of one’s oppressor can offer the trapped a chance at escape. Soft Spot is an escape–portals everywhere opened by voices, sculptures, scores, photomontage and stanzas.
I’m proud to see these five artists’ work together in the soft spot New City Arts and Visible Records has made for artists post-pandemic. It’s a testament to the power of the creative incubator and the strength and self-determination of these emerging artists.
About the Artists
