Grace DuVal, born from the mountains of Virginia, raised in the water of the James River, is a maker and a builder, a doer and a moment capturer. She uses the camera and the sewing machine and her own body to create new landscapes and moments of connection between material and skin. She uses quiet gestures and repurposed materials to build and construct her own narratives around the body, to understand more deeply the things she already knows. With a BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Fashion, Body and Garment from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her practice moves between sculpture and the body. Through her thesis exhibition she continues to explore the space where these two meet.
I Stopped at the Border [Between the Two]
I Stopped at the Border [Between the Two] is a series of performances captured through video. Rocked by life events and personal narratives, I create my own landscapes of skin on terrain. Site specific and deeply personal, each moment in time that is captured is a gesture of intimacy and loss, a physical shift mimicking these moments of tension before the breaking point. These tectonic plates of life that are butting up against each other, pushing in opposite directions–about to slip—sending tremors and shocks through our steady lives. Watching binding ties come undone as emotions take over common sense, as memory transports us into distant landscapes that once seemed so close. With this installation I am showing these fragmented moments, projected through broken and abandoned windows, fogged over and distorted just as our personal histories fade and shift with the passage of time.
.
