Life In This Dark Time by Trisha Orr Opens at Hunt Gallery

From October 1 to 26, 2018, the exhibition, Life In This Dark Time, by Trisha Orr, will be on view at Mary Baldwin’s Hunt Gallery.

Trisha Orr was born in 1950 in Paterson, New Jersey. As a teenager she studied at the Art Students’ League. She attended Sarah Lawrence College, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the University of Michigan (BA). Her later professional education included the New York Studio School.

Her paintings have been exhibited regionally and nationally,and her shows have been reviewed in such publications as Art in America, the New York Times, and Art Papers. Portfolios of her work have been published in Georgia Review, American Artist, Meridian, and Iris among others. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts mid-Atlantic regional fellowship in painting.

She has lived in Charlottesville, Virginia since 1975. She is married to the poet Gregory Orr and has two grown daughters, Eliza and Sophia, and a beloved dog. She divides her time between Charlottesville and Keene Valley in the Adirondack Mountains.

A portion of Trisha’s artist’s statement follows:

The two groups of paintings in this show, Beloveds and Others and Charlottesville Burning, could easily be taken for the work of two different artists with completely different aesthetics. It could seem as if there’s little connection or bridge between them. They present two different worlds through the lens of two different aesthetics and artistic strategies. The fact that I’m the artist that produced both groups during overlapping time frames seems almost schizoid even to me.

I wish I could bridge these modes — the beloveds and the Charlottesville burning. Instead, I’ve decided that to represent their lack of connection and lack of shared artistic vocabulary is itself a symbol of a strange political and cultural situation we experience now in America. Two different visions discordantly juxtaposed. At this point I can’t reconcile these visions, either in my life or in my art. All I can do is to dramatize each vision to the best of my ability in the mode that seems most adequate and appropriate to its nature.

Dinah Ryan, Professor of English at Principia College and a contributing editor for Art Papers Magazine, writes the following about the work (extracted from the full critical review, Trisha Orr’s Beloveds and Others: Navigating Dangerous Times):

Trisha Orr’s paintings and works on paper in Life in These Dark Times reveal the walls of public and private spaces as permeable; and, her works invite viewers to examine this human porousness through both the closeup of familiarity and the more remote view of public events. The bridges between these vantage points are the works in the Beloveds and Others series that occupy such public spaces as parks and grocery stores. If both private and public bodies — the body of home, family, and friends and the body politic — are vulnerable, the answer is not in a descent into violence, which rips the Other to shreds in an attempt to preserve the self, but in an awareness of that vulnerability of both self and other, of the loved and the unfamiliar.

A reception will be held for the artist from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on Monday, October 1, in Hunt Gallery. 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 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday during the academic year. Hunt Gallery’s schedule for the 2018–19 academic year can be found online.