Giants Art from the Dean Collection at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (I)

A color-negative walk through the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, from Dean Collection galleries to painted stone.

Giants Art from the Dean Collection at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts / 35mm color negative (stock unidentified) / Giants Art from the Dean Collection at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (I) — Giants Art from the Dean Collection at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts collection, 35mm film archive

The roll opens at point-blank range, where the museum stops being rooms and becomes surface. A doorframe's shadow gives way to a wall of pattern — a great orange paisley leaf packed with flowers, rendered in tiny squares of neon color like embroidery run through a circuit board. A few frames later the lens is deep in fur, red and gold and green strands catching light like a bonfire seen through grass. Whatever the labels said, the camera's first instinct was touch.

Then it backs up and lets the galleries breathe. A constellation of small oval seascapes hangs in gold frames on a warm wall, dark silhouettes of visitors pressing in at the edges. One gilt frame gets its own study — a scalloped arch around a field of sea green, throwing a sawtooth shadow down the wall. Deeper in, the Dean Collection's rooms open up: a bold geometric canvas in green, pink, and blue holds one wall while a painted portrait of a woman with an afro and a single earring watches from a freestanding panel, steady as a lighthouse.

The roll ends by leaping across centuries without leaving the building. Six dancers in pink skirts kick through an expressionist stage set of acid green and yellow. A surreal desert scene — a figure on a pedestal, a crowd of tiny onlookers, one enigmatic monolith — glows inside a heavy red-and-timber frame. And last, a limestone relief: the red-painted legs of a striding figure, an ankh swinging from one carved hand. The color negative treats them all the same, which is perhaps the point — everything here was once wet paint, warm hands, work.

Open the interactive project view

Related

Virginia / Art / Neon Lights

  • Cemetery - A single fall afternoon among old walled stones and white marble rows in Alexandria, Virginia, on 35mm color negative.
  • Fall Leaves - Three color-negative frames of leaf-covered ground and thinning trees along a Belmont Bay path in Woodbridge, Virginia.
  • Kodak 200 at Belmont Bay - Golden-hour shoreline frames from Woodbridge, Virginia, where a goose family holds the bank.
  • Loosies - Orphan frames from the Virginia waterfront, where fog, flowers, and camouflaged moths all practice the art of disappearing.
  • Same Shots, Two Film Stocks - One evening at Belmont Bay, photographed twice — matching frames from two different color negative rolls.
  • Snowfall - Five color negative frames from a Woodbridge, Virginia snow that arrived before the garden agreed to winter.
  • Giants Art from the Dean Collection at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (II) - Neon, marble, and glowing resin traded back and forth through the glass of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
  • RVA Day Trip - A short color-negative walk through Richmond, Virginia, from new glass to painted brick to late-sixties chrome.

Images

Close view of a wall-sized artwork with an orange paisley leaf filled with flowers in small squares of green, blue, and red, partly blocked by a dark doorframe.
A paisley the size of a door, stitched from squares of neon. The frame's shadow only makes it burn brighter.
A cluster of about a dozen small oval paintings in ornate gold frames arranged in a diamond pattern on a warmly lit wall, with dark silhouettes of viewers at both edges.
A little galaxy of gilded ovals, each one holding its own sliver of sea and sky. Visitors drift past like eclipses.
Corner detail of an arched, ornately carved gold frame around a sea-green painted surface, casting a jagged sawtooth shadow on the wall below.
The frame does half the talking: carved gold biting into sea green, its shadow serrated like a crown laid sideways.
Extreme close-up of long shimmering fibers in red, gold, green, and dark tones, filling the entire frame like colorful fur.
So close the artwork becomes weather — red and gold fibers streaming like sparks off a grinding wheel.
Gallery view with a large geometric painting in green, pink, and blue on a far wall and, in the right foreground, a painted portrait of a Black woman with an afro and a dangling earring.
Two kinds of geometry share a room: hard-edged diamonds on the far wall, and the perfect circle of an afro in profile.
An expressionist painting of six dancers in pink skirts posed mid-step against a green stage backdrop with two gold ornamental shapes, over a yellow floor.
Six dancers caught mid-lesson, all pink tulle and green shadow. The brushwork moves faster than they do.
A surrealist painting in a heavy red-lined wooden frame showing a figure standing on a pedestal in a desert plain, a crowd of small figures below, and a tall draped form at right under a cloudy sky.
A dream in a red-velvet border: one figure raised above the crowd, one shrouded monolith keeping its secret at the edge of the plain.
A limestone relief fragment showing the red-painted legs of a striding figure holding an ankh and a staff, carved into yellowed stone blocks.
Only the legs remain, still walking after thousands of years, an ankh swinging from a carved fist like a house key.