Andy Zimmermann: Rebar

" I have been surprised by how many people have wanted to tell me that they, or their son, or father or brother, have spent some part of their lives doing construction work. They seem really pleased to have their contributions to our city, our world, be recognized. Even as they acknowledge that buildings are not permanent, that sooner or later they come down, and are replaced, that this is an endeavor that involves vast numbers of people in one capacity or another."

"I have also felt that I got something right when I stumbled onto the title of my exhibit, 'Rebar.' The word itself seems to conjure some strong feelings for a lot of people. They seem to like saying it. 'Rebar…Rebar'. "

-Andy Zimmermann

October 2017: Focus on Larry Pollans

"In my work, the search is intimate and predicated on the old equation of head, heart and hand.  I begin with a few formal restrictions such as the basic configuration of clay slabs, or the simple architecture of lines at the beginning of a drawing, but the themes and juxtapositions emerge only over time.  I am acutely aware that there is a close link between the physical and metaphysical.  How does the form respond as I apply more clay to the surface?  Figures, flowers, walls, embraces, longings, all take shape, literal shape.  Ceramic, wood, bronze, pastel are my major mediums.   In a year, much will happen."

-Larry Pollans

Forthcoming solo show at the Boston Sculptors Gallery: November 2018

Murray Dewart: Spirit Level

"My Spirit Level show includes Dickinson Gate, twelve feet high and made of translucent tubing. I like its mystery, its wing form, the way it looms and soars against its black background, with prayerful texts from Emily Dickinson attached. In the Name of the Bee and the Butterfly and the Breeze Amen. Hope is the Thing with Feathers that Perches in the Soul. My gate forms raise the question about journey and passage. What path is this? What interval of longing between a where-from and a where-to? The sculpture is a maquette for an outdoor piece in polished stainless steel."

-Murray Dewart

August 2017: Focus on Andy Moerlein

"I have enjoyed a very lively summer. I created a new piece for a show I curated with BSG colleague Donna Dodson, I organized a reading in my gallery in Anchorage by Alaska writer Laureate Ernestine Hayes, I went to Denmark for the Ringkobing International Wood Carving Symposium and I recently completed a month residency at the National Museum for Marine Science and Technology in Keelung, Taiwan, creating another Avian Avatar with Donna Dodson under our collaborative entity The Myth Makers.

Installation at Art Complex Museum

So why co-curate a major exhibition, Wood as Muse at the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury MA. with Donna Dodson?

Researching and selecting artists allowed me entry into the lives and studios of artists I admire. It made me think deeply about my affection for and lifelong connection to wood. It was an opportunity to create a community of twelve artists who mostly did not know each other.

How did an engagement with Alaska Writer Laureate Ernestine Hayes come about? I had never met her, but had been reading her books with enthusiasm. I knew she would be in Anchorage for a workshop the week I was visiting. My Alaska gallery, blue.hollomon gallery often hosts readings, and always an event when Donna Dodson and I are in town. Ernestine had a new book and was eager to read. It was a warm synergy of meeting and shared work – a perfect intersection of her fans and ours.

Alaska Writer Laureate Ernestine Hayes with Andy Moerlein

What is an international wood carving symposium and why Ringkobing, Denmark? A wood symposium brings together an elite selection of the world’s best wood sculptors to carve monumental logs in a brief period of time. This is performance sculpture in rare form. The art making process is laid bare to daily observation, bark-on log to finished surfaces.

Ringkobing invited twelve artists to this short week-long event. The skill level was uniformly evident. These artists knew shape and understood how to create it. We had great accommodations at a local hotel, an endless stream of meals featuring the many ways this harbor town prepares and serves fish: fried, baked, smoked, poached, spicy, salted, hot, cold etc, tours to nearby sights and places of community pride, and many fun evenings with local supporters and our fellow sculptors.

Ringkobing is an ideal symposium location. The city is celebrated internationally for it’s fjord harbor, fish restaurants and markets and tourism. The symposium is a summer highlight that is visited by hundreds of visitors daily. A grassy acre overlooking the harbor provided the perfect background for chainsaws, tourists, sunshine, sawdust and photos with sailboats in the background. The Director Otto Pilgaard is a superhuman organizer who has earned deep respect and affection from town leaders, businesses and the world sculpture community.

Why not Boston?! We have the arts focus, tourist volume and necessary business value. We have a dozen great possible sites I can think of.

Work by Andy Moerlein at the International Woodcarving Symposium, Ringkobing Denamrk

Next stop? Taiwan! A jungle coated mountainous country with a dynamic economy and vivid culture, Taiwan is diligently seeking to focus education and attention on their precious ocean environment. My invitation there was as team Myth Makers. Working with Donna Dodson we were invited to make another of our monumental “Avian Avatars”. The theme of the residency was Making Connections. We built one of a series of globe embracing sculptures addressing ocean health and the sustainability of this vital world resource. Connecting harbor cities our first Widow’s Walk debuted in New Bedford MA and wsa followed by the Interpid Albatross in Keelung. Please see the following Youtube video to see how this project culminated."

