Exhibits & Events

Second Thursday receptions: March 12 and April 9, 6-9pm

InLiquid presents Disappearing Horizon, a solo exhibition by artist member Anthony Vega, at The Hall at Crane Arts from March 12 – April 26, 2015. This show presents new works, including both paintings and drawings that relate to Vega’s new Instagram project. He utilizes content, scale, mark, material and color to engage and challenge our contemporary conditions, allowing the works to invite viewers to question and investigate their visual landscape in new ways.

Vega is a visual artist, educator and curator in the Philadelphia area, and he is represented by LG Tripp Gallery (Philadelphia). His undergraduate work was completed at Saint Joseph’s University, where he studied fine art and philosophy, and his Master of Fine Arts degree was received from the University of Delaware. 

He is currently adjunct faculty at the University of Delaware, teaching studio courses, contemporary art theory and media studies as well as adjunct faculty at Penn State Brandywine teaching drawing and painting courses. Previously, Vega was the director of the University of Delaware Philadelphia gallery, UD@Crane, in the Crane Arts building. Vega’s work is exhibited in galleries, museums and other venues regionally and nationally.

Vega writes about his art:
“The main interests in my practice lie in my fascination with the translation of language and image in the digital age. My work is an exploration of my relationship to culture, interpretation, and how we apply meaning personally and socially.”

Artist statement:

Why do we love looking at landscapes? I ask myself this question often. I can assume this compulsion involves beauty, habit, nostalgia, or even the ever elusive sublime, but why do we post so many of these vistas on social media? Are we looking for emotional support, evidence of our record of an experience, or some kind of validation that we too matter and can contribute to the sharing of meaningful images? This begs a very important question; what makes an image meaningful?

In the time it takes to read this sentence, there will be roughly 3,000 Instagram posts made. Some significant percentage of these posts are of landscapes. They tend to be of picturesque or famous vistas, but are these not simply “bad translations”? Given the preselected digital filters, file format, image resolution and app interface, these images are just edited manageable bits of sharable data. One could see these posts as empty or invisible, immediately after they are posted. They disappear into the depths of time or the provisional permanence of the “cloud.”

What is needed, how much is needed for these images to speak to an actual and meaningful experience? Are these images in fact “whole,” in spite of there limitations?

The work in this exhibition reconstructs 3 Instagram landscapes twice, in an attempt to find out how little of an image is needed to recapture, make permanent, and fundamentally “re-materialize” these vistas.

The public hours for Crane Arts are noon – 6 pm, Wednesday – Saturday, and until 9 pm on the Second Thursday of each month.

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