CURATOR'S ESSAY: Storytime at Studio Place Arts (SPA) in Barre

by Janet Van Fleet

When I made a commitment to curate Storytime at Studio Place Arts (where I have my studio, and am on the Gallery Committee) I was interested in exploring the human impulse to construct narratives. I have noticed that even when people are looking at abstract work, they often see images and construct stories about what's going on. We need to make things make sense -- and not only descriptively (what it looks like), but also narratively (what's happening).

When I called for and selected work, I expected more pieces with words and text -- lots of comic books, drawings, collages, etc. That just didn't come in, even when I solicited it, but what I got is truly fascinating and of amazingly high quality. I think this is one of the best exhibits I've curated at SPA, where I've put together eight major exhibits over the last eleven years. The Storytime theme is a rich one, and the work in the show includes stories about such diverse topics as violence, family, animals, and the high seas. There's humor, charm, and insight, and the pieces relate to other work in the show in interesting ways.

The thirty-six artists whose work is included in the exhibit hail from Oakland, CA to New Hampshire and they tell stories through video, sculpture, painting, drawing, digitally- manipulated images, watercolor, and collage. The exhibit also features a Publications Area, with original comics, 21 books and booklets by Peter Schumann from the Bread & Puppet Press, as well as unique artist books. Most of these stories feature people in the title roles. Very large paintings of people in interesting contexts by four different artists dominate the Main Gallery. Fly Boy, by Salem, MA painter Jill Pabich, shows a young boy leaping, almost coming out of his jacket, into the sky above a field of wind turbines. There is a piece on paper by Janet Fredericks, from her Minute Particulars series, about which she says "In a recent waking vision, I was visited by a brother who died when he was ten years old. Charlie…appeared with a swarm of bees hovering over him." Fredericks felt the bees could be speaking to Charlie, and maybe it was important to pay attention to what they could be saying. A large double-sided piece by Dana Walwrath explores the dementia of her mother, Alice, in The Aliceheimer's Project. And, in a cultural nod to Scheherazad, a big drawing, August 2010, from Valerie Hird's Maiden Voyages project, depicts Middle Eastern women who kept a journal of their activities on the same date each month for one year. Then Hird, without ever meeting or seeing these women, produced large drawings that are a pastiche of that month's experiences.

A photograph by Kate Bieschke, of Oakland, California, shows two figures wrestling on the grass. Nearby, a sculpture by Phil Whitman, The Historic Berkshires: Prisoner Pile Along the Waloomsac, with historically-accurate costumes (both on -- and removed from -- the prisoners captured in 1777 during the American Revolution), references the events at Abu Grahib, but with Americans and German mercenaries in the place of Iraqis.

Four videographers show work that ranges from the playful, through the ambiguous, to the mock-horror genre of Slasher, by a collective from Brooklyn called Cereal Lab, that presents a young woman in a sexy Heavy Metal outfit wielding a machete and axe to slash, decapitate, impale, and ultimately drink the "blood" at a dolls' teaparty. Nancy Dwyer contributed two short pieces, Brains and Trancecart, presented in self-contained 7 inch players.

Also in the Main Gallery are three ocean-themed pieces - John Douglas's double-exposure of 3 oil platforms and three sailing vessels, another sculpture, Triska Decka, in Evanston, IN artist Rob Millard-Mendez's series of ships and boats (begun in 2008, after The Boat Show that I curated at SPA), and Adelaide Tyrol's huge painting Kraken, showing a mythological sea-monster squid surrounded by lamps from the deep.

The exhibit continues on SPA's second floor, with images that feature animals and animal stories: nine of Burlington artist Jude Bond's prints of original collages that superimpose heads and jewels from Bazaar magazine on drawings from a period children's book of the Cat Family (Lions, Leopards, and Lynxes, Oh My!), two large mixed-media sculptures by Rachi Farrow (Chimeras in Burkas), a photograph by Jack Rowell showing a stuffed moose in Currier's Market in Glover, and a touching mixed media painting by Kristin L. Richland (Creature and Healer).

Our stories carry our explanations, however incomplete or provisional, for why things are here and why things happen. Narrative tries to answer the great WHY, though not always without ambiguity. What is wonderful about the objects in this exhibit is that by embodying the questions, they evoke from us the narratives that struggle toward answers, and the viewer who pays attention – as should be the case in the visual arts – is providing much of the story.

