classical themes x every breath we drew x until they get it
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Gayle Caruso:Divine Light: 100 Kinds of Light
When: On view through November 2nd, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday October 3rd, 6-8:30PM
Where: Bromfield Gallery, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Divine Light” is the last 100 14×11″ mixed-media paintings from the “Free Fall” series of 1000 mixed-media paintings, drawings, prints and photographs. The first 900 pieces in “Free Fall ” were based on a personal experience of free fall into a transcendant white light.
The 100 “Divine Light” pieces are all done on 14×11″ photographs of the Giotto paintings, which are installed in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy. It was Giotto’s ability to depict the entrance of the supernatural realm into the natural world, his pure light that gave a glimpse of eternity, which serves as a perfect background for the last 100 paintings.
The “Divine Light” series is my way of trying to capture the behind and the above and the beyond of the very pure, very bright multi-colored white light of my experience.”
Also on view…
Tim McDonald: Opening the Mountain
What/Why: “Those who climb to the peak… have seen but little of the mountain. I came not to look off from it, but to look at it. “
– Henry David Thoreau
Throughout the summer and fall of 2013 I hiked through New England’s mountains. Documenting the experience through writing and photography in my blog walkingisdrawing.blogspot.com.
I came to find that the journey was more of an interior than aesthetic one. Since memory (and thus images) are unreliable translators of experience, I am attempting here to address the ambient texture of events… forwarding the noumenal over the phenomenal and giving form to what, ultimately, is formless.
I approach my art practice, not so much in terms of a project, but as more of a kōan.* This reflects a deep and abiding question that hovers, for me, over the making of objects: “What is this? What does this mean?” It is the broadest, but ultimately deepest question (and it is one question), as it embodies all others, is rooted in the present moment, and is the one that guides me, moment to moment, into the work, into the world. “
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Greg Mencoff: Chasing Artifacts
When: On view through November 1st, 2014
Where: Carroll and Sons, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118
How: Official Website
Also on view..
Jacqueline Ott: Spangled Plush
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Suzannah Sinclair : Nature Nudes and Interiors
When: On view through October 25th, 2014
Where: Samsøn Projects, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118
How: Official Website
What/Why: “I thought the feminist revolution was over. I thought that fight had been fought, and although it may not have been won, it at least happened and let’s move on. Attending art school at the turn of the 21st century, the world was mine. I was brought up in a household that encouraged me to be anything I wanted: a doctor, lawyer, astronaut, a painter? Could I be a painter?
I wanted to explore self-expression and concepts of human nature, so what if I was a woman. I wanted to paint the nude, to hone my skills and because: that’s what all the great artists did. But whom should I paint? I have no anonymous model to lounge around my studio, I have no mistress and I have no wife. What’s a girl to do? I start to amass vintage men’s magazine to draw from. Healthy, earthy, almost mundane bodies all at my fingertips.
“Let us first examine such a simple, but critical, issue as availability of the nude model to aspiring women artists, in the period extending from the Renaissance until near the end of the 19th century, a period in which careful and prolonged study of the nude model was essential to the training of every young artist, to the production of any work with pretensions to grandeur, and to the very essence of History Painting, generally accepted as the highest category of art. “
“There exist, to my knowledge, no historical representations of artists drawing from the nude model which include women in any other role but that of the nude model itself, an interesting commentary on rules of propriety: that is, it is all right for a (“low,” of course) woman to reveal herself naked-as-an object for a group of men, but forbidden to a woman to participate in the active study and recording of naked-man-as-an-object or even of a fellow woman. “
Linda Nochlin. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists”. ARTnews. January 1971.
Then next thing you know, a decade has gone by and I have to lie down on the psychoanalytic couch and ask, “Why?”
That’s the stage I’m at, in my process and career. Is it a coincidence that this new journey of self-discovery is happening as I have left New York City and moved to the Maine woods to live ‘the simple life’ with a husband, a daughter, chickens and a dog? I have literally left the circles of the art world and with that, freedom is mine. I can stop and make new work that doesn’t have to please galleries, collectors or critics.
