a non-profit gallery for the visual and performing arts

2833-A Hathaway Rd., Richmond, VA 23225
in the Stratford Hills Shopping Center

Gallery hours beginning Saturday, January 22, 2022:
Noon to 4pm, Tuesday - Sunday
Free and Open to the Public
Purchase artwork from our online store

Plate to Platelet: Sparkling
by Mia Brownell
Oil on canvas
46x36 inches

Habitorium: Blaze
by Martin Kruck
Photogravure on BFK paper
22x16 inches

Artists' Statement

The term Skeptical Realism can be found in some philosophical texts debating the truth and falsehood of things. The artwork of Mia Brownell and Martin Kruck are both visual meditations on perceptions of the artificial and real. Using still life (Brownell) and landscape (Kruck) these artists are reflecting on the current skepticism that has emerged in our political climate and culture by creating altered and ambiguous spaces.

Kruck and Brownell both manipulate artistic traditions in order to explore reality through a skeptical lens. Martin Kruck's series Habitorium investigates the traditions of the romantic landscape using a 19th century printing technique called photogravure. His work questions the truth of habitat and nature by combining images of natural and urban landscape elements with habitats built for zoos, urban parkland, and other urban public greenspaces, and compresses them into compartmentalized environments. Mia Brownell's series Plate to Platelet simultaneously draws on scientific images of platelets (tiny blood cells shaped like plates) and the history of the painted food still life. She explores the realism of eating by recognizing the entanglement between the consumerist idealization of food with its biological engineering and the molecular strains that then interact with our bodies. The space she paints attempts to capture this paradoxical perspective, one that is equally rational and fantastical, material and in constant flux. If we are what we eat, what are we becoming?