Storytime: The human impulse to construct narratives is explored through painting, video, sculpture, photography, and published materials
Studio Place Arts, 201 North Main Street, Barre, VT
Exhibit Dates: March 6 - April 7, 2012

CURATOR'S ESSAY: Creating the Inaugural Exhibit at the Gallery at Phoenix Books in Essex Junction

We welcome essays by exhibit curators, describing how they came to choose artists and work for a particular exhibit, placing the work in context, and saying what they hope audiences will experience and enjoy. – Ed.

Curator's Essay:
Creating Our Inaugural Exhibit at the Gallery at Phoenix Books

by Kristin Eaton

When Mike DeSanto, the owner here at Phoenix Books and Cafe, announced that we were officially launching The Gallery at Phoenix Books, I was thrilled. What could be better than spending my working hours surrounded by books and fine art? We all chimed in on which artists we’d love to see on the walls for our Grand Opening, with Mike making the final calls. We wanted our inaugural exhibit to showcase the quality and range of artistry in our community, and ended up with an exhibit featuring Cubism and photography, graphic art and Impressionism, pen-and-ink on paper and oil on canvas.

Rick Evan's Page 100 Comics are ideal for a gallery-cum-bookstore. Rick takes commissions for these black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings based on page 100 of (almost) any book. A few samples hang on our wall, along with some of his other work. I'm a big fan of their clean lines and bold panels, especially in Page 100: Sabriel. Rick has a brilliant knack for expressions: Sabriel's as she contemplates climbing a seemingly-endless stairway, a dragon's combination of serenity and ferocity in Page 100: Dealing with Dragons, the grandson’s full-body grin of victory in Page 100: Northern Borders. These are beautiful and evocative pieces in themselves, but it’s intriguing, too, to see how Rick adapts the written material to a visual medium: which actions and bits of dialogue he keeps, which images predominate.

Jonathan E. Russell's pieces range from a Cubist landscape (Mother Nature's Wild West) to an extreme close-up of a rose (Pink Rose), to his almost Futurist Elements series. Bold color choices and dynamic shapes are present throughout; those shapes invite your eye to roam throughout the piece and appreciate the painstakingly-executed color gradations.

Jonathan - in his own words - "uses abstraction and focus to help people really see the natural world:" "Mother Nature's Wild West" depicts a sunset behind rolling hills, but also a reclining woman. Pink Rose focuses so intently on the spiral formed by the petals that I'm drawn in by this innocuous but alluring painting. Fire, Water, Ice, and Light (members of Jonathan's Element series) use simple color schemes to emphasize repeated curves or angles that evoke the element in question. Fire and Water would work beautifully as a pair, as would Ice and Light.

Karen Dawson's landscape paintings share Russell's bold palate, but her works are all swirling lines that almost look as though you could dip your hands into them and come up with your fingers streaming paint. Tall Grass Orange Sky II is a perfect example of this, particularly the namesake tall grass in the foreground and the green-blue-purple trees in the midground. Her color choices are vibrant and - delightfully - a tad surreal, as in Wells Beach with Surfers, where the much of the sand is bright yellow and pink. My particular favorite is RT 2, Fishing Access Area, in which a gnarly tree dominates the foreground, its red and orange branches shooting up like flames.

To look at Joshua Mower's photography, you wouldn't know he's a student at Essex Middle School. His work in this exhibit includes both landscapes and closeups - of , say, a monarch butterfly or a Polyphemus caterpillar. The latter, bright green against the mottled browns of a stone and what looks to be a forest floor, is particularly charming. You almost expect the little guy to to light up a hookah! Blue Dragon depicts a dragonfly on silver fabric. The dragonfly’s body cuts across the frame on a diagonal, head down, the texture of the wings playing against the texture of the material. Joshua exhibits a true natural talent and a keen eye for capturing the moment.

Daphne Tanis paints with a loose brush and a pallet that includes a lot of blues and purples. She depicts peaceful, almost contemplative, country and waterside themes. The latter are my favorite, especially when water dominates the foreground. In Morning at Perkins Cove, for example, those trademark loose brush strokes mimic the motion the water's surface beautifully. Her other landscapes are equally charming: Mount Mansfield from Irish Settlement captures both the clean lines of the snow-capped mountain and the soft green landscape below. These scenes are lovely reminders of New England’s capacity for timeless moments.

This exhibit opened on Foliage Open Studio Weekend, and will be up through the holidays. We also have up an exhibit featuring the imaginative work of Kristin Richland and Karen Witt, as well as a rotating exhibit by members of the Essex Art League. With this wide variety of subjects and styles (not to mention prices, with many original pieces between $50-$150), we hope our inaugural exhibit will serve a triple purpose: to give Phoenix’s wonderful patrons a taste of original local art, to welcome the area’s art fans into Phoenix, and to expand the reach of the artists themselves into a new community. Selfishly, meanwhile, we’re thrilled about the way this artwork enhances and energizes the physical space here at Phoenix. As Mike has said, “It is quite transforming.”

