August 16, 2024
Artist Reception, Thursday, August 22, 2024 at 12 PM
Show closes Sept 13, 2024
Make it stand out.
Using found objects, painting, and installation, This Is Not An Art Show examines the lived experience of making art within contemporary cultural expectations. The project considers questions of visibility, legitimacy, and self-definition—moving between humor and seriousness as it traces the tensions artists often navigate while forming an independent practice.
Rather than offering fixed conclusions, the work unfolds as a visual inquiry into how artists come to recognize themselves as artists amid competing signals from commercial markets, institutions, and cultural narratives. The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the contradictions embedded in creative life: being encouraged to seek recognition while remaining wary of popularity, to sustain oneself while separating art from commerce, and to be visible without becoming reduced to a product.
Presented as a sequence of moments rather than a single argument, This Is Not An Art Show asks open questions about authorship, identity, and creative persistence. It considers how a thinking artist continues to create within systems that both invite and resist participation.
The exhibition ran from August 16 to September 13, 2024, in the gallery on the second floor of the Professional Arts Building at College of the Albemarle – Dare, 205 Highway 64 South, Manteo, North Carolina. The gallery was open to the public Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. An artist reception was held on Thursday, August 22, from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m.
About the Artist
Dawn Van Ness is a self-taught visual artist whose work is informed by early experiences along coastal waterways in Virginia Beach and on her father’s rural homestead in southern Virginia. These environments shaped an enduring attentiveness to place, observation, and the restorative qualities of natural settings.
Her earlier bodies of work often engage with themes of landscape, presence, and disruption, reflecting an interest in how environments—both natural and constructed—shape inner experience. Alongside this inquiry, her practice has been influenced by longstanding questions about authorship, value, and the cultural expectations placed on artists working outside traditional pathways.
Van Ness continues to develop work that examines process, perception, and the conditions under which art is made, balancing material experimentation with conceptual reflection.
There is external societal pressure and conditioning to believe an art show is not much more than framed, flat artwork with a title and a price tag. Not exclusively. But the pressure and the messaging are there. What I’ve observed is that acceptable works for traditional galleries should be flat and framed and made up of mediums such as oil, acrylic, and watercolors. Modern. Classic. Abstract. Impressionistic. And aesthetically pleasing. And preferably it says little. And never should it upset anyone.
The price tags, the purchasing, and the collecting of those types of art work demonstrate not only what our pedestrian communities, made of strip malls, chain stores, and shops, believe is valuable and what is safe, but also what will safely fit in our shopping carts and living spaces. And in no way does this validate the artist as a free human being with thoughts and feelings. It only validates a categorized commodity that can have an acceptable price tag on it. Commercialism.
And that is art. End of story for many. It’s what the majority of us grow up with and absorb. These things with price tags and frames with a recognizable brand of an artist are largely what is considered a legitimate art show and something to aspire to in order to be identified as an artist. It’s a model. It’s a role model.
Reinforcing the commercial messaging are the Monet coffee cups, the Van Gogh socks, and Frida T-shirts (all of which I do own myself). Smaller, local galleries and shops echo the messaging. Artists hoping to show and sell their work reproduce the business model at art shows and farmer’s markets, any place where they can pay a fee and put up a booth. And so it goes.
If you want to be an artist, you have to sell your art.
If you want to be a legitimate artist, you have to live off of what you sell.
If you want to sell, this is what the public is conditioned and primed to buy.
So, this is not an art show…
not in the commercial sense which I internalized unknowingly, before I had developed filters, growing up in a suburban, pedestrian community with art and craft shows. Art Appreciation and Art History did little to disrupt this messaging. The field trip to the Chrysler museum in the 1980s did little to disrupt this messaging. Please exit through the gift shop. Van Gogh signature pencils. Monet ties. Modern? Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog.
The art vendors on the Virginia Beach boardwalk were the same. Works were typical, flat, framed, and digestible. Print reproductions of original artwork, matted in a plastic sleeve, reproduced on cups, magnets, and so on. And the reproduction of these works requires they be flat passive images for scanning.
Being an artist and being commercial are linked and chained together. These models feel like being caged in wire. I’ve become conscious of the hang ups that have me doubting my inner voice. I’ve grown in awareness, and I’m rebelling. I need to break out of these self-limiting beliefs and take down thes hang-ups in order to step fully into being an artist versus being oppressed by the idea of Artist.
The pieces in this collection are my personal expressions about the external pressures and internal hang-ups, obstacles, and challenges to being an artist and putting on an art show, hang-ups which ultimately lead to chilling artistic expression. The pressure to be commercially successful, therefore validated, and to reproduce a business model result in self-limiting and self-censoring, a shrinking down artistically to fit the consumer's idea of an artist.
So first off, here there are no price tags unless they are the subject of the art. The same with frames. And largely and hopefully they are not valued as art in the general population and by many shops and galleries, especially the ones I grew up seeing.
I will leave you here and I’ll let you in on a secret. This really is an art show…
at least the kind that I want to exhibit in this moment of my artistic journey.
The only purchase I really want you to make is to have an experience and some thoughts of your own on how challenging becoming a mature, well-developed and independent artist is, how driven those who succeed must be in the chilling atmosphere of overt commercialism, and how much is going unexpressed because of those pressures to be commercial.
And if anyone asks you, shhh… this is not an art show….
