Lead summer artist 2011
Lead summer artist 2015
Windscreen artwork artist- Tide Light Rail, Harbor Park station
Offsite Gallery exhibiting artist October 19 – November 30, 2018 “Re-Ligare”
John Rudel has exhibited his work across the country in venues including the Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA), the University of Miami Art Museum (Oxford, OH), the Lauren Rodgers Museum (Laurel, MS), the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center (Brooklyn, NY), and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Virginia Beach, VA).
Rudel’s drawings were given the “Award of Distinction in Drawing” at the 2007 Virginia Artists Juried Exhibition at the Charles Taylor Arts Center in Hampton VA, and his Paintings were selected by Lisa Dennison, Director of the Guggenheim NY as 1 of 20 winners of the 2002 MFA National Competition in New American Paintings Magazine.
In 2004 Rudel was awarded a Mississippi Arts Commission Fellowship. In addition to 8 solo exhibitions in the last ten years, Rudel has been commissioned three times by the Norfolk Public Art Commission and also has a large mural featured in the NEON Arts District in Norfolk. He is Professor of Art at Virginia Wesleyan University where he also serves as Curator of Exhibitions for the Neil Britton Art Gallery. Rudel was awarded a Batten Professorship in 2014 in recognition of excellence in teaching, scholarship, community contributions, and passion for inspiring excellence in others.
“Re-Ligare” was a series of meditations and visual discoveries.
“The convoluted experience of the contemporary “individual” should be resonant in my images. I’m interested in how the “recipe of particulars” within a painting makes it work as a carrier of content – while simultaneously – I interpret the contemporary onslaught of communication technologies to have greatly impeded the authenticity and effectiveness of actual communication. My images evolve in the studio with lots of reflection, and most often a series of changes that involve adding and removing elements. I like to work with images and motifs that escape duration and suggest the potential of an infinite pause for reflection. I’m attracted to pictures that might hold a viewer’s interest, such as the spectacle of a sunset or a crowd scene. I’m drawn to recognizable images because they have the power to engage perception in a familiar way, but I use the augmentation of surface texture and competing hyper decorative patterns in my paintings to add non-direct, visceral communication, or even meditative visual engagement. My image aggregations and competing hyper-decorative colors serve to question how perceptions are formed in an age of ubiquitous digital technology and cultural pluralism. Visual competition is important because understanding comes to me as a system of comparisons. My work is constructed in the same way. “Meta-modernism” is a contemporary social theory that suggests we, as individuals, are always in oscillation between modes of understanding. Additionally, contemporary neuroscience provides a picture of human brain function as a highly vulcanized.”
