As Americans, we often forget that an outsider’s view of the American landscape is often quite different from our own.

Through his brightly colored oil paintings and his socially and politically charged watercolor sketches, Colin Ginks examines the country with foreign eyes, creating a window to another America. Placing familiar images in unfamiliar juxtapositions, Ginks sheds light on many things, we, as Americans and more specifically, Virginians, readily accept and seldom question. These seemingly indiscriminate pairings lead the viewer to sense that the artist perceives his adopted home as having multiple personalities which need to be reconciled. “I acutely feel the tension between the manicured, civilized face Virginia wishes to present and the threats at its edges; the wildness of nature, the shadow of history and an uncertain future,” says Ginks.

Colin Ginks is a visual artist and a published novelist. English by birth, he has lived a “nomadic existence” in such places as Lisbon, Marseille, Johannesburg and New York City, before recently settling in Norfolk, Virginia. Ginks has exhibited in galleries across Europe and in New York, including the Leslie-Lohman Gallery in New York City and most recently with the ArtFlux Organization, also in New York City. He is currently looking forward to his first exhibition in his adopted home of Virginia.

An opening night reception will be held on Saturday, June 20 from 7 to 9:30 pm.

At the Edges You Are Also will be showing June 20 through August 8, at ArtGallery, located at 424 W 21st Street, in Ghent, Norfolk.

Gallery hours are Wednesday through Friday, 12:30 to 5:30 pm and Saturday, 12:30 to 4:30 pm. Find more at the gallery’s website, www.artgalleryls.net.

Further below–the artist’s statement…

At the Edges You Are Also

An Artist’s Conversation with Himself (Americanized)

• Hello Colin.
• It’s a beautiful day for an art show.
• Whatever. You can’t even give us a simple title, can you? It’s as if you’re afraid to reveal what you really think.
• That’s not true. I enjoy things as intricate, complex patterns, and I’d like my public to experience that too, through me. What if I told you the title is an invitation for them to look for themselves, somewhere in all this art?

(Laughs ghoulishly)

• You are seriously creeping me out.
• It’s supposed to be fun. Where’s your sense of humor?
• What’s funny about bugs, dude?
• Bugs are everywhere. All around us. It doesn’t matter how pretty your lawn might be, it’s teeming with ‘em. Nature is intense here, a source of constant, physical tension with our surroundings, especially when we try and bury it under asphalt. Anyway, enough about bugs. It’s only a small part of the universe I am creating.

(Pauses)

• I like bugs. And foofy dogs.
• Sure doesn’t look like any Virginia I know.
• How can you say that? Y’know, I think people only see what they want to see, most of the time. Isn’t that a shame? Actually, our sense of place – this place - is a fascinating hemorrhage of history, identity, cultural anxieties and sensual pleasure. That’s why I often like to paint kids; they absorb the ambiguities of places, while adults have to some extent switched off to their surroundings.
• You are two shades of crazy, mister.
• Thank you. I think.
• Anyway, what do you know? You’re not even from here.
• I guess. But then I like to think that gives me an emotional and intellectual distance that makes my artworks resonate the way they do. I’ve travelled a lot, and have never lived in places for more than a few years at a time. I absorb new places, as if I were a kid. It’s exhausting, but I guess that’s what makes me an artist.