Images: Page 100 Sabriel by Rick Evans, Pink Rose by Jonathan Russell, RT 2, Fishing Access Area by Karen Dawson, Polyphemus by Joshua Mower

CURATOR’S STATEMENT: Dialogue at Brattleboro Museum

Jackie Abrams & Josh Bernbaum: Dialogue
July 15 - October 23, 2011

by Mara Williams, Curator

Continued growth is a necessary component in art making, as it is in most endeavors in life. Stretching yourself in order to explore a new idea, in a medium over which you already have mastery, involves risk taking, most often alone in the studio.

Basket maker and weaver Jackie Abrams and glass maker Josh Bernbaum chose collaboration as a way of exploring, expanding, and eventually fusing their artistic practices. This exhibit traces the trajectory of their artistic partnership.

Their first explorations are best characterized as “call and response.” Jackie gave a woven vessel to Josh and he translated it into glass. Before long, their reinterpretations gave way to intensive conversations and experimentations.

The resulting pieces are dynamic fusions of fiber and glass—molten shapes girded in copper; translucent and opaque glass rods laced with cording; glass pods encased in a tracery of fabric. Each piece seamlessly blends technical ingenuity with aesthetic considerations. Color, pattern, texture, and proportion along with the qualities of light (reflectivity, opacity, translucence) that animate glass are all harnessed to striking effect.

What began as a dialogue between two artists is now a conversation between art and viewer. I trust you will find the exchange stimulating!

Image: Jackie Abrams and Josh Bernbaum, A Primary Discourse: hot glass/hot paper, painted cotton paper, waxed linen, glass (2011)

CURATORS ESSAY: Olga Lawson at Red Mill Gallery in Johnson

Olga Lawson’s exhibit will be at the Red Mill Gallery in Johnson, Vermont from Friday, May 7 through Saturday, May 15.

By Sam Thurston

Olga Lawson is 94 and now lives in the Manor Nursing home in Morrisville. She was born and grew up on a farm in Eden Mills, Vermont. Upon her marriage her father gave the young couple a farm of their own, also in Eden Mills. Later she farmed in Cabot.

I met Olga Lawson at Out and About, an adult and elderly day facility in Morrisville that at that time had many artists on its staff, including Lois Eby, Peter Gallo, Melinda White and Shelly Warren. Olga Lawson said she knew art would be included at Out and About before she went there. She had liked art and done a lot of it, including maps, in her school years, but none since she had left in about the 8th grade to work on her family farm.


She stopped going to Out and About over ten years ago. I always liked her work and have tried over the years to place it in galleries but to no success except once in the Morrisville restaurant Bee’s Knees. But now she is having a Renaissance of sorts with this show at the Red Mill, three works at the Kellog-Hubbard Library in Montpelier and, opening in May, three works in the Route 58 Gallery in Lowell, Vermont.

Some of my observations on Olga Lawson’s work:

• Olga Lawson’s works all depict rural Vermont.
• She has a good idea before she begins. When I visited her this month she talked of a picture she had in mind of a woodpecker on a log she wanted to do. (She does not do as much any more).
• She sees and depicts pattern more than form. This is especially noticeable in her paintings of the winter, where the black and white world naturally becomes flat and resists ‘form’.
• Sometime she depicts the world of her childhood – sugaring with sleds and buckets for example – and sometimes the modern world – sugaring with plastic tubing for example.
• I think of her as a Folk Artist, not an Outsider Artist. Sometimes ‘outsider’ refers to ‘outside tradition’ and in that case she may be considered an Outsider Artist, but to a greater extent ‘outsider’ refers to outside society and Lawson is not that. Darger with his Vivian girls is outside society but with Lawson you see a landscape that is within your world not outside it. Folk is a good word to use – like a folk ballad.
• She likes birds so they appear in most of her works.
• You can see the part of Eden Mills she grew up in although it is so changed you will find it hard to imagine a farm there. It is on the Long Trail right by Devil’s Gulch In Eden Mills. The place now looks like a scene from one of Hawthorne’s early stories.
  

There will be a closing at the Red Mill gallery on Saturday May 15 starting at 6:45, just after dinner at the Vermont Studio Center. Olga will probably not be there but come and say hello to other people who have her work or knew her.

The Red Mill Gallery is connected to the Main building of the Vermont Studio Center, which is on the North side of the bridge under construction in Johnson. There is a small parking lot.

Image: Trees and Hills From Back Porch