video salon

The first in the series took place on June 4th from 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. in participation with the Montpelier Art Walk, and features artists: Susan Calza, Kelly Holt, Dayton Shafer, Peg Shaw and Madara Tropa.

Gallery Director Susan Calza curated a collection of short videos from both local artists and artists further afield. Calza intends for the series to serve as a platform for experimentation, innovation and discussion. Films on view tackle social injustice, meditations in nature, thoughts on being, leaving traces, and transcendence.

Susan Calza is a conceptual artist whose work reflects her times, while holding a mirror to society. Her artwork and gallery serve the greater community by speaking truth to power. Kelly Holt’s work is steeped in the urban landscape, capturing energy and mystery in moving images. Dayton Shafer has been a theatre practitioner for a quarter century as a writer, director, and actor. His original pieces have been performed in fringe festivals, barns, abandoned factories, converted laundromats, black boxes, and street sides. Shafer wants to alter what is conventionally usable on the stage: a poetry on stage, an exorcism of fantasy, a cosmic search for meaning along with the personal and social. Peg Shaw is a professor in photography and video at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois. As a multimedia artist, Shaw’s layered elements have both a conceptual and physical presence, Threads become roots, hair becomes veins, thorns become scar-  reality and imagination become one. Latvian artist Madara Tropa’s artwork probes between limits of fiction and reality, in the search for her most profound understanding of being. Madara constructs dream-like spaces where the sense of human vacancy is uncertain and nebulous. This uncertainty entwines with the materials of ritual and magic, creating temporal shrines of intense auras of reflection, both personal and beyond.

This salon series is in collaboration with the statewide initiative of the Vermont Curators Group 2020 Vision - Reflecting on a World-Changing Year.