SOLOS 2022 Artist Talks

Join AAC for the second of two artist talk programs taking place as part of SOLOS 2022, on view at Arlington Arts Center through June 18. The program on May 21 will take place in the galleries and feature artist talks by Alexander D’Agostino, Sharon Shapiro, and Marisa Stratton. Each talk will be followed by a Q & A, giving visitors an opportunity to talk directly with the artists.

Attendees will be asked to wear masks during the talks. The first artist talk program, which took place on May 7, featured artist talks with Kyrae Dawaun, Danni O’Brien, and Ju Yun.

About the exhibitions:

Alexander D’Agostino: Lavender Shrine
Alexander D’Agostino works with queer histories and images, reclaiming material from queer archives and paying homage to previous generations through practices of myth-making and ritual. In Lavender Shrine, D’Agostino explores the history of the Lavender Scare, a Cold War-era moral panic targeting gay and lesbian employees in the federal workforce. Drawing visual inspiration from Arlington Arts Center’s Tiffany windows, D’Agostino connects the funerary nature of his ongoing Queer Shrouds project with the history of the windows.

Sharon Shapiro: Then the Dream Changed
Inspired by personal events, collective mythology, and pop-culture, Sharon Shapiro’s paintings and collages portray subject matter both fantastic and real, utopian and dystopian. In recent collage work, Shapiro combines found and staged imagery to explore issues of gender, race, identity, and history in the American South. Utilizing collage to create visual relationships between the past and the present, Shapiro challenges the viewer to differentiate between mythology and history. At AAC, Shapiro presents new enlarged collage works, allowing viewers to enter the intimate spaces created in the work.

Marisa Stratton: keep scrolling…
In keep scrolling… Marisa Stratton explores the scroll as object and action. Working with oil paint, the artist translates slick, low-resolution digital images into expressive polyptychs with unique textures and imperfections. Each screen-sized painting is sourced from temporary posts on Instagram stories, which regenerate infinitely in one linear stream of images. Through Stratton’s work, the screenshot, often thought of as disposable, becomes an artifact of movement through a digital interface.