murmurations x i dread to think x not of this earth x together we rise
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Doug Weathersby: A Year in Review
When: January 14 to February 25, 2017
Opening Reception: Saturday January 14, 6-10 pm
Where: VERY, 59 Wareham Street, Boston, MA
How: Official Website
What/Why: “VERY presents A Year in Review, a culminating exhibition by Doug Weathersby Environmental Services LLC. Boston-based artist Doug Weathersby has owned and operated Environmental Services since 2002 with the promise to “provide you with fresh perspectives on your living and working space” all while fulfilling your home repair needs. Weathersby founded ES after receiving his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, and he quickly rose to prominence as the recipient of the Boston ICA’s Artist Prize in 2003.
ES projects cover everything from tidying up unruly basements and art studios to building cabinetry and installing artwork. During his tasks Weathersby collects, organizes, and rearranges various debris from the site. He chronicles his progress through a photo log where he records the details of his daily work: dust drawings, stacks of discarded wood, empty cans streaming with dried paint.
Weathersby’s sensitive documentation is a self-reflexive and light-hearted meditation on artistic process. He often displays his photographs in galleries alongside the materials depicted in them which he then transforms into sculptural installations. His recent solo shows include Paint Shed Showcase at the Solomon Projects in the Atlanta, Georgia and What is Yours is Mine at DODGEgallery in New York.
A Year in Review incorporates items that Weathersby has amassed from jobs over the course of the past year as well as site-specific installation and video. Generated by curiosity and a perpetual string of improvisations, Weathersby’s work frames and interrogates everyday environments to engineer new ways of seeing.
A Year in Review will be on view at VERY from January 14 to February 25, 2017. The Opening Reception is on January 14, 6-10 pm.”
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MURMURATIONS: new work by Anya Smolnikova and Jared Williams
When: On view January 14 – February 11
Opening Reception: January 14, 6-9 pm
When: On view through January 14 – February 11
Opening Reception: January 14, 6-9 pm
Where: Dorchester Art Project, 1486 Dorchester Ave, Boston, MA 02122
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Murmuration /mərməˈrāSHən/ : a flocking behavior in starlings. Without a centralized control structure dictating individual behavior, minor interactions and shifts in airflow lead to the emergence of an intelligent moving system – a mesmerizing display of dynamic collective survival through improvisation.
Murmurations is a month-long exhibition of recent drawings, paintings and a site-specific video installation by two Boston artists, Anya Smolnikova and Jared Williams.
The show is a visual representation of an intimate creative process between two artists working and living together. Murmurations is an experiment with the collision of opposing and complementary forces that arise during the process of relating and creating.
As the birds in a murmuration create beauty out of their strategy for survival, these two bodies of work merge and resonate to become the document of a shared adventure of two artists.
“We both like to draw, dance, make masks and be out in the woods, so we decided to make something together. We’re interested in the connection between People and Nature, the unseen parts, the rhythms underneath everything. To us, science and mythology are both so endlessly fascinating and through making art we can explore them simultaneously. Also, we were both the kind of kids who sat quietly in the corner making drawings of dead birds during our parents’ parties.” said the artists when talking about the origins of their collaboration.
Anya Smolnikova is an artist and educator working and living in Boston. Born in Belarus, she came to the US with her family in 1999. Her work in multiple media explores the space between observation and abstraction, as well as the tension between cultural inheritance and individual expression. Anya is a resident artist at Dorchester Art Project.
Jared Williams is a visual artist, dance-improviser and dance-arts curator. As a curator he has founded Electric Fish and co-founded New Movement Collaborative (NMC) – organizations that develop dance in Boston. This past Fall, NMC created the 1st annual Lion’s Jaw performance + dance festival. He is a believer in the power of art and movement as both a practice and a tool to support healing; build community; and create political and social change.
The Opening Reception for MURMURATIONS will be held on Saturday, January 14 from 6-9 pm, and feature live music by Jeffrey Lockhart and Keith Hollis. The Closing Reception on Saturday, February 11 from 6-9 pm will feature live music by Dr. Bob Singley.
Dorchester Art Project is located at 1486 Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester MA, across from Fields Corner Station on the Red Line. Between the Opening Reception on 1/14, 6-9 and the Closing Reception on 2/11, 6-9, MURMURATIONS can be visited by appointment only and online at murmurationsart.com. To find out more about the artists individually, please visit their websites: asmolnikova.wordpress.com & jaredtwilliams.wordpress.com.”