Frustration is fueling my studio fire. Frustration with the boy’s club that still exists and the plight of the female artist to be seen and heard. Forget about the plight of the Mother as artist, but to talk about these state of affairs is frowned upon and dooms you to a little box that no one wants to be in… and good luck getting out.
So I have started to work in a new (old) medium, egg tempera. And with this I am painting my way through the genre of American Art: the portrait, the nude model and the landscape. Still working from the same source material as before. I do not wish to neuter my work nor push the boundary with in your face vulgarity. It’s a fine line to tow but I’ll teeter back and forth until ‘they’ get it. “
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Lester Johnson: Classical Themes
When: On view through October 25th, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday Friday, October 3rd, 5:00-8:00PM
Where: ACME Fine Art, 450 Harrison Avenue #308, Boston, MA 02118
How: Official Website
What/Why: “This will be ACME Fine Art’s fourth solo exhibition of Lester Johnson’s work and it will feature nine seminal oil paintings from what was a pivotal decade for Johnson: the 1960s. During the 1960s the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, and the H.C.E. and the Sun Galleries in Provincetown were frequent venues for Johnson’s contemporary work. It was also during this decade that Johnson’s paintings were selected for inclusion in groundbreaking exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His canvases from this period are bold and vigorously expressive regardless of scale, and they demonstrate a poetic virtuosity that became Lester Johnson’s hallmark.”
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August Sander – Just Women
When: On view through October 11th, 2014
Where: Gallery Kayafas, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118
How: Official Website
What/Why: “To mark the beginning of the gallery’s 12th season, I have paired portraits by August Sander with those by Jess T. Dugan. The relationship between the photographer, subject, and viewer is equally important to the commitment to seeing, observing, and thinking. Both of these artists, separated by almost a century, are dedicated to the honesty of the portrait – description is everything; that resonating moment can reveal the truth. “
Also on view..
Jess T. Dugan Every Breath We Drew
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Susan Alport: There for the Taking
When: On view through November 2nd, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday, October 3, 2014, 5:30-7:30 pm
Where: Kingston Gallery, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118
How: Official Website
What/Why: “I like looking at refined products and polished pieces of other artists. But my own work is motivated by a different quest: how to capture those unplanned and unedited visual encounters on the street, in a room, on an alley wall when I spot, as if by accident, the exact confluence of all the elements that constitute what’s beautiful to me, what I would make myself, except it’s already made, out in the world, there for the taking. I want to hold that combination for perpetuity, to capture with camera, drawing, word, or phrase the entire visual entity before the light shifts or I change positions, and what I would have made is gone.
In those fractions of a second, everything’s in flux: the fugitive image, my fumbling hands, an enveloping cloud overhead. To remember the visual instant, get it down, and bring it home as visually intact as possible is the essence of my work.
The discovered images, objects, and text are later incorporated into pre-existing work, reconfigured and collaged into new pieces, or simply preserved in their appropriated state to serve as Muses, models, and catalysts for my studio practice.
This installation reflects how that practice feels and looks. Collected detritus, new photographs, current and previous drafts of artist statements and other materials, united by one sense of flux, hold together here in a shared temporality. “
Also on view..
Eugene La Rochelle: 
(I Love You)
(I Love You)
What/Why:“Exploring uncomfortable questions prompted by the American experience primarily centers on group identity and the pain one feels when one “doesn’t belong”. These experiences themselves are categorized into relatively rigid groups, ironically reflecting the same suffocating binary identities they intend to describe: the biracial experience; the queer experience in a hetero-normative culture, etc. I find myself at the intersection of multiple experiences. In addition to being biracial and queer, I come from a military family that moved from base to base, born in a foreign country that is a liberal democracy but growing up in another that is a conservative theocracy. My personal history provides me not just with a vein of material to mine, but I believe gives me a nuanced understanding of the origins of pain that may rise from these incompatible and intersecting experiences, which I have had to curate and manage at great expense my entire life.
