First Friday (Feb 2009)

I attended First Friday this month and looked at some of the galleries around Broad and Marshall streets. The first one I walked through was Gallery 5, which was showing a piece by various different artists that seemed to be their reactions to being sexually assaulted. This exhibition was not my favorite aesthetically that night, but was the one which made the most impact. The pieces combined with the way they were presented were truly haunting to me at first. After seeing them as a group, however, I got a much different feeling of release from the expressions within the pieces. It seemed to me that these media were the artists way of expressing and then maybe letting go of their fear or isolation, or whatever else they must have been feeling. Some people use music, others artistic expression. Obviously these pieces were not a complete remedy, but I saw most of them as tremendous release for the artists.
On the other hand, individually, some of the pieces in this collection continued to haunt me. This makes me feel as though they were not about letting go, but instead about heavily introverted examinations into dark worlds of memories. Although these pieces were the most horrifying, they were the ones I examined the closest.
I also really enjoyed the large-scale canvases hung in the 1708 Gallery. I was really drawn to the geometric paint-globs that seemed to be being launched at top speed from one canvas to the next. This, I would say, was the most aesthetically pleasing exhibition. It was refreshing to look at pieces focused on form, color, lines and texture after being sort of smacked in the face with the context of the Gallery 5 pieces.