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M/othering
When: On view Thursday January 5 – Saturday February 4, 2017
Opening Reception: January 14; Reception: 6-8pm, Artist Talk:, 8-9pm
Where: Gallery 263, 263 Pearl Street, Cambridge, MA 02139
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Gallery 263 is pleased to present M/othering, a Curatorial Proposal Series exhibition that features recent works by Fletcher Boote, Maya Pindyck, Tereza Swanda, and Angela Rose Voulgarelis. These four artists draw on their experiences of motherhood and childhood in relation to the often-complicated dynamics of family relationships, cultural identity, and positions of privilege. They explore these themes through a range of media, driven by questions about inheritance and systems; What continuity is there, if any, between generations? What gets handed down from mother to child? What gets passed from nation to education, or from education to family structure? What images and stereotypes of mothering tend to spread and reproduce?
All four artists featured in M/othering have attended art workshops for the past twenty years led by South African artists Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky, which encourage reflection on the interconnectivity of social, cultural, and familial experiences. Each artist in this exhibition considers the far-reaching impacts and political implications of everyday notions of “othering” and “mothering” in connection to their own lives.
In her audio series “Like Night and Day,” Fletcher Boote explores nuances of domesticity and family through various arrangements of sounds. Recordings from her daily life with young children are the backdrop for compositions which point to the impact of repetition, give relevancy to the unexceptional, and question a hierarchy that qualifies music as one thing and “noise” as an “other.”
In the series “Out of Lezley”, Maya Pindyck’s gouache portraits are an elegy to the black lives lost to police brutality in the United States. Working from a media photograph of Lezley McSpadden taken after her son Mike Brown was killed, she renders visible multiple faces that blend source material, medium, and collective grief.
Tereza Swanda works with themes of erasure and recognition. In “Spot Light,” embedded portraits of victims of police brutality are slowly revealed as participants wash their hands. Illuminated with light and color, Swanda preserves and displays these cracked, painful images.
In her paintings and performance-based work, Angela Rose Voulgarelis re-contextualizes notions of “women’s work”. Her paintings are an exploration of the figure in relation to the context of the everyday. In the ongoing project, “Airing Dirty Laundry”, Voulgarelis prompts participation with beginnings of phrases such as “Don’t Be Too…”, or “Not Enough….”, asking visitors to complete the phrase in writing. Voulgarelis then embroiders the responses in public spaces, inviting conversation and exchange.”
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The Grab Back
When: Wednesday January 18, 6-9PM
Where: Hatch Fenway, Landmark Center, Boston, MA
How: Official Website
What/Why: “The Grab Back” is a support in protecting equality. A one-night group art show + raffle with photo, painting, and illustration—visual work that shares femininity in an empowering way. 70%+ of art sales and 100% of raffles proceeds will be donated to Planned Parenthood.
Artists from Boston and beyond: Rachel Tine, Jeremy Fraga, Paris Visone, Tod Seelie, Ellen T. Crenshaw, Raul Gonzalez, Allison Bamcat, Nick Ward, Eileen Clynes, Tegan Harmonay, Tim McCool, Jennie Cotterill, Justin Keena, Kati Mennett, Ben Gebo, Amanda Atkins, Brian Butler, Amanda Clarke, Sarah Gay O’Neill, Chris O’Neill, Alisha Mowder, Anya Vedmid, Keith Zoo, Alaina Montuori, Nineta, Tiffany Mallery, Mandee Martin, Scott Murry.
Raffle items include: Hubway, Townsman, NE Aquarium, Coppa, Charles River Canoe/Kayak, Aeronaut Brewery, MotherJuice, Rasayana, Turnstyle Cycle, Polished Nails, Grab Back t-shirts printed by QRSTs, Renee Kurilla signed book, Julia Denos signed book, and more!
We’ve got oodles of postcards on hand from Jakprints if you’d like one or a few to share with friends!”
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DOG, TREE, TABLE
When: On view January 14-February 4, 2016
Opening Reception: Reception January 14TH, 6-9PM
Where: GRIN Gallery, 60 Valley St #3, Providence, RI 02909
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Dog, tree, table is a group exhibition featuring artists Susan Metrican, Austin Ballard, and Harry Gould Harvey IV, curated by Corey Oberlander and Lindsey Stapleton.
Ordinary objects often go unconsidered, cast aside, or misunderstood in terms of their form and function. These artists confront these objects by using their likeness or physical form, contextualizing and placing the object on a plateau for hidden consideration. Examination in this format can cause a snowball effect, or by the same description an opposition to this concept: a deconstructualization of an object and/or its fundamental existence.
