The MANUAL PROJECT will be on view at Richmond Virginia’s artspace gallery Friday February 25 until Sunday March 20th, 2011. The opening reception is Friday February 25, 7:00 – 10:00 pm. artspace is located in Plant Zero, Zero East Fourth Street, Richmond, VA 23224.

I will be showing 20 prints from the Manual Project plus over 100 salted paper prints of the collodion wet-plate hand portraits. Please join me at the opening on February 25th from 7 to 10 pm.

The adjacent artspace galleries will feature work by Sara Clark and Sue Greene

the official news release:

Three new solo exhibitions open at artspace Gallery in Richmond Virginia on Fourth Friday, February 25, 2011 from 7-10pm and continue through Sunday, March 20, 2011. Sara Clark and Sue Greene from Richmond and Bill Westheimer from New Jersey will present paintings, sculpture and photography exploring science-related themes.

In the Frable Gallery, Bill Westheimer will be showing selections from “The Manual Project” a series of 150 photographic portraits of the hands of people from diverse backgrounds, occupations, ages, and cultures from around the globe. He says, “I collaborate with my subjects to expose their hands and their personalities. Without the distraction of faces, these images become honest and deeply perceptive portraits, reflecting the lifestyle, habits, and sensitivity of each subject.” He uses19th century collodion wet-plate techniques, and photographs each person’s dominant hand.

Westheimer began playing with photographic processes at age 14. While still in high school Bill and three partners operated a lightshow business and worked with bands such as The Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers, BB King, The MC5, Vanilla Fudge, Bitter Blood Street Theater, and many other marquee name bands of the era. The lightshow tapped into Bill’s love of alternative processes and experimental image making. At Union College Westheimer studied philosophy and art, including scientific photography techniques. He taught Cibachrome printing at Colorado Mountain College in Aspen. He recently learned the 19th century technique of collodion glass plate photography from the leading experts in the field: France Scully and Mark Osterman.

Sara Clark will exhibit “The Shape of Space” in the Main Gallery. Her show will consist of a series of paintings that use mathematical and scientific models as objects in an idealized world – a way of describing shape and space. From mathematics she has chosen topological shapes as the primary source for images. These shapes are defined by their qualitative features rather than by measurement of distance and angle. Using images from print and Internet sources and her own drawings, she alters and manipulates forms to reveal some of their unique incarnations. Clark sees these images as describing a Platonic world of Form, which has been enhanced by aesthetics.

Clark earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art History and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). She is a recipient of a Professional Fellowship Award for painting from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA). Sara lives and maintains her studio in Richmond, Virginia where she is Affiliate Graduate Faculty at VCU and Faculty at the VMFA Studio School.

Sue Greene will be showing “Visualizing the Infinite” in the Helena Davis Gallery. Greene’s career in chemistry laid the foundation for her “excitement in visualizing the microscopic, molecular, and subatomic structures that define what we see in Nature.” She carves, sculpts, and makes fine furniture and sculpture, while keeping her hand in the sciences through tutoring and lecturing.

Greene graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in Chemistry. She did research in both university and industrial laboratories as a liquid chromatographer. After early retirement in 2001 Susan studied sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).

artspace gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday from noon – 4pm. The gallery is also open by appointment. Please contact the gallery administrator Kathleen Westkaemper at artspaceorg@gmail.com or phone the gallery at 804-232-6464. The gallery is located at Zero East 4th Street in Richmond, Virginia 23224.