Vox Populi Gallery. 319 North 11th Street, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107

Vox Populi is pleased to announce January's exhibitions. Please note that Vox will open this month on Second Friday, January 9. Featured in the galleries are Vox artists Julianna Foster, James Johnson, and Eva Wylie. The Video Lounge features David Tinapple, and continuing with our alumni programming, a group show featuring Merrilee Challiss, Anne Schaefer, and John Lange will be on view.
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Julianna Foster
From Morning On

From Morning On, Foster's second exhibition at Vox Populi, represents the artist's ongoing interest in creating a series of interrelated photographic images. Influenced in part by cinema, and most recently by modern Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky, Foster explores how the individual image can transcend its own limits, and by association, provide the opportunity for a pictorial narrative to unfold.

Julianna Foster teaches at The University of the Arts where she received her Master's of Fine Art in Book Arts and Printmaking and has been a member of Vox Populi since 2006. She has exhibited her work nationally.

James Johnson
Break

James Johnson is on break. He will be unreachable for the next few weeks. He hopes you like the art.

James Johnson (born 1976) received his M.F.A. from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2002 and his B.F.A. from Marywood University in 1999. He has exhibited his work in Philadelphia at Vox Populi, Arcadia University, Moore College of Art & Design, the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial, and the Center for Emerging Visual Artists and nationally at the University at Buffalo Art Gallery, Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania), the Firehouse Gallery (Burlington, Vermont), Publico (Cincinnati, Ohio), Repetti (Long Island City, NY), and ThreeWalls (Chicago, IL). He completed a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and received a 2007 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship. James was recently shortlisted for the West Prize, which will be announced in February 2009. His work will be exhibited with the West Collection at the NEXT art fair in Chicago in May 2009. He currently lives and works in Philadelphia where he is a member of Vox Populi and chairs the Photography and Digital Arts major at Moore College of Art and Design

Eva Wylie
A Continuous Shuffle of Earthturf

Eva Wylie juxtaposes organic imagery with images that intimate how humanity and its detritus merge into the natural world.

Wylie received her MFA in Printmaking from Tyler School of Art in 2003. She was a resident at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007 and is a 2006 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant recipient. She has had exhibitions at Moore College of Art and Design, Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Fleisher Art Memorial, and has an upcoming solo exhibition at Indiana University.

Vox Alumni:
Merrilee Challiss, Anne Schaefer, and John Lange
One is Silver and the Other Gold

Merrilee Challiss

The works in this show, simple ink drawings, portray fractured portraits of women. The vignettes depict vacillations between clarity and obfuscation -- fragility altered by trauma, and anomalies tempered by beauty. These anatomies (which, like memories, distorted and fantastical) represent "speculative fictions" of psychological states.

Merrilee lives in Birmingham, Alabama where she owns and runs an alternative music venue and cafe, called BottleTree (www.thebottletree.com). She received an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2000, and has since exhibited work at Square Foot Gallery (Nashville), Bucheon (San Francisco), Paperboat Gallery(Milwaukee), Space 301 (Mobile), and Cambodia, among other places.

John T. Lange

In Nostalgia & the Antiquated - The Landscape Series, artist John T. Lange toys with romanticized memories that are fuzzy and vague. Through his deliberate use of materials and objects, he creates the setting for a narrative that he invites the viewer to help complete.

John T. Lange is a former member of Vox Populi who currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA as an artist & curator. He works in a variety of mediums in his studio while his exhibitions often take the form of multi-media installations. His work is engaging, with narratives and concepts that challenge the viewer to stop and think for a moment.

Anne Schaefer

Anne Schaefer's work is comprised of large-scale installation, works on paper, and objects. In each, repeat pattern is employed to explore the opportunity for endless variables within limited modular systems. Complex relationships are arrived at through a combination of simple shapes, basic building structures, and color.

Anne lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. She received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2007. She has exhibited most recently at Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts (New York, NY) and The Gallery Project (Ann Arbor, MI).

Upcoming Alumni Show:
May 1- June 28: Joseph Hu and Mauro Zamora

IN THE VIDEO LOUNGE
David Tinapple
Scatter Square

David Tinapple is part artist part engineer. Central to his art practice is the creation of his own tools for capturing and exploring images, video, sound, and human interaction. Tinapple creates automated systems that collect and analyze media, creates real-time performance tools, interactive video environments, and image capture devices. His aim is to illuminate the forces at work around us and within us, explore our assumptions about the world and reveal surprises about everyday life.

Tinapple completed a Master's of Fine Art at Carnegie Mellon University and currently teaches Digital Media Art in the Department of Art at UNC Chapel Hill. www.davidtinapple.com.

SCREENING
Kris Lefcoe
Tiny Riot Project

Screening presents Kris Lefcoe's Tiny Riot Project-an intricately detailed stop-motion animation. Using reconstructed stuffed toys and posable dolls, TRP offers a satirical spin on advertising aimed at children. After discovering that their local idyllic forest will be the site of the next Enormart, a young couple joins forces with a group of adorable anarchists in a peaceful protest. Little do they know that the powers that be-in a quest to protect their company's Infinite Growth-have trained an elite riot squad from an unexpected source : the warm and fuzzy characters that populate their Saturday morning cartoon commercials. Corporate mascots including Sugar Bear, Tony the Tiger and the Care Bears are reborn with gasmasks and killer instincts. Led by their sadistic captain Ronald McDonald, they unleash a reign of terror on the unsuspecting demonstrators, igniting an all-out street riot.

Kris Lefcoe is an award-winning writer-director based in New York and Toronto. Lefcoe's films occupy a space between entertainment and cultural critique, exploring themes of consumption, surveillance, and cameras as a virus. Her work has screened at Toronto International Film Festival, Miami Basel, Anthology Film Archives, Pulse Art Fair, SXSW, Berlin International Film Festival, BFI London, and many other venues worldwide. Tiny Riot Project was exhibited most recently at Galerie Thomas Shulte in Berlin.