Daniel Z. Korman examines this postulate in the 2011 publication “Ordinary Objects”:
Our everyday experiences present us with a wide array of objects: dogs and cats, tables and chairs, trees and their branches, and so forth. These sorts of ordinary objects may seem fairly unproblematic in comparison to entities like numbers, propositions, tropes, holes, points of space, and moments of time. Yet, on closer inspection, they are at least as puzzling, if not more so. Reflection on Michelangelo’s “David” and the piece of marble of which it is made threatens to lead to the surprising conclusion that these would have to be two different objects occupying the same location and sharing all of their parts.
(Korman, 1)
This concept can be approached in layers, as objects are very frequently composed of other objects or materials (composite objects, let’s call them). In turn, these objects can bend the perception of what defines an object, and what may define a material.
Is a material an object?
If so, how many objects make up that material, and so on?
s viewers, we can continue this pattern until we’re faced with the pure building blocks of matter.
Dog, tree, table presents works by three artists working in nuanced forms of this concept by altering the viewers’ perception of the ordinary through various forms of presentation and material alteration.”
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I Dread to Think..
When: On view January 13 – March 19, 2017
Opening Reception: January 13, 6:00PM-8:00PM
Where: Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St, Boston, MA 02116
How: Official Website
What/Why: “In the new Mills Gallery exhibition I Dread To Think…, curator Liz Blum integrates varied reflections on the ambiguous, multifarious emotions and feelings surrounding the state of fear, highlighting aspects of inner paranoia and anxiety as well as pointing to external influences—from political inducements, erosions of privacy and the persuasive media loop that seems to nurture our feeling of being unsafe.”
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Jane Rainwater | Drawings and Encaustics
When: January 9 – February 15, 2017
Opening Reception: January 14th 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Where: EBK Gallery, 218 Pearl Street, Hartford, CT
How: Official Website
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Different Strokes
When: On view January 3 – February 3, 2017
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 19, 5:30 – 7:30 pm
Where: FPAC Gallery, 300 Summer Street, Boston, MA
How: Official Website
What/Why: “The Fort Point Arts Community Gallery is pleased to announce Different Strokes, the third show of the 2016-2017 season, juried by Jeffrey De Blois of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Different Strokes features nine artists who work together weekly, guided by their teacher and mentor-in-common, Elizabeth DaCosta Ahern. The artists have very different styles and approaches, yet their collective experience unifies them, enriching both process and the resulting works.
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List Projects: Andrea Crespo
When: On view through February 19, 2017
Where: MIT List Visual Arts Center,20 Ames Street, Bldg. E15, Atrium level, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
How: Official Website
What/Why: “The MIT List Visual Arts Center
is pleased to announce the opening of List Projects: Andrea Crespo
Andrea Crespo takes their own neurological embodiment as a point of inquiry as well as departure for their work in video, drawing, and sculpture. Crespo connects their own personal narratives with computational network culture and the medical sciences, as well as to institutional apparatuses of control and surveillance. The exhibition at the List Center engages with autism as an embodied and a sociocultural entity.
List Center members are invited to List Projects: Behind-the-Scenes with the artist. For more information, please click here or contact Betsy Willett.
List Projects: Andrea Crespo is curated by Alise Upitis with Yuri Stone, MIT List Visual Arts Center. Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Cynthia & John Reed and Terry & Rick Stone.
General operating support is provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, the MIT School of Architecture + Planning, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.”
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Free Martin Luther King Jr. Day Open House @ MFA
When: Monday January 16, 2017
Where: Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115
How: Official Website
What/Why: “On Monday, January 16, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), hosts the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Open House, offering free admission from 10 am to 5 pm, as well as programs and activities throughout the day.
Exhibitions on view include Wilson/Cortor, which highlights two contemporary artists—John Wilson and Eldzier Cortor—each dedicated to exploring the African American experience. Gallery Talks, American Sign Language (ASL) tours and ASL-interpreted events, and a behind-the-scenes talk with the curator of Wilson/Cortor take place throughout the day.
Visitors can check out the Community Arts Initiative Spotlight, which features artworks commemorating Dr. King’s legacy by students from the MFA’s 10 partner clubhouses; add their mark to a collaborative mural hosted by Artists for Humanity; and meet the MFA’s Teen Arts Council and artists from HOMiE: In Our Eyes, the Museum’s first teen art exhibition.
