Join us in an interactive exhibition tour of the current exhibitions at AVA, with commentary from exhibitions manager Sam Eckert on the artists’ work. The tour includes three solo exhibitions and two group exhibitions currently on view at AVA.

The exhibition Forces of Nature brings together artists Deborah Pressman, Stephanie Roberts-Camello, Lia Rothstein, and Marina Thompson in a group exhibition where natural elements, memory, and environmental themes are deeply integrated into each artist’s ideas. Across the Road, is a culmination of the past several years of studying, sketching, and finally digitally painting the views across the road from studio windows of Samuel Neustadt. Studies in varied seasons and light– dawn, daylight, evening, and moonlight– each painting is an amalgamation of these variables. Of Earth and Astral Plane features monotypes and collages by Erika Lawlor Schmidt. The monotypes, Opening and Closing the Gate to Heaven, is a series of monotypes that originated as cloud studies in early 2020 that abruptly shifted to a direct and visceral response to the onset and evolution of the global pandemic. The collages, Birds of Earth and Astral Plane is a collection of collages with pointed references to all kinds of birds. Lawlor Schmidt shares the view with many indigenous cultures that have thought of birds as messengers from heaven or symbols of departed souls. In The Architecture of Dreams, Axel Stohlberg explores the spaces in between – here and there, then and now, dreaming and awake, tangible and intangible in sculpture and drawings of familiar forms.

In the interactive tour, Samantha Eckert  also discusses her process for curation, as well as artist studio visits and what makes a strong exhibition proposal.