Here’s the deal. LAL’s Capital Campaign has been underway for about a year now, and can we just say, fundraising is HARD.

To celebrate how far we’ve come and to get the arts community (that means YOU) jazzed for the second phase of the campaign, we’re throwing a pARTy that is for everyone.

And since nothing is as inspiring as art, pARTy is going to be chock full of it!

We’ve got street art installations, interactive photo booths, artist trading card swaps, video bombing. Wanna know what video bombing is? Plan to come to pARTy.

We’ve also got a performance by the beloved March Madness Marching Band, sweet beats by DJ Dr. Gram, and a flash mob by Dance Blue. Wanna see a flash mob go down before your very eyes? Gotta come to pARTy.

Parlay Social will be providing a cash bar on site, and some lucky pARTygoers will win drawings for giveaways to Buster’s and Bellini’s.

pARTy is happening right in the heart of downtown (just a stone’s throw away from what the Capital Campaign is all about — our downtown contemporary art space) at the Fifth Third Bank Pavilion on April 20 from 5-10pm, which is during the April Gallery Hop.

We’ll see you there!

Posted in Events, Money Matters
Tags: capital campaign, contemporary art in lexington, fundraising, lexington art league expansion, pARTy

"The Apples Were Heavy in Her Bag" by Marcy Chevali

New York- based artist Marcy Chevali has a piece in Right Here Over There that is a story written on 2 balls of yarn. You can see and feel it at the Loudoun House gallery- and you can hear the story here.

Chevali states on her website:

“I build my work as re-presentations of emotional situations in my life. The materials I use and the way they interact become metaphors, diagrams. I choose ordinary materials for certain qualities that accurately portray the situations with which I am concerned. Often, additional attributes of the materials become unexpectedly significant. ” – Marcy Chevali

Posted in Exhibits
Tags: becky alley, lexington art league, loudoun house, Marcy Chevali, Right Here Over There

"Bootstraps" by Pulled Resources (Dan DeZarn and Thomas Sturgill)
salvaged lumber from Hurricane Katrina damaged house, glue, nails

Another work from Right Here Over There. This piece, created with materials important to a particular time and place, was made by a team known as Pulled Resources (Dan DeZarn and Thomas Sturgill).

Here’s what they say about Bootstraps in their artist statement:

“In January of 2007, these materials were collected from a home in Ocean Springs, Mississippi… created from… materials that were too short to salvage, a small patch of mismatch hardwood flooring and small or damaged structural lumber. These materials had little construction value but were contextually significant, emblematic of the time and culture inherent in their previous existence.”  - Pulled Resources

Posted in Exhibits
Tags: art, Dan DeZarn, free, lexington art league, loudoun house, Pulled Resources, Right Here Over There, Thomas Sturgill

Margi Weir (Detroit, MI)
Frontline/Detroit: Bones 2a
sumi ink, india ink, and tusche on rag paper
28" x 40"
2010

Can art be both disastrous and beautiful? We read in a book once that beauty is not always truth, and truth is not always beautiful.

Margi Weir’s drawings are  like that. Her line work and detail of decaying Detroit buildings are beautiful- even though the subject matter is an honest depiction of a deteriorating contemporary landscape.

Weir’s drawing above- and one more also seen in Right Here Over There- were included in an exhibition put together by SUPERFRONT LA called Detroit: A Brooklyn Case Study. Here’s a bit from her artist statement:

“It was not until I moved to Detroit in the fall of 2009, that I encountered the urban ruins that are so prevalent here. After the initial shock, like many others, I was attracted to these relics. Unlike many others, I did not retreat to the suburbs.  I moved in among them and these ‘bones’ have become personal.  The open form left by fire and weather appeals to my sense of design.  They have become part of my everyday world, my neighbors.  I began to draw them to help myself understand them and my relationship to them.  These ‘bones’, ruins of our civilization, occupy an ambiguous place in time that I am trying to understand. They are not completely of the past yet it is unclear what role they play in the present.

“I began to notice them all across the country… There are ‘bones’ left from natural as well as financial disaster… I like the idea that something beautiful on the surface has an underlying violence, a dark side, if you will.”

Posted in Exhibits
Tags: art, free, lexington art league, loudoun house, Margi Weir, Right Here Over There, SUPERFRONT LA

"Six Chairs" by Tracy Spencer-Stonestreet
six wooden chairs, stacked
51”H x 33”W x 39.5”
2010

Just a few days before the Right Here Over There  Opening this Friday, we are still busy installing and making last-minute perfections. Next on our installation radar is an interesting work by Hampton, Virginia based artist Tracy Spencer-Stonestreet. Here’s a clip from Tracy’s artist statement. Be sure to check out more of Tracy’s work.