The Boston City Singers 35-piece youth choir will perform twice in the Museum’s soaring glass Shapiro Family Courtyard. Additionally, kids can join a fun, interactive Family Tour or Story Hour and drop in on a range of art-making activities to create masterpieces to take home.
Sponsored by Citizens Bank. Open House programming made possible in part by The Lowell Institute”
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Librería Donceles
When: Friday, January 13 at 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Where: The Urbano Project, 29 Germania St Bldg F, Boston, Massachusetts 02130
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Urbano presentará la Librería Donceles, un proyecto de arte socialmente comprometido que consiste en una librería itinerante de más de 10.000 libros usados en español. Durante su estadía en Urbano, esta instalación de arte participativo será una lugar donde la comunidad podrá participar en una serie de tertulias bilingües, conversaciones, eventos musicales y talleres diseñados para fomentar la comprensión cultural, la tolerancia y el activismo social.”
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Take Only What You Can Carry With You
When: On view January 14 through April 08, 2017
Opening Reception: January 14, 6PM – 9PM
Where: Yellow Peril Gallery, 60 Valley St, # 5, Providence, Rhode Island 02909
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Yellow Peril is pleased to debut 2017 with “Take only what you can carry with you”, curated by Andrew Paul Woolbright, founder of Karst and Gorse (Wappingers Falls, NY), featuring Lauren Fejarang, Andrea Frank, Daniel Giordano, Kathy Goodell, Matt Harle, Matt Mahoney and Martin Smick – artists who “operate in the sweet spot of engaged, responsible Romanticism; a shaky Romanticism that avoids naivete and instead operates within the limited field that this philosophy currently allows.” The opening reception is Saturday, January 14, from 6PM – 9PM. A date will be announced later for the artists’ talk at the gallery, moderated by curator Andrew Paul Woolbright.
About Karst and Gorse
KARST AND GORSE is an artist run curatorial space for contemporary art located in the Hudson Valley. The gallery has a passion for contemporary Romanticism, as it seeks to outline a Utopic aesthetic through the construction of an exhibition schedule referred to as “The Church of the Braveface.” This church belongs to artists who remain longing and in pursuit of the unfinished project that is Romanticism and Utopia, hedged with the acute understanding of contemporary dilemmas, the collapsing anthropocene, and political and individual strife. The gallery takes on the name of two ecological occurrences. Karst is the weathered stone, the worn away object of oceans meeting and creating internal spaces between cliffs and islands. It represents the object-oriented aesthetic of the gallery-speculative, weathered, and incredibly affective. Gorse is a wild plant. Although it appears almost decorative, a wall of bright yellow flowers, it takes over beaches, backyards and newly logged timberlands, quickly spreading if left unchecked. It’s thorns make it impassible and its monocultures embed themselves into the biosphere. The plant’s dry branches make prime kindling, and they have been known to be the source of wildfires. Gorse represents the image and painting oriented aesthetic of the gallery-seductive, wild, and romantic. For more information about Karst and Gorse, visit karstandgorse.com.”
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Body Politic
When: On view through February 28, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, January 13th, 6 to 8pm
Where: OPEN Gallery, 201 South St, Boston, MA 02111
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Guest Curator Laura Zittrain brings together eleven artists to make an intersectional critique of technology production with wearable interventions: Body Politic.”
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Emilie Stark-Menneg: Dream Team
When: On view January 14 through February 18, 2017
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 14 at 5 PM – 8 PM
Where: kijidome, 59 Wareham St, Boston, Massachusetts 02118
How: Official Website
What/Why: “kijidome is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Emilie Stark-Menneg, on view from January 14 to February 18, 2017, guest curated by Sarah Montross.
Emilie Stark-Menneg often renders fluid elements, like smoke, water, and fire, in her paintings. She bases some of this work on personal memories, which, like such ineffable vapors and liquids, are loose and hazy and thus provide ample space for the artist’s vibrant creative expansions. Knowingly amateurish and painted in a full-blown spectrum of day-glo colors, Stark-Menneg’s paintings offer pleasure and comedic release. Yet however cartoony and exuberant they appear, the content of her work often veers into ambivalent territory with references to themes of love and loss, migration and conflict.
Stark-Menneg has had solo exhibitions at the Leonard R. Craig Gallery, Unity College, Unity, ME and Makebish Gallery, Chelsea, NY. Her work was featured in the Portland Museum of Art Biennial, Portland, ME in 2015. She earned her BFA from Cornell University in 2007 and currently lives in mid-coast Maine.”
