An exhibition of recent photographs by Richmond-based artist Jon-Phillip Sheridan will be on view at Mary Baldwin University’s Hunt Gallery from October 8 to November 2, 2012.
Born in 1977, Sheridan was raised in rural Virginia on a farm and campground. Coming from a family of artists, he received his BFA in photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011.
Sheridan has had solo exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and Heiner Contemporary in Washington, D.C. He was recently honored by Oxford American as an emerging “Superstar” southern artist. Sheridan has been featured in many group exhibitions including Photography Now, which was curated by Natasha Egan, and Look 3’s Shots. He currently has work in the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies program. His work is also included in the collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Markel Corporation, Capital One, and the Federal Reserve Bank. Sheridan lives in Richmond, where he teaches and works.
Sheridan’s work explores the ambiguities of photographic representation and the traces of human presence left in objects, material, space, and the landscape.
“The act of folding is a useful metaphor for the many transformations, material or metaphysical, that we encounter in life,” he said. “Folding is a process of complicating matter, and of introducing structure into the formless and undifferentiated. Un-folding is not the reverse of this process but rather is a type of opening up, a revelation of this complexity … The photograph’s indexical referent — that which is being photographed — is presented in a straight-forward manner, but is given depth and atmosphere by utilizing the hyper-real effects of large format photography. I present an ambiguity of scale, depth, and surface, where the reading of the image fluctuates between associations of landscapes and atmospheric illusions of embodied light, and a trompe l’oeil effect where the material in the photo seems present and the virtual window is inverted into the edge of the thing represented. These images are constantly shifting between the banality of their materiality and the spectacle of their illusion.”
There will be an opening reception for the artist in Hunt Gallery on Monday, October 8, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. The public is invited to attend. Hunt Gallery is dedicated to the exhibition of contemporary work in all media by regionally and nationally recognized artists. The gallery is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. during the college’s academic year.