My aim as an artist, then, is to create work that frames and provides a window into conversations on pain and conflict, allowing the observer to eavesdrop and gain an intimate, even invasive view of the private lives, quarrels and pain of others. Though the audience may feel discomfort at being caught in the crossfire of private conflicts, I hope the work will provide catharsis and promote discussion, revealing the personal cost of leaving pain unresolved and undiscussed.”
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Terry Donsen Feder | Paintings
When: On view through October 11th, 2014
Opening Reception: Saturday October 4th, 2014 6:00-8:30PM
Where: EBK Gallery, 1429 Park St. suite112, Hartford, CT 06106
How: Official Website
What/Why: “The selected work being shown in the gallery was born out of an encounter with illuminated manuscripts some years ago by the artist Terry Donsen Feder. In her paintings there are two perceived spaces that reside on a shared surface. One is reflected and blurred. The other illustrated and clear.
As she says, “…In medieval manuscripts, words or music or design form a flat plane. In the center of a page is a scene that suggests you might be able to enter into if you read the text or sing the music or perform the devotions written on the page.”
“I use oil paint and primer on metal. In my work the unpainted metal surrounding the image forms the flat plane, and there’s a painted illusionistic image in the center very different from the flatness of the metal. I often work from photographs and sketches of landscapes. The painted center is about hand and expression, the metal about machine, even technology. Contradictions we live with.”
The artist lives and works in Farmington, Connecticut. E. B. K.
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David X. Levine: John Surette
When: On view through October 18th, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday, October 3, 5:30pm
Where: Steven Zevitas, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118
How: Official Website
What/Why: “John Surette presents five recent works on paper and an editioned t-shirt. While colored pencil continues to be Levine’s primary medium, his latest work also includes collage elements. The most noticeable change in his work over the past several years, aside from its increased scale, is Levine’s abandoning of the intuitive, wonky and hard-won forms that used to dominate his compositions in favor of more strictly geometric forms. Levine has successfully wrestled the same unstable energy out of a square that he used to produce with his own personal forms.
The exhibition takes its name from the eponymous Boston-area musician, who has had a significant influence on Levine. In the work on view, Surette, Mary Tyler Moore and other pop icons as raw “material”; they function more as a brushstroke would than as cultural signifiers. Through their integration into his work, Levine explores memory and thought, and how the two intertwine and overlap to produce content that is at once highly personal and universal.
The t-shirt/print plays a central role in the exhibition and is the most consciously conceptual object that Levine has ever made. Titled “John Surette,” the shirt functions as a formal art object while referencing a litany of other issues and concerns that are central to Levine’s life and practice, from blue-collar art to iteration/repetition to installation, with the wearer as the center.”
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Deb Todd Wheeler
When: On view through October 21st, 2014
Where: Miller Yezerski Gallery, 460 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118
How: Official Website
What/Why: “…in the atmospheres”
Also on view..
Mike Mandel & Chantal Zakari
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Katina Huston: First Cut: Original Drawings & Antique Japanese Textile Stencils
When: On view through October 31st, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday October 3rd, 6-8PM
Where: Chase Young Gallery, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118
How: Official Website
What/Why: “In a review by Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle this spring it was noted that my work showed an influence from antique Asian art. Little did he know.
Going on fifteen years I have been drawing shadows; hanging objects from the ceiling, throwing light through them and running colored liquids through the forms. The resulting drawings show the splashy liquidity of calligraphy and the cropped silhouette of block prints, though neither was my intention. I was looking for a way to draw that would allow me to show what I see. Still, where do we learn to see?..”
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Julie Gorn: Milestones
When: On view through October 26th, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday October 3rd, 6-8PM
Where: Galatea Fine Art, 460B Harrison Ave., #B-6
How: Official Website
What/Why: “My paintings have evolved, first painting nudes, then trees, plants, and then for many years rocks. Rocks amaze me, their colors, patterns, and age. I am obsessed with rocks. How did they get to this particular beach? I have gathered them since I was a child. All that is left now in my paintings is an occasional reminder of this history.
