Nicholena Moon, a Frewsburg native, will host her first gallery exhibit from Wednesday to Dec. 1 in the Kiernan Gallery in Lexington, Va.
Ms. Moon graduated from Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa. in May with dual majors in art and technology and communication arts. She has had artwork featured in several student exhibits at Allegheny College, but the upcoming show will be her first outside of academia.
"I am honored to have been selected by the juror, along with several other amazing artists, for this show," she said.
Article Photos
Pictured above is one of the two photos by Frewsburg native Nicholena Moon selected to be displayed in the Kiernan Gallery in Lexington, Va. The show is titled “The Unreal.”
Photo by Nicholena Moon
Ken Rosenthal, juror and photographer, curated the show, selecting 30 photographs from submissions by nearly 125 artists. Forty other photographs will be included in an online gallery. Moon submitted six photos for the show, two of which were selected to appear physically in the Kiernan Gallery in Lexington, Va. Ms. Moon's images, along with the others in the show, will be reproduced in an exhibition catalog available for purchase.
The show is titled "The Unreal."
"When I saw the call for entry and the theme of the show, I thought it really described my photos," she said.
Rosenthal mentioned Ms. Moon's work specifically in his juror's statement.
"The quizzical works of both Nicholena Moon and Kelly Wrage fuse dark humor with a cinematic view of domesticity tinged with the supernatural," reads the statement.
Ms. Moon felt this aptly described her work.
"The two photos that were accepted of mine deal with a suburban character who finds himself at the center of an alien conspiracy," she said. "I try to construct my scenes to have a surreal, uncanny feeling to them, so I really appreciate the juror's acknowledgement of that. I am very pleased with his description."
One of the images in question shows a large circular pattern imprinted in an open field surrounded by trees. Ms. Moon created this faux crop circle last summer in Frewsburg as a precursor to a school project.
"That one is pretty self-explanatory," she said. "It's obviously supposed to have been the site of a UFO landing. The viewer is left to decide for themselves whether the taker of the photograph created the circle, and if they did, whether they are human or alien, or if they merely stumbled upon it. It was a lot of hard work though."