Second Street Gallery is pleased to present Inside the Artists’ Studio, a group exhibition featuring the work of Stacey Evans, Kristen Finn, Ken Horne, Bill Moretz, Sharon Shapiro, Guillermo X Ubilla, Russ Warren, and Cate West Zahl.

For this exhibition, Second Street Gallery’s Chief Curator, Kristen Chiacchia, has paired one local painter with one local photographer (Russ Warren and Bill Moretz, Sharon Shapiro and Stacey Evans, Ken Horne and Guillermo X Ubilla, and Cate West Zahl and Kristen Finn). Over a period of at least 6 months, the photographers have documented the artists’ process as they created works specifically for the exhibition at Second Street Gallery. The exhibition took place in SSG’s Main Gallery with an installation of photographs next to each painter’s finished artworks.

An opening reception for the exhibition was held First Friday, February 1, 2019 from 5:30-7:30 pm, with remarks by the curator and artists at 6:30pm. Additional programming for the exhibition included field trips to the different artists studios for tours and talks.

Stacey Evans began her photographic career in middle school as yearbook photographer. She went on to study photography at Virginia Commonwealth University and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Currently, Stacey works as an artist, educator, and commercial photographer. She is adjunct faculty at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, an Artist-in-Residence in the Albemarle County Public Schools and teaches workshops at the McGuffey Art Center. She exhibits her work regionally and is a resident artist at the McGuffey Art Center. 

Kristen Finn is an artist and commercial photographer with an interest in the way people inhabit space and connect with one another. Her portraits look for small, honest moments while her process alternates between being witness and playful experimentation. Finn is based in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Ken Horne is a contemporary abstract painter based in Charlottesville, Virginia. His work brings the traditions of modern abstraction together with the language of aerial mapping and cartography to speak about the ways in which contemporary society divides the landscape and organizes our experiences of the world. Whimsical and kaleidoscopic, his pieces reference puzzles, maps, and game boards while conveying situational or emotive qualities. He has exhibited across the United States, and his work has been featured in publications such as Martha Stewart Living and Blueprint Magazine.

Bill Moretz is a professional photographer based in Charlottesville, Virginia. His work has been exhibited throughout the mid-Atlantic region, and can also be found in many private and corporate collections, including North Carolina Museum of Art. Bill is also a specialist and consummate professional in photographing the works of other artists. His photographs have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues and marketing materials for major museums and galleries throughout the country, as well as in many national and regional publications including American Artist, Art in America, Artforum, Southern Décor, Arts Journal, and Yankee Magazine.

For over 20 years, Sharon Shapiro’s figurative paintings and works on paper have been exhibited in numerous venues including shows in Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, New York and Los Angeles. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at {Poem88} Gallery in Atlanta, GA, and Brenau University in Gainesville, GA. In addition to being published in catalogues produced for these solo exhibitions her work has been featured in two issues of Oxford American and three issues of New American Paintings, including as the cover image for New American Paintings Volume 39. Shapiro is current pursuing her MFA at Maine College of Art in Portland, ME.

Guillermo X Ubilla is a digital artist and photographer based out of Charlottesville Virginia whose photographs live somewhere between the real and the surreal.  Using digital photography as the basis for his work, Ubilla then applies a variety of digital manipulation techniques to take away from and add to the photo to focus on the message of the piece. Ubilla lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia, and is a member of the McGuffey Art Center.

Russ Warren is a contemporary figurative painter who has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and abroad, notably in the 1981 Whitney Biennial and the 1984 Venice Biennale. A painter in the Neo-Expressionist style, he has drawn inspiration from Spanish masters such as Velázquez, Goya, and Picasso, as well as from Mexican folk art and the American southwest. Committed to his own Regionalist style during his formative years in Texas and New Mexico, he was picked up by Phyllis Kind in 1981. During those years he transitioned to a style characterized by "magical realism", and his work came to rely on symbol allegory, and unusual shifts in scale. Throughout his career, his paintings and prints have featured flat figures, jagged shadows, and semi-autobiographical content. His oil paintings layer paint, often incorporate collage, and usually contain either figures or horses juxtaposed in strange tableaux. Warren now lives and works in Charlottesville, where he is represented by Les Yeux du Monde Gallery.

Cate West Zahl is a painter based in Charlottesville Virginia. She obtained her BA in Fine Arts from Hamilton College and has studied at the New York Studio School in their advanced painting program. Her work, while inspired by the natural world, is made up of architectonic fictions, having little to do with specific locations, but rather where cool geometry collides with unkempt nature and gesture, imagination and color. Zahl’s work has been exhibited across the east coast, and belongs to several public and private collections, including the Hamilton College Permanent Collection and the Evans Institute.