Currently, my painting is non-objective. Non-objective painting is the most personal. I start with no preconceived notion of where the journey will take me. A painting is like one’s signature. Recurring shapes have meaning. An irregular circle evokes the image of a rock. I never know where I will end up. I leave evidence of the process. I like to be reminded of the steps along the way. There are elements that are quirky, humorous, and edgy.
The “memory” paintings just happened. Perhaps they were inspired by a recent move, when one tends to take stock and review where one has been. Memory is viewed over time and is often distorted.”
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Robert Grady
When: On view through October 31st, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday Oct 3rd. 5 – 8:30pm
Where: Movimiento, 450 Harrison Ave, # 61, Boston, MA 02118
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Painter RJ Grady transforms the historical tradition of still life painting, subtly playing with perspective and reflection, pushing the edges of perception to create an unexpected narrative between object and ground.
Where the still life typically strives to construct spatial order among multiple objects, Grady mines the relationship of a single object to its background, clandestinely creating spatial impossibilities. At first glance, his work appears to be painted in the manner of realism, but Grady bends and breaks the rules of perspective, creating an abstract liminal space where the object and ground are inexplicably intertwined. The artist employs an aerial point of view, bestowing a sense of privacy upon the viewer, and often produces large-scale works, rendering delicate, intimate objects monumental.
Grady chooses his subjects with careful consideration for their cultural significance, exploring the juxtaposition and conflation of divergent historical eras, cultures, and values. An elegant Art Nouveau vase sits sacrilegriously atop Mondrian’s modernist masterpiece Broadway Boogie Woogie. A piece of Mexican souvenir pottery rests on a regal Persian motif. In Grady’s Bowl on Cherries, a humble Asian bowl is presented on a 1950’s era American cherry motif tablecloth, juxtaposing the notion of the handcrafted versus the mass-produced object. The work also transforms a well-known saying about life into a visual pun. The bowl is not “full of cherries” but they are merely reflected in the bowl’s exterior glaze.”
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Sam Earle: Circus
When: On view through October 14th, 2014
Where: Adelson Gallery, 520 Harrison Ave, Boston, MA 02118
How: Official Website
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Just Gaming
When: On view through November 23rd, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday Oct. 3 5:30-8:00pm
Where: Laconia Gallery, 433 Harrison Ave, Boston, MA 02118
How: Official Website
What/Why: “What if, instead of our tastes determining which artwork is interesting, each artwork, with its own distinctive personality and style, was quietly surveying the room to determine the most interesting viewer? The artwork, fixed and unchanging (even for just a short period of time), becomes the arbiter of taste as it decides which person to consume. The art is looking at you. Are you very interesting?”
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Monster Party
When: Friday October 3rd, 2014 6:00-8:00PM
Where: 308 Congress Street, Boston, MA 02210
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Monster Party is a community-building celebration of friendly monsters curated by the Studio Miners, a duo intent on bringing accessible and interactive artwork to all ages in a fun and light-hearted atmosphere. This fall, the curating duo will create monster mayhem at Boston Children’s Museum with a full on monster-themed installation that includes an interactive mural; smelly monster sculptures; a monster safari; a sensory box; monster bean bag toss and much more!”
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Standard Variation – Maria Molteni
When: On view through November 1st, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday October 3rd, 7-10PM
Where: Lincoln Arts Projects, 289 Moody Street, Waltham, MA
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Standards are a matter of logic, analysis and minute study: they are based on a problem which has been well “stated’. Arrangement is the gradation of aims, the classification of intentions…. To map out in rhythmical quantities, animated by an even impulse, to bring life into the whole by means of a unifying and subtle relationship, these quantities provide a mass of material as a basis for work; they result in rhythms, they speak to us of numbers, of relationships, of mind.”