“Through my manipulations of furniture and other domestic objects, I attempt to complicate entrenched conventions of family relations, sexuality, and social conditioning. I give physicality to moments of internal crisis through an on‐going investigation and deconstruction of furniture. Made to imitate heirlooms of the aristocracy, these objects are already participating in a sort of role‐playing that aids in the reconstituting of an upwardly mobile class identity.” - Tracy Spencer-Stonestreet

Posted in Goodness
Tags: art, free, fun, lexington art league, loudoun house, openings, Tracy Spencer-Stonestreet

London-based artist Tessa Garland’s video Above the Skyline is one of the works selected for exhibition in Right Here Over There, which opens this Friday at the Loudoun House with a party from 6p – 9p.  See a preview of Garland’s piece above, thanks to the artist’s website, and a snippet of her description below.

“Above the Skyline presents a deserted stage set depicting a grim prospect of a lonely, future with nothing but memories. Built entirely in miniature, the detailed film set invites the viewer to piece together the profile of an absent person. With its use of scale and filmic devices Above the Skyline plays with illusion and explores the tension between theatricality and reality. Light and sound have been fused together to create an external energy that leads the camera through the model and creates an atmosphere of surveillance and menace.” – Tessa Garland

Posted in Goodness
Tags: art, free, lexington art league, loudoun house, Right Here Over There, Tessa Garland

Right Here Over There exhibition. Image: "untitled (holding rocks)" by Ann Mansolino

LAL announces the opening of its newest exhibition Right Here Over There, with an opening reception on March 23 from 6p to 9p at historic Loudoun House. The exhibition will be on display through May 13, 2012, with other events and lectures scheduled.

Curated by Becky Alley, LAL Exhibitions and Programs Director, and curator of Love and Things Like Love, the show saw over 1,500 works submitted and 55 accepted. The exhibition explores the physical, mental, and metaphoric landscapes of place and their indelible link to memory. Throughout our lives we are surrounded by a world punctuated by varying spaces, climates, geographies, buildings and cultures. Accumulating in layers over time, pieces of our physical world provide visual reference points for how we understand one another and ourselves. Viewing the show will also give onlookers a taste of media ranging from drawing, printmaking, installation, video, photography and non-traditional media.

Alley states, “As a curator, I am always interested in finding a natural intersection between contemporary art and everyday life.  This exhibition explores themes of place and memory -  concepts that resonate with almost everyone.  The tremendous response by submitting artists living all over the world demonstrates the relevance and universality of the theme, and my hope is that gallery visitors will also connect with the work, finding moments of self-reflection and discovery throughout the gallery.”

Artists like Margi Weir (you may remember from the LAL exhibition Paintpresent) are tackling issues of urban and financial decay, and memories of past failed societies, by depicting the suburban ruins of her Detroit city. She finds them both beautiful and disastrous. And sculptor Tracy Spencer-Stonestreet of Hampton, Virginia, is directing the conversation to social conditioning and family crisis. Tracy manipulates and reconstructs domestic objects (like heirloom furniture) to “give physicality to these moments”.

Other artists like Jennifer L. Manzella of Athens, Georgia, are using mixed media and printmaking techniques to depict a landscape that resides somewhere between memory and dream. Stacey Chinn of Lexington, Kentucky, also touches on this topic in her piece Persistence of Memory, which is an open vintage suitcase filled with branded pillows stating things like “loving”, “jealous” and “control”. Both are suggesting aspects of our lives that are not always visually present; but, rather, carried in our psyche and worn on the inside, like a suitcase of closed experiences carried from one stop to the next.

Ann Mansolino, photographer of untitled (holding rocks) and of Whittier, California, states in her artist statement, which poignantly sums up the concept of the show, “[The images] explore the aspects of life that are not visible on the surface: how we see ourselves in relation to our pasts, our memories, our feelings of belonging and its opposite, and our ideas of who we are and who we think we should be.  The images investigate the ways in which we search for and locate meaning, and reveal the emotional and psychological texture of our experiences.”

See the schedule of lectures and events on our website.

Posted in Exhibits
Tags: Ann Mansolino, becky alley, free art, Jennifer L. Manzella, lexington art league, loudoun house, Margi Weir, Right Here Over There, stacey chinn, Tracy Spencer-Stonestreet