Show opens Friday May 13th, from 7 to 9 PM. The exhibition will remain on view through Friday June 3rd.

This exhibition at the Page Bond Gallery (1625 West Main Street) features Andrea Keys Connell’s large-scale ceramic figures are “driven by her desire to investigate how an individual’s personal history affects their identity, behaviors and actions.”

As a grandchild of Auschwitz survivors, Connell explains, “I am especially interested in intergenerational trauma and how a person’s past, particularly a past that has been interrupted by a traumatic event such as war, can influence patterned behaviors that are passed through the family.”

Andrea Keys Connell received her MFA from Ohio University in 2009 and her BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002.

Connell has exhibited her work throughout the United States and lectures frequently about the study of interpenetrate trauma and third generation Holocaust survivors. Connell is the recipient of an Emerging Artist Residence Fellowship in Craft and Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2010-2011.

Lacey Jane Roberts is best known for her politically charged large-scale knitted art installations. Her choice tools are a vintage 1974 plastic toy Barbie knitting machine and a pink, sparkly Cool Corder that manufactures ropelike strands of yarn. Vibrant and colorful barbwire fences are fused together out of these crude materials and can stretch up to 50 feet in length. The work can take over a year to complete.

“With her engagement and place within the craft fold and as a member of the Queer Caucus of Art, Roberts’ art activism continues to form thought-provoking narratives across the art/craft platform in support of the underdog.” — Mang Lar Lam, Fiber Arts, Nov/Dec 2010 edition.

Roberts describes her current work as a merger of craft and objects. “Craft with objects of violence and control examine large structures of power and how they might be interrupted by ways of making that are often labeled as gendered, amateur, and low.

Lacey Jane Roberts received her MA in Visual and Critical Studies and her MFA in Textiles from the California College of the Arts in 2007. She received her BA in English and Studio Art from the University of Vermont in 2003.

Roberts is the recipient of numerous awards including the Emerging Artist Residence Fellowship in Craft and Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2010-2011; MacDowell Colony Residency, 2010; the Searchlight Artist Award by the American Craft Council, 2008; among many others.