The Bridge announces new exhibit examining media, cultural history

The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative is set to open a new exhibition, Inherited Innocence by JaVori Warren and Megan Richards.

The exhibit opens in The Bridge’s Belmont gallery with a reception on Friday at 5:30 p.m. and runs through the month.

Inherited Innocence uses abstraction, violence, and the distortion of forms and bodily symbols as a way to explore both politicized limitations and expansive possibilities of the body.

Warren and Richards use material methods of abstraction and distortion to collapse politicized dichotomies that often permeate our mediasphere and cultural history.

Warren cultivates a politics of seeing, by working through how racialized perceptions of different individuals affect how we interact with the world around us. She is invested in the social and political consequences of leaving people unseen. Her work forces viewers to question who they are and what they do when in such spaces.

Richards investigates creation and destruction in relation to desire, and her work explores the erotic and primal as a source of empowerment. She is interested in the relational dynamic between femininity and masculinity, beyond gender and in both the individual and in society. Her visual language is interested in inverting and subverting our visual language around whiteness, goodness and purity, and her use of whiteness reflects on her own whiteness within a larger societal context: its generational privilege and compounding destruction.

Warren and Richards both consider the intergenerational consequences of trauma and the process of discovery through artistic practice. They explore projections upon reality, notions of a “true” reality, and the creative potency that projected realities have upon our lived experiences.

The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative is a cultural hub for Charlottesville offering an inclusive space for creative thinking and artistic pursuits while providing resources and methodology for meaningful arts engagement throughout the community.

More information can be found at thebridgepai.org.