Vivid Art Gallery

Vivid Art Gallery will host an art opening for Featured Artist Vanessa Filley on March 3rd at its monthly First Friday event. The event, which runs from 5-7 PM, is open to all and is free of charge. In addition to great art, there will also be refreshments and live music at the gallery. 
 
Filley will be presenting new work in her exhibit entitled In The Delicate Meshes. Her pieces combine graphite, watercolor, and thread on paper to create intricate geometric designs of radical beauty.  She describes each piece in this series as a quilted conversation, a way of taking the disparate questions and feeling of a given moment and mingling them with inspiration from the outside world and the work of those who came before. The synthesis creates a new form, an imagined cosmic map or quilt on paper that coheres these disparate pieces into a grounding, geometrical structure.
 
She describes her work as a project of wayfinding that grapples with processing contemporary questions of living, observing and mulling them, while delving into the practices of female artists of the past whose work was based on craft or spiritualism. Says Filley, “My work teeters between sacred geometry and geometric abstraction coupled with the error and energy of the human hand to open a channel between past, present and future." In particular, Filley is interested in and draws inspiration from the work of Lenore Tawney, Sophie Tauber Arp, Francoise Grossen and the Gees Bend Quilters, as well as women whose artwork was grounded in a spiritual practice of divining and communing with energies beyond themselves. 
 
Filley’s work is characterized by her use of thread and sewing, which she views as the foundation of her creative voice, having first picked up a needle to make doll clothes in childhood. Working this way has been a meditation and solace through which she has sought refuge and found not only her voice, but also understanding and insight, as well as close observation. Her goal is to bring these feelings to the forefront in her work for her viewers to more fully experience.
 
Vanessa Filley’s work will be on display throughout the month of March. Please stop by the gallery during the month to see her exhibit.