Opening Reception: First Friday, May 7th from 5pm to 8pm.
Elsabé’s artist talk will be recorded and accessible online through the RVAS website and social media pages.
Exhibit run: May 7th - June 17th, 2021, Craddock-Terry Gallery at Riverviews Artspace.
Gallery Hours Beginning May 8th:
Wednesday - Sunday: 12pm-5pm
Open until 7pm on Fridays
Through live insect installations fused with constructed recycled and repurposed materials, my series of work with Silk Worms (Bombys Mori), Bees, Spotted Lanternflies, Cicadas and bread enzymes explores alternative strategies of object making while using insect life-cycle systems. I create work that explore the mediating effect organic environments have on our sensory perception of space, objects and processes completed within a given time frame. My work involves the audience through invitation of communal work and through the construction of interactive live environments, or replications of live environments through which the audience can move. I invite chance operations, mimetic systems and audience participation to reveal the life cycle of a living organism within the imagined structures of a built environment. The installation becomes both an observation lab and an information-sharing platform.
Sericulture and apiculture are ancient crafts. So is the process of making bread. The material is meant to make us remember the cycle of life and death, and the process of regeneration as well as disruption.
BIO:
Elsabé Dixon is a visual artist focusing on eco and living platforms. Elsabé has exhibited and produced work throughout the United States including the DMFAH, Danville, VA; Artisphere A.I.R. Center for Contemporary Art, Rosslyn, VA; Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; The Textile Museum, Washington DC; The Museum of Contemporary Crafts Pittsburg, PA and the, the A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Dixon has participated in exhibitions in Schönebeck, Germany; the Ghetto Biennial, Haiti; Istanbul, Turkey, as well as Sichuan China.
Dixon most recently showed work at VisArts in Rockville where her exhibition Mise en Place (Part of a larger 13 curator exhibition called Deep Dive: Art and Transformation) and incorporated collaborations with the Great Harvest Bread Company, the Beall Dawson Museum, and the Montgomery County Beekeepers Association. Curator Laura Roulet oversaw the exhibition, a pollinator panel discussion and VisArts facilitated 10 hands-on public workshops. Her last project: SFZ/ Spotted Lanternfly Zones of Syncopation, was a community engagement facilitated through Penn State in 2019. She worked with Scientist Pam Borrowski, and Director of Campus Arts, Tamoryn McDermott as well as Lehigh Penn State Gallery Director: Ann Lalik. This was an exhibition built by 400 faculty and students.
Elsabé has directed and engaged in multiple cross-disciplinary educational art projects: The Book of Latent Promises Project, a series of collaborative public art projects with George Mason University and the Floating Lab Collective, at the Ghetto Biennial in Port Au Prince, Haiti, and The Living Hive Project, a Multidisciplinary Provost Grant she received in 2016 while working with the GMU Bee Initiatives Program as well as the Smithsonian Mason School of Conservation and the GMU student run MakerSpace (the MIX) and the Penn State Campus Arts program.
Born in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, Elsabé immigrated to the US in 1985 and currently lives and works in Virginia. Elsabé received her MFA in New Media from The University of George Mason, and BA from University of Averett, VA, where she studied under Maud Gatewood and Robert Marsh. Elsabé Dixon is the Past President of the Washington Sculptors Group (a DC based 501 C3 non-profit which serves the local communities in the triad area of MD, DC, and VA.) While living in DC, Dixon wrote for East City Art Paper. She is currently the Executive Director of the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History in Danville, Va. She continues her apiculture and sericulture practices while directing community engagement art projects.
For more information visit website: elsabeloubser-dixon.squarespace.com/
EXHIBIT CATALOG
If interested in purchasing any of the pieces in this exhibit, contact Meg Weston (Assistant Curator) at meg@riverviews.net
ARTIST TALK
EXHIBITION PHOTOS
