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Opening Friday, June 22:
Richard Chartier, Bridget Sue Lambert, and Shamus Ian Fatzinger
Civilian Art Projects is pleased to present three new exhibitions, including a multi-channel sound work from Richard Chartier and photographs from Bridget Sue Lambert and Shamus Ian Fatzinger.
The exhibitions will open to the public on Friday, June 22, 2012 and will be on view through July 28, 2012.
Opening Reception for the artists: Friday, June 22 from 7 to 9 p.m. at Civilian Art Projects
Richard Chartier: Interior Field
"...[with] a hushed aesthetic that shelters a powerful compositional vision. Even when pitched at the fringes of audibility, Chartier's sounds have an extraordinarily seductive quality."
-- The Wire, UK
Civilian Art Projects presents Richard Chartier, Interior Field, a multi-channel sound work created from field recordings of a variety of small and large spaces from around the world.
Through his compositional practice, Chartier utilizes the unique physicalities of these environments to create a newly defined acoustic space. According to the artist, "Interior Field is a 65- minute transposition of location, focus, and experience itself." To this end, Chartier transforms the center gallery at Civilian Art Projects into a darkened space where the visitor may relax and focus on the sound composition. A significant portion of this new piece utilizes several binaural audio recordings made at the unique 1905 McMillan Sand Filtration Site in Washington, DC during a sudden heavy rainstorm.
For the exhibition, two limited edition, archival prints titled "s is for... (1)" and "s is for... (2)" by the artist will be available. The prints depict two unique spaces whose audio recordings appear as elements in the sound work. The first images are of a bright blue sky bisected by the rusted metal, circular surface view inside a Richard Serra sculpture. The second image is from a similar perspective, this time from inside the McMillan Sand Filtration site in rainy darkness, and was created for this exhibit.
Richard Chartier (b.1971), sound artist, is considered one of the key figures in the current movement of reductionist electronic sound art, which has been termed both "microsound" and Neo-Modernist. Chartier's minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself. Chartier's sound works/installations have been presented in galleries and museums internationally, including the 2002's Whitney Biennial, and he has performed his work live across Europe, Japan, Australia, and North America at digital art/electronic music festivals and exhibits. In 2000, he formed the recording label LINE, and has since curated its continuing documentation of compositional and installation work by international sound artists/composers exploring the aesthetics of contemporary and digital minimalism. In 2010, Chartier was awarded a Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellowship to explore the National Museum of American History's collection of 19th-Century acoustic apparatus for scientific demonstration. In 2011, Chartier curated and designed the new media exhibit Data/Fields at Artisphere in Arlington, Virginia, including five noted international artists: Ryoji Ikeda, Mark Fell, Andy Graydon, France Jobin, and Caleb Coppock.
Bridget Sue Lambert: Bedrooms
 In this photographic series of large-scale pigment prints, Bridget Sue Lambert explores and emphasizes the complicated nature of relationships through the humorously messy rooms of a dollhouse.
For the first time, Lambert will exhibit the collection of bedrooms that she has been working on for the last three years. In them, she has constructed -- and expertly photographed and printed -- scenes that simulate the emotional and physical clutter that surrounds romantic relationships, as well as a woman's relationship with herself.
Lambert is interested in evoking the tensions, anxiety, and muddle that exist in these private spaces: The things we strive to keep hidden behind closed doors. According to the artist, "by creating spaces filled with miniaturized everyday clutter, I'm able to manipulate the viewer's sense of time and space and offer frozen tableaus that suggest a living narrative. Messy beds, knocked-over drinks, bras and clothing flung on the floor hint at feelings of lust, desire, fear, love, faith, anticipation, and expectation." She distills personal experiences and draws on memories and images from both childhood and adulthood to engage in a contemporary discourse.
Allowing Lambert to make light of uncomfortable situations, the ironic titles for the works making up Bedrooms are inspired by self-help relationship books and the season finale of The Bachelor. Yet although Lambert presents constructed vignettes peppered with references to popular culture, she nonetheless demonstrates the universality of human reactions and emotions.
Bridget Sue Lambert is a photographer and master digital print specialist who was born and lives in Washington DC. She received her BA in Studio Arts from the University of Maryland, College Park. Lambert has received an Individual Art Award for Works on Paper from the Maryland State Arts Council (2004), a Artist Fellowship Grant by The DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities (2007) and was a semifinalist for the both the Janet & Walter Sondheim Award (2008, 2012) and the Trawick Prize (2008). Her work was chosen for the DC Art Walk Project (2006) and has been added to the Wilson Building Art Collection and Art Bank. Most recently she has exhibited her work at the Workhouse Art Center, VA; Hillyer Art Space, DC; the Arlington Arts Center, VA; the Katzen Arts Center, DC; the Decker and Meyerhoff Galleries, MD; Pyramid Atlantic, MD; and The Pepco Edison Gallery, DC. She is a board member for the DC Arts Center (DCAC), a founding board member of The Studio Visit (TSV) and served on the Advisory Council of the Transformer Gallery from 2004 to 2009. Lambert currently maintains her studio at Arlington Art Center, Arlington, VA as a Resident Artist.
Shamus Ian Fatzinger: Personal Frontier
In Personal Frontier, a series of photographs created from negatives found in a cardboard box belonging to his mother tell the story of Shamus Fatzinger's childhood and his family's move west.
The move was inspired by stories circulating in the New Jersey zinc mine where his father worked: Stories of big money in mining uranium, deep under the deserts of New Mexico. Three weeks after hearing these stories, the family and their bloodhound, Aspen, loaded into a Mercury Monarch station wagon (purchased with $200 worth of quarters) and headed west toward Grants, New Mexico.
Shamus Ian Fatzinger is a staff photojournalist for the Fairfax County Times, a suburban division of The Washington Post Company. He lives in Hyattsville, MD with his wife Marian and two cats. This is his first solo exhibition with Civilian Art Projects. Special thanks to Rebecca McGahey and other anonymous authors of the photographs.
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