Article (via Virginia Living): Alt Art: Richmond’s ADA Gallery showcases contemporary artists
Sarah Bednarek’s Concertina (2014), walnut, paint and canvas, 36" x 12" x 12"
Alt Art: Richmond’s ADA Gallery showcases contemporary artists
by Sarah Sargent
January 21, 2015
ADA gallery founder and director John Pollard is joking when he says “Artists Doing Alright,” is what ADA stands for. It’s really Artists Downtown Access, which Pollard selected when he opened the Richmond gallery in 2003. The name pays homage to ATA (Artists Television Access), a video gallery in San Francisco where Pollard worked for a number of years. “And my Grandmother’s name was Ada,” he adds. “She was always supportive of my art instincts as a kid, so I did it for her and some good karma.”
Pollard, who received his BFA from the University of Virginia in 1988 and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1992, classifies ADA as an alternative gallery showing the work of emerging and mid-career artists. “I’m always looking to be surprised and challenged, and I do have a thing for humor .… not jokey ‘ha-ha,’ but someone who’s honestly funny and letting that out subtly in their work.”
In ADA’s February line-up one sees just the kind of work that excites Pollard. Brooklyn-based Sarah Bednarek and Richmonder Kirsten Kindler are featured in a two-person show, and Lynchburg native George Terry will create a video installation inside the gallery.
Bednarek, born in Wisconsin and a resident of Brooklyn for the past eight years, crafts sculptures from wood, melamine and canvas using a technique similar to book-binding. These creations are complex arrangements of lines and planes reminiscent of origami, albeit origami done by a physicist using unexpected colors and patterns. The work is informed by Bednarek’s battle with stage IV colon cancer, with which she was diagnosed in 2009 at the age of 29. While undergoing treatment, Bednarek had hallucinations of flying through “a crystalline world of ideal geometries, all pervaded with benevolent illumination.” While she was moved by the experience, it provoked questions for her about real versus imagined space. Intrinsic to Bednarek’s carefully rendered pieces is the issue of control, whether it be of space or destiny. The sculptures evoke the most basic structure of things—as if she has stripped everything else away and is exploring matter on a sub-atomic level.
