PARADE

A sculpture collaboration between Janet Van Fleet and Riki Moss
January 13 - February 7th
Reception January 23, 5:30 - 7:30

HOURS:
Monday - Friday 1:00- 8:30 pm
Saturdays 12:30 - 4:30 pm.
For more information, contact Joan Watson, Joan.Watson@uvm.edu , (802)656-4150.

DIRECTIONS

From I-89: Take Exit 14W toward Burlington,
stay in right lane, take the right for East Avenue.
At the next traffic signal, turn left onto Carrigan Drive.
Proceed straight through the next traffic signal at Beaumont Drive.
Take next left after the water tower.
Visitor parking is at the parking meters on the left, purchase tickets in the payment machine. Parking is free after 3:30 PM and on weekend.s

The Living/Learning Center is a short walk away, across Main Street. Use the pedestrian crossing signal at Main Street/University Heights.
Walk down the path to the Commons, the gallery is on the second floor in the Fireplace Lounge.

STATEMENTS:

Both artists use natural, found and/or recycled materials to create human, animal, and hybrid creatures, presenting these figures in ways that suggest migration through time and space. The exhibit offers Moss and Van Fleet the opportunity to mingle and integrate their work in new ways to expand on ideas about species loss, resource sharing, extinction, ethnicity, and the big questions of life and death. The sculptors first worked together in 2010, creating and mounting work for the On the Planet exhibition in Nagoya, Japan in conjunction with UN Conference on Biodiversity (COP10) and in 2012 in Mutual Gaze, one of the exhibits in the 2012 Winooski Pop-Up Gallery District. More recently they each mounted work from their Parade series in June, 2013 in an exhibit organized by Vermont 350.org.

As Pamela Polston wrote in the 7days ReView: "Riki Moss and Janet Van Fleet make creatures from paper, mixed media and found materials. Don't let their whimsical appearance fool you: The exhibit examines life's migration through time and space, addressing issues such as species loss and ethnicity"

Janet Van Fleet: Thin Sections

When we think of a parade (or our life's journey) we imagine a beginning and an end, with a fairly straight path between the first and the last points. But if we broaden our vision a bit, we will notice that we are not alone; other people are traveling along with us in the parade, sometimes marching very close by, but then moving away, sometimes disappearing onto unknown other paths and not coming back into our view. If we broaden our scope again, we see that it is not only other humans parading along with us, but also animals, viruses, and millions of other lifeforms that surround us, each living lives that occasionally intersect with ours.

In this installation my wooden human and animal figures are interacting with Riki Moss's ethereal white paper beings. When she and I set up this exhibit, it was like a dance party, with each of my wooden creatures finding a paper partner with which it connected, often in wonderfully evocative pairings that suggest play, dance, love, and solidarity.

My original intention with this installation was to remove the bases from my figures and suspend them from the ceiling in a kind of curtain, like a thin section in biology or minerology -- a wafer thin slice of a material that allows scientists looking through a microscope to see how and where parts of a whole are connected, information that could not be known by looking only at the outside of the material.

But collaboration, like life, sometimes takes us in new directions, and now I think that the thin sections of the title may be the thin veil of our own skins, the place where I end and the Not-Me begins, that critical synapse across whose tiny gap we must leap to connect with others

Riki Moss: Passing through

My perspective is linear, more prosaic: I see the Parade as moving on a loop through time and space, we are all just passing through. I think of the gallery as a freeze frame of the meet and greet (or the dance party, as Janet calls it) between my Curious Life Forms and her wonderful wooden beings - her Curious Lifeforms (one word) - taller, darker, even intimidating. I see my guys, rearrangements of animal, plant and human life, as either ghosts or sparks, finished or about-to-be, reminders that we humans need to pay attention to the other beings with whom we share this planet. There is only paper - thin skin between us, and even that is porous.

Links:

Living/Learning Gallery http://www.uvm.edu/llcenter/gallery/

The Parade Project http://mutualgaze.com/projects/collaborative/parade_project.html

Riki Moss website http://www.rikimoss.com/

Janet Van Fleet website http://janetvanfleet.com/