Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington Opens New Exhibitions

Arts and Entertainment

February 22, 2025

From: Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington

New shows include a group exhibition featuring six painters, the first two solo projects taking place as part of SOLOS 2025, and a solo exhibition by one of MoCA Arlington's resident artists.

ARLINGTON, VA - Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington is proud to announce the opening of its first new exhibitions of 2025. The shows feature work in a wide array of media, including painting, sculpture, installation, and new media, in five distinct exhibitions: A Passage of Force Though Matter is a group exhibition focused on current painting; Brandon Morse: Gradually, All At Once and Joshua Challen Ice: Something to Do With My Hands take place as part of SOLOS 2025; and Milan Warner: Where growths sleep but cannot dream is the first solo exhibition by the MoCA Arlington resident artist.

A Passage of Force Through Matter features work by six painters based in the DC area: Tom Bunnell, Asha Elana Casey, Claudia "Aziza" Gibson-Hunter, Matthew Mann, Maggie Michael, and Marisa Rasum.

The exhibition asserts the ongoing vibrancy of painting in contemporary art and considers the role it plays in our visual world. It frames painting as a practice that artists use to reconcile and transcend their own experiences of our overburdened image landscape–both the physical world and the endless scroll of news images, selfies, digitally-created content and, increasingly, AI-generated materials that fill our various screens. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from art historian David Joselit, who described the painterly mark as “a passage of force through matter” in his essay for the 2016 exhibition Painting 2.0.

Brandon Morse: Gradually, All at Once and Joshua Challen Ice: Something to Do With My Hands take place as part of SOLOS 2025. Launched in 1988, SOLOS features solo exhibitions by artists based in the Mid-Atlantic region who are working at the forefront of contemporary art.

In Gradually, All At Once, Morse presents two new multichannel video works that use real satellite data to create digital abstractions of geological phenomena. Joshua Challen Ice's Something to Do With My Hands explores issues of care, maintenance, and creation. For the installation, Ice has imagined a simple workshop space and transformed it into what he calls a "worksite suspended between creation and collapse."

MoCA Arlington resident artist Milan Warner’s Where growths sleep but cannot dream situates viewers in an alternate reality where fictional growths are allowed to flourish. Turning the gallery into an outsized petri dish and casting viewers in the role of curious scientists, Warner creates sculptures and installations that foreground the strangeness of the human body, often to disquieting ends.

PRESS IMAGES

PROGRAMS

Art After Hours

Saturday / February 22 / 5pm-8pm

Join MoCA Arlington to celebrate the opening of our new exhibitions! Inside the museum, view the new exhibitions, visit resident artist studios, and enjoy refreshments from the cash bar.

Artist Talks: Brandon Morse and Joshua Challen Ice

Saturday / March 22 / 3pm

Additional public programs to be announced soon.

EXHIBITIONS

Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington Winter/ Spring 2025 Exhibitions

February 14 - May 25, 2025

A Passage of Force Through Matter

Featured artists: Tom Bunnell, Asha Elana Casey, Claudia "Aziza" Gibson-Hunter, Matthew Mann, Maggie Michael, and Marisa Rasum

Curated by Blair Murphy

Main Level Galleries

Brandon Morse: Gradually, All at Once

Truland Gallery, Lower Level