Arts This Week: Second Street Gallery
By Ben Larsen
Ella Powell:
You are listening to WTJU. Running for 7 weeks from Friday, December 5 through
Friday, January 23, Second Street Gallery presents two solo exhibitions of Charlottesville based photographers, Stacey Evans and Courtney Coker. In the main gallery, Evans exhibit titled Passenger blurs the line between urban and rural landscapes through snapshots along the Northeast Regional Amtrak line. In the Dové gallery, Coker explores the curious decay of her family’s rural farmhouse from the Civil War period. For Arts This Week, we spoke with CM Turner at Second Street Gallery.
CM Turner:
Stacey has been building an archive of images that she has shot from the windows of commuter trains over the past couple of decades, mostly Amtrak trains here in the US, but she’s done several international trips as well. The majority of images are shot from the perspective of a passenger moving through rural areas to urban areas and documenting the liminal spaces in between. And then in our dove gallery, we’ll be featuring an exhibition by freelance photographer Courtney Coker, which is entitled Possibility. The name of the exhibition is drawn from a family farm that was owned by her grandmother that has since been sitting derelict since her family member passed on her exhibition, sort of documents the reclamation of the space by nature as it sort of sits derelict and functions as sort of a visual time capsule, documenting the space itself and some of the objects that were left behind after folks stopped habitating The location.
Ella Powell:
Have you had an opportunity to see some of the works yourself?
CM Turner:
Most of the works that will be included in the exhibitions we’ve seen. Stacey’s images capture moments in time. As I said, they’re shot from moving commuter trains, so there’s no ability for her necessarily, to contrive the shots. It’s more of a point and shoot. If something catches her eye in transit, she’s going to seek to document that moment in that space. Courtneys are more lyrical images. They’re not necessarily staged, but because she’s in a space that has sat fairly untouched for a long time, these sort of vignettes have presented themselves to her, and so she has the ability to orient herself and the camera in a way to capture shots where Stacey is reacting to the landscapes that she’s moving past from commuter trains.
Ella Powell:
How did you all at Second Street gallery come into contact with these artists?
CM Turner:
So, both of these exhibitions were actually chosen from our open call for submissions. So twice a year, Second Street Gallery produces two open calls. One is specifically for our Teeny Tiny Trifecta exhibition, which opens our season each year, and then the other open call is just for exhibition proposals, project proposals that we review on the back end, and then set our seasons based on what some of those strongest proposals are and how those proposals fit in with exhibitions that had previously been chosen and set within an exhibition season. So, to pair these two photographers together is something that our curator and director, Kristen Chiacchia, really pays attention to and allows for conversation between the two exhibitions. What we see between Stacey Evans’ work and Courtney Coker’s is both carry a fair amount of atmosphere within their documentation. We are going to see from Stacey’s show a lot of images shot out of windows, and within Courtney’s, we’re going to see a lot of works that are interior based works. So, we’re looking at the difference between exteriors and interiors. We’re looking at the differences and similarities between how light is being used within these photographic spaces and how space itself is sort of defined through the lens of the camera.
Ella Powell:
Wow. Okay, that’s an interesting connection between those two artists. Do you know how many pieces each of them have in their exhibition?
CM Turner:
You know Stacey’s exhibition, which is called, again, Passenger: Riding the Rails, is within our main gallery, so it’s a larger exhibition, and the works on view are really just a small part of this incredibly large archive that she’s built shooting from these passenger trains over the past two decades. So she’s shot 1000s and 1000s of images, and what we’re showing in this exhibition is a very curated selection of images that have just been shot between Charlottesville and New York City. So there are images that are around kind of rural spaces moving from Charlottesville through Virginia. Virginia up to more urban places, moving through Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, New Jersey, all the way up to New York City. And her exhibition is set up in a way to communicate and illustrate that journey, while also pulling out specific images that act as kind of punctuation points that break up the sort of rhythms that we would find in both travel and topography. So the rhythms of the landscape, the rhythms of movement by train, and some of these images are pulled to sort of disrupt those rhythms a little bit and really show these points of interest that are captured in passing, but speak to elements that are uniting communities throughout the Northeast and, by extension, throughout the United States. So we’ll see aspects of innovation where new builds are taking place, or new bridges are replacing bridges that have been in place for over a century. There are documentation of large satellite dishes and things that at one point were cutting edge technology, and now we see as somewhat antiquated, as well as urban landscapes that are in various points of renewal or reconstruction, but still maintaining markers of past history. So the exhibition, in a way, sort of collapses time and history by bringing into relief objects and spaces with historical presence that are also engaging in periods of renewal. Within this exhibition, we’re not necessarily highlighting the effects of time on these spaces within a very linear type of progression. So we’re not installing iterative works where we say, here’s an image from 2005 here’s the same space in 2015 here’s the same space in 2025 more. So the exhibition is set up in a way to actively communicate this sense of travel and movement from place to place, while communicating a larger narrative of the spaces that are being moved through themselves.
Ella Powell:
Do you know how the gallery went about curating the specific photographs that are in the exhibit?
CM Turner:
Absolutely. So, our curator and director, Kristen Chiacchia and myself, met with Stacey several times throughout this process, reviewing different images, kind of giving feedback about what was resonating with us as viewers, and what we thought were strong examples. So we’d look at images that were potentially very similar to each other or had been shot in the same location at different points in time, and then selecting one that for whatever reason, whether it is a certain quality of light or the way that the composition mirrors a composition within a different image, how two separate images within one
archive can create a conversation between each other, and then how that extends into communicating something about the overall exhibition itself. So within an exhibition like passenger riding the rails, we’re dealing very much with this Gestalt principle, this idea that the elements within the exhibition, when added together, create something larger than their individual pieces, that the exhibition as a whole is communicated through these individual works that tell a larger story. Similarly, with Courtney coker’s exhibition, she had produced a growing number of images, and you know, part of our mission as the gallery is not only to foster an environment and provide a platform for our local artists to share their
work and express themselves, but also to serve our audiences and our community in terms
of exposing that community to artworks, perspectives and ultimately, ideas that we believe are worth communicating, worth holding on to, worth investigating as ways of expression and ways of being in the world.
Ella Powell:
Would you like to just briefly share a little bit about second Street’s mission and your role in the Charlottesville community
CM Turner:
Absolutely. So, Second Street Gallery was founded in 1973. We’re the oldest nonprofit 501, c3 contemporary art space in central Virginia. We’re one of the oldest existing nonprofit contemporary art galleries in the Nation that’s been in continuous operation. We offer somewhere between 10 to 12 exhibitions per season, and our seasons run from September through July each year as a nonprofit art space. We really rely on our community to help keep us going as we work to expand the reach of creative culture here in Charlottesville. And you know, some of the fundraisers that we do include VIP preview parties of exhibitions. So we’ll be doing one of these events for Courtney Coker and Stacey Evans upcoming exhibitions that’ll be held on December 4, both the artists will be present, and we’ll have opportunities for community members to meet with the artists, to speak with them about their exhibitions, to have an opportunity to preview the work before we open the show to the public on First Friday, December 5.
Ella Powell:
On Friday, December 5th, from 5:30-7:30, Second Street Gallery will hold their opening reception for two solo exhibitions of Charlottesville-based photographers, Stacey Evans, and Courney Coker which run through January, 23rd. The gallery is open Wednesday through Friday from 11am-5pm and is located at 115 Second St. SE. Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater, and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu For WTJU, I’m Ella Powell
