virginia asman • illuminage studio

This exhibit, presented in January/February 2021,
chronicled my journey as an artist while living in Santa Fe.

Click below to visit each part of the exhibit.

PART I—FIRST IMPRESSION: MONTAGE
PART II—EXPLORATION: LINE & COLOR

Slot Canyon at Tent Rocks, NM; Cathedral Rock, Sedona, AZ

The covid pandemic of 2020 gave many beautiful natural sites a time out from the usual influx of visitors. I chose two—Cathedral Rock in Arizona’s Sedona and a slot canyon located within New Mexico’s Tent Rocks—to include in an online summer exhibit, Art Unlocked! at Gallery35 in NYC. The following video shows my process that began with photography and continued by digitally layering and colorizing abstracted elements to unfold the imagery of these sites At Rest.

Click below to view ART UNLOCKED!—Gallery35’s online exhibit of work created by 14 member artists before and during the pandemic!

ART UNLOCKED!—June-September 2020

“Twilight Fantasy” hung for just two months at joe’s Dining in Santa fe, nm.

my work is on the wall through june, but joe’s is currently closed due to covid-19…

...so i have created a virtual tour instead!  Pour yourself a glass of wine and enjoy!

for more information about the series and a closer look at each piece
click here

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Over a year ago I was invited to launch an exhibition at a venerable Santa Fe institution: Joe’s Dining. Catering to locals, Joe’s—named after “Joe everyman”—has fed Santa Feans for twenty years and counting! It also presents 6-month rotating art exhibits and now my turn to hang had finally arrived! Rather than choose work from my existing collection, I decided Joe’s deserved something different! This brand new series—Twilight Fantasy—showcases the southwest just before nightfall. A deep blue sky is the common element bringing together diverse imagery including a coyote, a pueblo, a graveyard, cowgirls of old, crows —and, of course, Zozobra (old man gloom)!

TWILIGHT FANTASY
January-June, 2020
Opening Reception
January 11  4-6PM
Joe’s Dining
Rodeo Road, Santa Fe, NM

By coincidence, two galleries where I show work are both presenting exhibits this fall addressing social justice concerns of our time.

Coming To America at Santa Fe’s Art On Barcelona Gallery poses an invitation to look, think and enter into conversation about immigration. Fifteen artists answered the call to offer 31 pieces of artwork.

For this exhibit, I am showing 2,000 Years of Flight showcasing refugees of note whose contributions to the world are considerable. The value we place on them contrasts with a political attitude that demeans persons now appearing at our southern border looking for the same opportunity for a better life as were the people shown in this artwork.

COMING TO AMERICA
September/October 2019
Artists’ Reception: October 6  1-3pm
Performance Event: October 13  3-5pm

Art On Barcelona Gallery
107 W Barcelona St, Santa Fe, NM

Gallery35 in New York City has launched We Bend, Not Break, an exhibit by 13 artists focusing on the perseverance of African-Americans and other historically and currently marginalized groups!
My work,  The Struggle Continues and Fabric of Progress is described at the gallery website: http://www.gallery35nyc.com.

WE BEND, NOT BREAK
September 8-October 20, 2019
Artists’ Reception: September 21  6-8pm
Closing Reception: October 19   6-8pm

Gallery35
30 E 35th St, New York, NY

What is Zozobra?

AKA “Old Man Gloom, “he” is a 50-foot tall cloth behemoth stuffed with papers upon which Santa Feans have written their glooms from the past year. He is then placed at the far end of an athletic field to meet his fate as throngs of locals and visitors chant “burn him!” This is the 95th time this tradition has marked the beginning of the annual Fiestas de Santa Fe.

Zozobra head, 2015; Burn Zozobra, 2014 viewed just after I moved to Santa Fe!

How did I win?

Earlier in the summer I entered an art competition for the Seventies-themed 2019 poster and T-shirt. It was a labor of love transforming this ugly creature into a disco icon! Even after being notified that my John Travolta look-alike would be silkscreened onto the official adult T-shirt, I had to keep design top secret until the unveiling just one week before the Burning of Zozobra.

The unveiling at ZozoFest; modeling the fringed shirt!

Read more about all the winning Zozobra artists at https://burnzozobra.com/2019-official-zozobra-artists/

Back in the 1990s, when the World Wide Web was a new and exciting territory, I joined a wonderful organization called Webgrrls which offered meetings and classes in downtown Manhattan. There I learned enough rudimentary HTML to create my first simple websites! Their lack of “bells and whistles” was more than offset by lots of links—and eyecatching colorful art!

AncientworksGallery.com was one of those early endeavors, created to showcase my growing line of “arT-shirts”—and later complementary jewelry—which featured “unique designs inspired by the petroglyphs, paintings, potter and sculpture of ancient peoples throughout the world.” Unfortunately—and mysteriously— that site has somehow disappeared from cyberspace! 

But now, seven of my original thematic prehistoric composites can be re-visited in a new gallery page right on this website. A slide show features the designs, along with their titles and their ancient origins. Be sure to visit!

The early days: (left) arT-Shirts for sale at Ocean Grove, NJ Crafts Festival, late 1990s and (right) hard at work on jewelry in NYC, circa 2004.

Creating art for a color-themed exhibit can be an artistic challenge, but coming up with ideas for Gallery35’s BLUE exhibit was a breeze! The color blue is abundant in our lexicon—blues music, a blue moon and birds with blue feet!

While all my pieces exemplify BLUE, their styles are widely divergent! 

Blue Footed Boopies, the most graphic of the three, was inspired by photographs of these amazing birds that I took during a trip to the Galapagos Islands. Their striking blue feet stand out in a stylized montage.  

Bluesy Boogie is a distortion of my drawings of musicians I have encountered in various venues and locations—blended together artistically using digital painting techniques—in an imaginary blues session. 

Blue Dog Blue Moon, a composite of photos and drawings, was inspired by my life in the New Mexican high desert, where coyotes live amongst us. The stylized coyote is based on a wood carving by another talented artist.

A long-time exhibitor and chairperson of Gallery35, I am again looking forward to my annual trip to NYC. I hope to see all my “back East” friends at the Closing Reception of BLUE on June 15th.

BLUE
May 3-June 15, 2019

Closing Reception: June 15  6-8PM

Gallery35
30 E 35th St
New York, NY 10016

My design for Barbara Kahn’s most recent production in 2019.

During my years as a New Yorker (1995–2014) and going forward, I have been privileged to design the promotional graphics for my good friend Barbara Kahn’s annual productions at Theater for the New City. Barbara was recently included in the Performing Arts Legacy Project highlighting her illustrious career, accomplishments and awards. I was pleased to find an entire page on that website https://performingartslegacy.org/kahn/theater-for-the-new-city-poster-designs/  showing just about all of the designs I created for Barbara’s plays. A great trip down memory lane!

Once again I will be joining my fellow Gallery35 artists in a group exhibit simply called NATURE. 

For this exhibit I dove into my trove of previous works that featured the natural world. From an earlier series, I created a new digital montage— In Wings of Flight— by arranging butterflies and moths along the color spectrum, my subjects being the most dramatic mounted specimens I could find in an insect museum. This piece will be joined by two other montages—Pining Away and  Of Lilies and Lizards—created from my nature shots during a trip “down under.” 

NATURE
March 3–May 5, 2019
Artists’ Reception: March 16  6-8pm
Closing Reception: April 27   6-8pm
Gallery35
30 E 35th St • NYC