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Together We Rise
When: Thursday, January 19 at 7 PM – 11 PM
Where: Strand Theatre (Dorchester, Massachusetts), 543 Columbia Rd, Dorchester 02125
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Be inspired. Be active. On January 19, be a part of a bigger community.
Individual Boston artists and activists have come together to cultivate an event like no other: an evening that strengthens ties across communities through a powerful arts-based experience.
Together We Rise will include a vocal and musical procession; a social justice art gallery; a mobilization fair; and a call-to-action concert, emceed by Ashley-Rose Salomon and featuring renowned musician Larry Watson and Ensemble as well as other talented performers.
Spoken word poets, comedians, authors, and additional artists will join us and bear witness to poignant testimonials and uplifiting talent.
Across one powerful event Together We Rise promises to move you and prompt you to action. Join us and be IMPACTFUL.”
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Not of This Earth
When: On view through February 26, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday January 13, 6-8PM
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
How: Official Website
What/Why:“Not of this Earth: Contemporary Art and Science Fiction is an exhibition comprised of art relating to science fiction. Sci-fi has been a prevailing method of entertainment and consideration of the seemingly possible consequences of technological advancement. The artworks in this exhibition consider these possible alternate realities and dystopian futures long perpetuated by the sci-fi genre. Some pieces share a kinship with the big-screen aesthetic popularized in the 1950s and carried forward in television such as Michael Lewy’s Bigfoot Island. Borrowing narrative and aesthetic elements from the many television shows he watched as a child in the ‘70s — including Lost in Space, the Six Million Dollar Man, Star Trek, and Land of the Lost — Michael Lewy created Bigfoot Island, a homage to past pioneers. Some pieces in the show are purposeful instruments such as Sophia Breuckner’s Empathy Box, which provides its users a sense of shared contact through warmth. In a world of technological distraction, Empathy Box attempts to provide comfort through perceived physical connectivity. A technological device itself, the piece yields an alternate use of electronics and asks the viewer to consider the ways in which technology may impact our lives presently and in the future.
The artists in this exhibition include: Sophia Brueckner, Micah Ganske, Tatiana Gulenkina, Carol Hayes, Michael Lewy, Joseph Popper, Chris Rackley, and Marion Tampon-Lajarriette.”
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Pat Falco: Just Not Break
When: On view through March 09, 2017
Where: New Bedford Art Museum/ArtWorks!, 608 Pleasant Street, New Bedford, MA 02740
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Boston-based artist Pat Falco creates text-based works that reside in the intersection of personal and political poignancy and the playful mundanities of everyday life. Falco’s work offers an authentic examination of the human experience through drawings and paintings that are both tender and sardonic, excavating devastating and hilarious truths about the U.S. political climate, historical events, the art world, love and loss.”
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OPEN CALL NXNE 2017
When: On view January 14 through March 05, 2017
Opening Reception: January 14, Saturday, 11 a.m.
Where: Brattleboro Museum + Art Center, 10 Vernon Street, Brattleboro VT 05301
How: Official Website
What/Why: “BMAC’s latest juried exhibit features 51 works by 24 photographers and video artists. They were selected by juror Bernard Yenelouis, Assistant Director at L. Parker Stephenson Photographs, NYC.”
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Mills Gallery: Artists Talk: Creative Empathy
When: January 14, 3 PM – 4:30 PM
Where: Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St, Boston, Massachusetts 02116
How: Official Website
What/Why: “Creative Empathy: A Q&A with artist Susanna Hertrich, designer Mitch Sinclair and curator Liz Blum. Presented by Boston Center for the Arts with generous support from Goethe-Institut Boston. Free public program. . Berlin-based artist Susanna Hertrich in conversation with IDEO Design Director Mitch Sinclair and curator Liz Blum, as part of the exhibition “I Dread to Think…” presented by Boston Center for the Arts at the Mills Gallery at the BCA South End Campus.
Hertrich, whose work is included in current Mills Gallery exhibition “I Dread to Think…” is a multi-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of art and technology, will discuss how her artistic research investigates the relationship of the physical body to technology-driven environments and how behavioral responses such as fear can be transposed into creative solutions. Sinclair brings another perspective to the discussion, based on her experience approaching projects from a behavioral and motivational direction, building on humanitarian design with insights to transform experiences into something rich with emotion.”
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