Begun three years ago as a way to showcase VCCA Fellows' work and demonstrate exactly what VCCA does,  The Commission  presents a major site-specific collaborative work by at least two artists from the three disciplines (literature, visual art, musical composition) VCCA fosters. The first  Commission, Bright Shiny Me  (2013), brought together visual artist Maja Spasova (London, Berlin) and composer Luis Hilario Arévalo (Mexico City). The 40 foot-square piece was made up of 1,600 mirrors secured to metal spikes. Loudspeakers produced a low frequency sound similar to a heartbeat, created by Arévalo, which caused the mirrors to move fracturing and reflecting light. Coming to Know What We’ve Always Known ,  The Commission  2014 took inspiration from the glorious natural surroundings of Central Virginia. Created by visual artist Georgia June Goldberg (Ross, CA) and poet Sally Dawidoff (Berkeley, CA), the piece combined 150 saplin...

Corinne Teed’s  Feral Utopias is a multi-channel animation that uses cross-species affinities to explore parallels between the alienation faced by LGBTQ people and that faced by animals. Both of these groups are “struggling to find a sense of home in a human society that has repeatedly communicated to us that we are unwanted.” Corinne continues, “There’s a whole field of study in critical theory called Queer Ecology that greatly influences my work. While I am interested in breaking down the boundary between human and non-human animals and what those distinctions mean, I am particularly interested in the perspectives of marginalized human communities on ecological issues.” In Feral Utopias , Corinne pairs photographs of LGBTQ subjects with audio recordings of these participants describing the animal species that provides them with a sense of home. “The interviews were completely unscripted,” says Corinne. “I thought the project participants would have something...