Congratulations to the 2013/2014 awardee of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship Award, Adriane Connerton, MFA student in the Department of Painting & Printmaking. Her fellowship provides a generous one-year $10,000 stipend. On Adriane’s exhibition, the review panel provided the following commentary:
“A painter who began experimenting with digital media only a year ago, Adriane Connerton masterfully combines multiple channels of video in two large projections and across six monitors to create a truly immersive environment for her 2014 thesis exhibition. Connerton’s complex, yet seemingly effortless choreography of image and audio enthralls even as it deeply unsettles, activating the entire space with one seductive view after another. She evokes such contemporary phenomena as video games, black-light raves, sexual fetishes, fitness and self-help trends, transcultural mashups, social media personae, and other aspects of the Internet. Threaded through everything are the artist’s formidable videotaped performances. At once threatened and threatening, Connerton’s wide-eyed avatar confronts age-old questions about the physical body and the spiritual self with hypnotic power and uncommon wit.” – Ashley Kistler, Director of the VCU Anderson Gallery
The depth and breadth of the work exhibited by our graduate students is striking. We are grateful to the VCU Anderson Gallery panel of reviewers for their thoughtful consideration of the exhibited projects.
Ashley Kistler, Director
Michael Lease, Head of Exhibitions
Traci Horne Garland, Gallery Coordinator and Collections Specialist