May/June Art Show: Circe Strauss & Ellen Moore Osborne

Posted on April 29, 2023 Posted By: Achsah Carrier Categories: Art, News & Views

Circe Strauss
Artist bio

Circe Strauss worked as a special effects technician for the movie industry in the 80’s and early 90’s in Los Angeles. She worked on 14 feature films, plus dozens of commercials and one children’s show. She moved to Charlottesville in the mid-90’s and retrained as a programmer.

She combines both mechanical special effects and computer skills in her art.

The four pieces that are being presented employ a technique called polarization diffraction. It’s similar to the rainbow reflection seen on a DVD. Each piece is approximately 16″ in diameter, constructed from acrylic, and mylar.

Through a Glass Darkly

Juan Ramon Guerrero and Christopher “Drew” Leinonen
Victims of the Impulse Nightclub Orlando, Florida
June 12, 2016

Brandon Tina
Murdered in Humboldt, Nebraska
December 31, 1993

Sage Smith
Missing since November 20, 2012
Charlottesville, Virginia

Matthew Shepard
Beaten, tied to a fence and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming
October 12, 1998

Ellen Moore Osborne
Artist Bio

Ellen Moore Osborne is a printmaker, photographer, and mixed media collage artist living in Charlottesville, Virginia. She originally attended East Carolina University with the intention of becoming a graphic designer, but fell in love with fine art instead. She received her BFA from East Carolina University in 1986 and an MFA from Louisiana State University in 1991. Her work has appeared in solo, group, and juried exhibitions in 37 states and several foreign countries. She stepped away from the art scene for a while to focus on raising twin boys, who are now in college.

Ellen has worked as a graphic designer for local, statewide, and national nonprofit organizations. She has taught graphic design and printmaking in Virginia at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville and Mary Baldwin College in Staunton. For the past eleven years, she has worked as the Executive Director of Literacy Volunteers of Charlottesville/Albemarle, a program that helps adult immigrants and refugees learn to read, write, and speak the English language. She is also on the Albemarle County School Board.

Website: www.TrinityArts.com • Contact: Ellen@trinityarts.com

Artist Statement

“My artwork is more of a spiritual practice than the mere production of images. Often, the figures in my work bring me along on their own journey, unveiling layers of meaning as quickly as I can apply new ones with my paintbrush. The process of creating each piece is a tug-of-war between my efforts to organize a composition and the image’s determination to realize itself. At the conclusion of a piece, I’ve always learned something about why I needed to revisit the photos that called me to begin it. I have been a photographer most of my life, and almost all my artwork begins with a particular snapshot of someone.

I incorporate a sense of transparency and of movement in the figures in my work. The finished images evoke a feeling of evanescence: something physically present at one point is now disappearing. Common to all of my work is the idea that something is happening in the image, but it’s completely okay not to know the specifics; the ever-changing nature of our existence doesn’t have to be scary.

As a complement to the realism that photographs inherently offer, I make sure my handiwork with torn paper and brushstrokes is visible. The physical mark-making combined with the photographic process is intended to raise a question about which parts of the image more closely represent reality.” —Ellen

Chaos and Kitties, 2022, Mixed Media Collage, 12″ x 12″, $150