Passing Strange at the Hunt Gallery, Mary Baldwin College features new work by Adria Arch on view January 12–30, 2015. Adria credits her April 2012 residency at VCCA as the reason for the show. It was then that she met Dinah Ryan, also in residence. A critic of contemporary art and visual culture, and an independent curator, Dinah has been she has been a contributing editor for Art Papers magazine since 1992. Dinah’s husband, Paul Ryan, is the Hunt Gallery’s director.
Based in Arlington, Massachusetts, Adria is a mixed-media artist who produces striking compositions that pair strong graphic elements and intense color. There is a purposeful rightness to her compositions despite the fact that Adria incorporates bits of chance in the form of doodles and paint spills: “I look at the edges of things: the eccentric and unpredictable shapes found in unexpected places such as the puddles and pools of spilled paint and the overlooked doodle found in the margins of a notebook, or the swooping li…

Seed saving is a topic Rachel Breen’s explored from a number of different angles over the past four years. The practice preserves heirloom seeds by collecting them and then sowing them, with the goal of keeping the plants in circulation. Seed saving speaks to the very essence of sustainability. In husbanding what we have inherited from the past and passing it onto future generations, we are fulfilling a sacred duty.
We’ve all heard about the threat from GMOs, but as Rachel explains there are other factors negatively impacting our agricultural biodiversity. “One of the problems is that we’ve lost a lot of edible plants over the last 100 years,” she says. “Many farms, in their effort to provide a particular kind of tomato or apple to a grocery store, have only planted certain varieties, letting other ones disappear.”
Prior to arriving for her VCCA residency, Rachel visited Association Kokopelli, the largest seed saving organization in France, where she made drawings of the seeds in the …

Lori Horvitz’s new collection of personal essays: The Girls of Usually, hailed as “Deeply intimate and wickedly funny," will be available February 1, 2015 from Truman State University Press.
A professor of Literature and Language at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, where she teaches courses in creative writing, literature, and women, gender and sexuality studies, Lori’s work has appeared in Epiphany, South Dakota Review, Southeast Review, Hotel Amerika, and Chattahoochee Review among others.

http://www.lorihorvitz.com/home.html