RIVERVIEWS BLOOMS IN TIME FOR SUMMER WITH NEW EXHIBITION, BOTANY

Botany; featuring Tamra Harrison-Kirschnick and Kristin Reiber-Harris:

Riverviews welcomes the warm weather and the green season with a new exhibition, Botany; featuring new work by Tamra Harrison-Kirschnick and Kristin Reiber-Harris. Being Virginia artists, both women paint and draw representations of the nature we see daily in this area.  Their pieces serve as more than strict representations, however.

Tamra Harrison-Kirschnick‘s work uses a dark sense of beauty to portray twisting vines, colorful flowers, and deep nests of grass. She states that,

“Plant environments allow me to explore intense color, edges, and forms, building discontinuous abstractions that exaggerate and intensify the realistic natural world. Heightened color combined with aggressive plant imagery disrupt ideas of the traditional landscape, where close-up details of nature become catalysts for expressionist friction.”

The result is a familiar, yet seductive scene that draws the viewer in to explore the details of these environments.

Kristin Reiber-Harris grew up on a farm, spending much of her outdoors where “plants, animals, and insects informed [her] sense of the world.”  As an adult, Kristin has managed to retain her child-like curiosity while bringing a new wisdom to her work. The pieces she will exhibit at Riverviews elevate simple plants and grasses to a more reverent level. The work is bright and colorful, yet mature and thoughtful.  In addition to numerous drawings, Kristin will also display her latest woodcuts, a style she is recently revisiting after a long hiatus. For her, the act of cutting into the wood to make the print ties the tree directly into the process and the final product.  Each woodcut illustrates a water garden scene, focusing on “the real and the reflected”