From Le Corbusier’s Eyes Which Do Not See”
‘The work of Maria Molteni is made possible through simultaneous devotions: from beekeeping to the Shakers, basketball to punk she cultivates her own complex approach to research and practice through an intuitive sense of spatial and psychic purpose. She employs a part-formalist, part-social interventionist approach that is channeled through a humble resourcefulness and keen awareness of the current conditions that request for a dialogue to occur at all.’- Shalini Patel
Also on view..
American Layman – Jamie Horgan
What/Why: “Jamie Horgan is an artist working out of South Boston, MA. Propelled by an appreciation for and dedication to manual labor, his work regards the value of craft, obsolescence, and the past vs. the present. Stemming from general concerns about the ways in which the world is changing, he questions the level of awareness or unawareness of people who participate in or embrace those changes. By drawing from the past, by isolating banal or obsolete objects from our day to day, and by physically obscuring reality, his machines, sculptures, and videos define the present, challenge social paradigms, and define how we so often forget to engage with the world in meaningful ways. “
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Let’s Get Banausick!
When: Friday October 3rd, 6-9PM
Where: Find and Form Space, 524 Harrison Ave, Boston, MA
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Find & Form Space is delighted to present Let’s Get Banausick!, a group exhibition on the themes of work, labor, time, and money showcasing work by artists from diverse backgrounds and approaches to making art.
In Let’s Get Banausick!, artists address the weird everydayness of work, work culture, and the societal structures and tacit assumptions around work, labor, and payment, as well as the idea of the artist as worker.
The artists in the show employ a wide range of media, tools, and processes including video installation, interactive sculpture, live performances, coded algorithms, repurposed instruction manuals, pennies and dollar bills, print-making, blood, typography, works in progress, multitasking, and bodies. Artists will also request compensation or payment through methods unconventional for a gallery show. Some pieces will request the payment of your attention; others will incorporate payment as an integral component of interaction; and one will even pay the visitor.”
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Unknown
When: On view through October 26th, 2014
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 2nd from 6-8pm
Where: Uforge Gallery, 767 Centre Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
How: Official Website
What/Why: ” UFORGE Gallery opens two new exhibits this October: a new group exhibition titled “Unknown” and a spotlight on artist Anna Kristina Goransson titled “Seeds.” Many artists find their style or preferred subject and stick with it, focusing on certain objects, people, colors, or shapes over a long period of time. Sometimes, it can be freeing for artists to step outside their comfort zones, dealing with new or unfamiliar elements in their work. For this open call exhibition, UFORGE Gallery asked artists to challenge themselves to make something different than their usual work, either by switching materials, tackling new visual themes, and/or experimenting with styles. Artists rose to the challenge in a number of ways:some working with unfamiliar materials, some experimenting with different styles, some capturing subjects that were strange or unknown to them. Figurative artists tried making an abstract composition for the first time, while photographers sought to capture brand new subjects. Some interpreted the assignment more subjectively, looking inward to “unknown” parts of themselves that could be revealed in their art.”
Also on view..
Seeds
“Anna Kristina Goransson: Seeds” is part of UFORGE’s partnership with the Eliot School of Fine & Applied Arts in Jamaica Plain, where Goransson, a Swedish-born furniture-maker and sculptor, teaches fiber craft workshops. She discovered the medium of felt while working towards her MFA in Fiber Arts at UMass Boston. She is attracted to the versatility of the material, constantly finding new ways to push its limits. Inspired by natural forms and patterns, her work revels in the simplicity of repeated forms, creating abstract installations notable for their tactility and effective use of color. This show introduces a new series whose shapes pull from seedpods and other plant life, rendered in muted tones so that their fuzzy felted textures, shadow casts, and circular negative spaces take focus. “Unknown” and “Anna Kristina Goransson: Seeds” are both on view from October 2 through October 26, 2014, with a joint reception to be held on Thursday, October 2 from 6-8pm. The gallery will also host an artist talk with Goransson on Thursday, October 9, from 7-9pm.”
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Christmas came early.
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