Love is an Expansive Thing
Written by Noah Simblist
“Virginia is for Lovers,” as they say, or at least since 1969 when an advertising firm came up with the slogan for the Commonwealth, drawing on a national movement of love-ins, a summer of love, and the activist slogan, “make love not war.” An expansive commitment to love was written into law just a few years earlier in Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage in the United States. Main Projects has chosen the intersection of love and Virginia as a Venn diagram between the multiplicity of meanings in each to gather artists for its inaugural exhibition.
Love can mean many things. It can be romantic; it can also be rooted in friendship, family, or community. It encompasses feelings of intimacy, vulnerability, and trust. But it can also be more abstract, a state of relationship with oneself and the world based on profound compassion, where one sees all living beings as interconnected, a state of being where the boundaries of the self start to disappear.
In Tahnee Lonsdale’s 2024 painting Two Sides of An Orchid, two nondescript figures are found in a reverse silhouette. They are twins, doubles, doppelgangers; two glowing yellow bodies hovering on a violent ground. Lonsdale is interested in human relationships in a time of screen mediated social interaction and the social distancing of the pandemic, asking: how can we be with one another when so many pressures keep us separate?
The Virginia native Meghann Stephenson’s Mistaken for Strangers, depicts two intertwined tulips. The title implies a kind of anthropomorphism, where each flower is a person in relationship to another. But perhaps that intimacy is hidden, more obvious to them than to the outside world. Liz Nielsen also approaches objects as relations but in two ways. Her Icy Lovers is an image of two overlapping icebergs, a tongue in cheek nod to the assumption that love has a particular temperature. But for Nielsen, relationship is about the process of making, between herself and the object/image. They are photograms made in the dark using light sensitive paper and stencils, demanding a certain degree of trust between herself and the medium.
The materiality of intimacy and vulnerability between the body of mother and child has been the subject of Loie Hollowell’s work for some time. Her 2024 work, Around The Clock In Flesh Blue And Purple was cast from the nipples of breastfeeding friends, moving outside of her own body, which had been the primary subject of her work, to shared experience, another form of love, an intersection between the love of a child and the love for friends, what might be called solidarity from a feminist perspective. As recent exhibitions at the ICA at VCU and The Anderson have noted, Hollowell graduated from VCU with a MFA in Painting and Printmaking. Veronika Pausova, who also graduated from VCU in the same department, has recently turned the subject matter of her work to motherhood, as she becomes a mother herself. Her two works Milk Path and Mother System imagine the connections of care between two bodies.
Diana al-Hadid, a VCU Sculpture MFA alum, considers the complexity of diasporic identity and the ways in which one might feel a sense of belonging or love for a place of origin, a homeland into which one was born and identifies with. But can one reconcile these feelings with the ways in which that nations, under various regimes, try to leverage an affective relationship to place, producing a tension between more abstract mythologies and political ideologies. Another artist in the show, who is also engaged with questions of place, community, and heritage and the ways in which diaspora affects these relationships, is LaRissa Rogers. Her work addresses the notion of home through traces of the domestic scene of her childhood home, which in turn has the traces of Black and Korean-American material culture. Rogers received her BFA from VCU from Painting and Printmaking but then received her MFA from UCLA and since then has shown internationally. She has recently returned to Virginia as a tenure track professor at UVA.
Two works by Gina Beavers, who received her BA from UVA, reference domesticity through textiles, like blankets and knitted forms. By zooming in on their physicality they have the potential to provoke associations with home and become abstract signs of care. Sacha Ingber also addresses memories of home through the abstracted still life of a domestic space. Ingber, who received a MFA in Sculpture from VCU, uses the cane webbing of kitchen chairs, along with other signs and materials to reference her memories of growing up in Rio de Janeiro, before she left home to immigrate to the United States. Like the material culture references of Rogers and Beavers, Ingber asks us to consider the relationship between love of family and love of place.
Finally, in reference to the complex history of Virginia and its relationship to the foundations of the United States, Sandy Williams IV and Ryan McGinness have contributed works that look back in time from a very particular contemporary moment. Williams, who also received a MFA in Sculpture from VCU, has made a series of melting monuments, candles that treat the images that formerly occupied a certain avenue in Richmond as impermanent things that don’t stand the test of time. While McGinness has reimagined the seal of the commonwealth, offering a contemporary take, asking us to consider the motto sic semper tyrannis (thus always to tyrants), along with an image of broken chains, as an invocation for the present moment.
It’s impossible to address the rich constellation of themes that the rest of the artists in Lovers address. But Amanda Baldwin, Holly Coulis, Mathew F Fisher, Laird Gough, Chris Oh, Leigh Suggs & Daniel Rickey all lie within the wide ranging network of ideas and relationships that Main Projects is committed to. One of these is an investment in published editions. Works by Ryan McGinness as well as a collaboration between Leigh Suggs & Daniel Rickey, are new editions presented here for the first time.
As Main Projects unveils its vision, Lovers marks an auspicious beginning, centering relationships, connection, and the many facets of love. This dynamic exhibition sets the tone for an ambitious new art initiative in Richmond.