The Vault Project installation this month is by Matthew Szosz, the VCU Craft & Material Studies Resident.

Matt Szosz is the first emerging VCU Craft & Material Studies Resident, sponsored by the Fountainhead Development. Fellows are selected based on their innovative use of materials and ability to expand the definition of craft in their work.

This installation will run from 7/7-7/24 

Nicole Baumann embraces the small things. Her carefully stitched paper creations ask us to remember the intangible, the small, the everyday. A playful mix of imaginative and nature, hr delicate images are carefully constructed compositions. Nicole is inspired by memories and relationships noting, "The recollection of familiar scenes and sentiments allows the imagination to interpolate information that may be missing as a result of passing time, thus causing a past experience to be corrupted by recollection. " A graduate of VCU where she earned both her BFA and MFA in Crafts and Material Studies, Nicole's work is widely exhibited and has earned her a Professional Artist Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Self described as "A Kinetic Learner", Vilkas D'Angelo-Horvath has been practicing art since graduating Cum Laude from VCU in 1997. Earning two BFA's in 5 years, one in Painting and one in Sculpture, D'Angelo-Horvath integrates digital and traditional media to create fantastical designs.  

Serena Pelissier grew up in a family of artists, but her own appreciation of visual art began when she was in college where she concentrated on foreign language. Pulled toward the studio arts she began drawing then painting. Now she creates compositions in textiles and paper. "The aim is to capture subtle mood, memory, and unabashed nostalgia, through color combinations that surprise, delight, and perhaps reach deep inside us." 

In between hope and desperation “my country loves me and some day I'll be president” tells the story of the those who are treated as disposable humans finding strength to hope for more than what is expected of them. 

The 2010 Vault Project kicks off with intriguing work by Tyler Payne. Payne's work elicits a sense of emotion and motion. The cross hatchings and frantic lines both invite you in and push you out.

Pam Shelor uses oils, oil pastels and oil sticks and beeswax to create visual relationships between images. Her works are created through a layering process of adding and removing, drawing and erasing, ultimately weaving together in a beautifully textured montage.

Jenny Mendes has exhibited her whimsical sculptures, ceramics, tiles, and jewelry nationally. For the past three years, she has been a resident artist at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. Her distinguished fantastical characters and faces are mysteriously alluring. You may have seen her bowls featured in Quirk's shop in the past; come see what she has installed in the Vault.

An image can evoke sound. A smell can call up a memory. Touch can speak of emotion. Through repetition and variation we understand the rhythm and cadence of making, of giving form to our idea. How we translate and recombine these beats gives us our own meaning and structure: connecting form to form, eye to hand, light to shadow, and form to void.

Just as the cup is both half full and half empty, there is more that one side to any story, more than one answer to a question. I can pick up the cup to drink or I can explore the undulating line and volume.

As I transform the clay into different shapes, I am challenged to express the duality of my material—that it is at the same time hard and soft, rigid and flowing. That it can suggest clay and fabric and metal is a part of the challenge and excitement of creating. The resulting pieces works, constructed of fixed and mutable components draw me through unexpected doorways even as the work itself moves across the wall or is stacked upon a pedestal.

My forms become bricks and windows, fabric scraps and building blocks. They can obscure or reveal. As forms can meander along the wall and my eye can explore space both within and around. These components frame a story and are a story in their own right---a language spoken in three dimensions.