Eddie Villanueva Art Exhibition to Open Jan. 30

Eddie Villanueva: Reoriented View to Open at Edgewood College 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Ed Taylor, Director of Marketing & Communications 608-663-2333

Madison, Wis. (January 16, 2014) – Reoriented View, a new installation by Milwaukee artist Eddie Villanueva, will be on view beginning January 30, 2014 at the Edgewood College Gallery.

Of special note is the Opening Reception, to be held from 5:00 pm – 7:30 pm, Thursday, January 30, 2014, in the gallery, which is located in The Stream, the College’s visual and theatre arts center. The reception features a talk by the artist at 6:00 pm. 

A more formal Artist’s Lecture is slated for 4:15 pm, Wednesday, February 26, 2014, in the Edgewood College Gallery. Reoriented View runs Thursday, January 30 through Thursday, March 13, 2014.

Eddie Villanueva’s work explores the social, political and communal nature of space in a variety of mediums: painting, print, and site-specific installation. His art practice is diverse in both form and content, and is often noted as being graphic, spatial, and dynamic. Formally his work focuses on exploring contrasts between illusionary space and flatness, while also working to expand the image content into its surrounding space. 

The works in Reoriented View share common threads of surface, spatial representation, and material history, yet the developmental approaches are distinctly different. First, an entire wall of the gallery is covered with similar quadrilateral shapes that have a carefully controlled imagery on their surface. The shapes are then cut and reformed, photographed and printed to original scale - which are then adhered in a disorganized orientation onto these fractured surfaces. The simultaneous multiple fragmented representations become a vehicle to explore the narratives that exist within recycled materials.

A series of paintings similarly explore the disorientation of how one reads an image. The canvases are given a wash of paint, photographed, and then photographic strips of a full-scale print are adhered to the canvas. The result is a visual reverberation of representation and reproduction.

“The work has been consistently driven by my desire to affect space in ways that illicit an emotional response in the viewer,” Villanueva says. “To achieve this I react to a space directly, so that most of the creative development happens in the space in which the work is exhibited. This time-based parameter requires that I work intuitively and confidently to address the aesthetic relationship between my work and the venue. In arranging and reacting against space, my process gets me closer to asking questions about how we see and how we relate to the world around us.”

Eddie Villanueva lives and works in Milwaukee and is a current recipient of a Mary L. Nohl Emerging Artist Fellowship and a 2014 residency at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Neb. A 2012 MFA graduate of UW-Madison, he has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, most recently at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the 2013 Wisconsin Triennial. 

About the Edgewood College Gallery
The Edgewood College Gallery’s mission is to promote the Visual Arts program and the permanent collection of Edgewood College through quality exhibitions and educational programs.