Widow's Walk, New Bedford Massachusetts USA

Intrepid Albatross, National Museum of Marie Science and Technology, Keelung Taiwan

-Andy Moerlein

Ode to Joyce McDaniel: Sculptor and Teacher

Joyce McDaniel taught sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts for over thirty years.  During that time she generated work for over two dozen solo and countless group exhibitions, co-founded the Boston Sculptors collective gallery and inspired hundreds of students to seek and find their artistic voices in three dimensions.  The current offering at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, “An Ode to Joyce” couples a wide spectrum of Joyce’s work as it has evolved over the decades with the work of eleven of the hundreds of former students she has inspired and influenced over a like period of time.  From her early welded steel work, inspired by her upbringing in Oklahoma, to her later constructions that combined expanded steel mesh, overlaid with delicate hand-made and dressmaker pattern paper, she showed an unusual willingness to push materials to their  outer limits.  The nineteen sculptures of hers that are included in this show demonstrate the breadth of her palette, the spectrum of materials and work by eleven of her former students show the broad range of her influence on the next generation of sculptors, just a few sprouts of the hundreds of seeds she cast as a teacher and role model.

-Ken Hruby

John Christian Anderson: My Inheritance

"My current show at the Boston Sculptors Gallery includes new work created over the past three to four years. My studio is small so after completing a piece it goes into storage in order to protect it from damage while working on new sculptures. I usually create a mental picture of each finished sculpture, which helps me create new iterations or forge ahead in a new direction.  But nothing substitutes seeing everything together in one space making this exhibition especially important for me personally as I pull together styles, techniques and materials I have been exploring for over forty years.

During our second reception on First Friday friends of mine witnessed a young couple take one of the carved and painted tangerines that is one of three in a piece I did entitled “Darling Clems” and place it into their bag. I was so busy talking to people and being charming my friends decided to take matters into their own hands and blocked the couple’s way as they started to leave the gallery. My friends, Barbara and Scott, demanded that the stolen tangerine be given back only to find out it was a real one and belonged to this couple, which they were using to compare to my carved and painted tangerine. My friends had thought they had seen a brazen attempt at theft and threw themselves into action."

-John Christian Anderson

July 2017: Focus on Nancy Winship Milliken

I work with materials of the commons and celebrate the unrefined. Every summer I trade studio for farm and open up the rustic studio practice to interns interested in environmental arts. At the farm we explore materials of the surrounding landscape, community and animals and look at ways art can be a voice for environmental concerns and activism. My voice is subtle, filled with reverence for small farms and the covenant between man, earth and animal. My goal is to engage the viewer with texture, and a sensory experience to create empathy or a remembrance, the first step towards caring for the earth. I am currently building platforms with canvas that will be sunk into a cow pasture. As the cows circulate from one pasture to another, I will be able to capture their movement on the canvas. (follow the process: https://www.facebook.com/nancywinshipmillikenstudio/ or www.instagram.com/nancywinshipmillikenstudio)

Stall, horsehair from reclaimed cello bow strings, NWM Studio

Current and upcoming exhibitions:

Now- October 2017: Stall at The Mount in Lenox, MA 

September 20, 2017-2019: Site/Time: Cordwood a collaboration with Erika Senft Miller and Michael Zebrownski at Vermont Arts Council in Montpelier, Vermont

October 20, 2017- January 7, 2018: Meadow Dance (mentioned above) at Burlington City Arts in Burlington, Vermont

-Nancy Winship Milliken Studio

www.nancymilliken.com

Fafnir Adamites: Holding Remnants

"During my artist talk at Boston Sculptors Gallery on June 25, I had the opportunity to talk about a number of research areas that inform my work - theories in psychotherapy, materials as chaos structures, plumb bobs and dowsing pendulums were all touched on. Another influence in my work that I spoke about is the Counter-Monument Movement in Germany. One driving principle for artists in this movement is that the surest engagement with memory lies in its perpetual irresolution. Artists such as Horst Hoheisel and Micha Ullmann challenged the traditional forms of public memorials and instead worked with anti-heroic concepts, negative space, and they chose to see the memorialization process as never-ending. This idea of constantly revisiting and allowing for limitless interpretations on ways to remember and memorialize traumatic events has been influential in my large-scale paper sculptures."

-Fafnir Adamites

June 2017: Focus on Susan Lyman

Featuring 15 new sculptures made from found and milled wood and vine, Susan Lyman’s exhibition in March 2017, “Sculpture in the Unmaking”, was largely comprised of works reduced and reinvented from her sculptures of the past 30 years. For Lyman, there is nothing sacrosanct about the older work. With a saw, grinder, mallet and gouge, the sculptures are swiftly dissected, reconsidered and animated into new forms. The deconstructive process fuels Lyman’s longtime fascination with the body in the woodland landscape.

“Body Language 2”, shown here, was one such work, deconstructed and reconstructed from a 1985 sculpture, “People Look Ridiculous When They Are in Ecstasy”. That sculpture prompted a prose poem, “The Invention of Ecstasy”, by Jon Davis, the beginning excerpted here, and first published in Provincetown Arts (1988) .

“People Look Ridiculous When They’re in Ecstasy” is the name for a group of branches and vines grappling or made to seem as if grappling. Is the name for a sculpture I have never seen. But I’ve imagined the crooks and corkscrews, the conjunctions and appeasements, the whole abstracted mess of longings / longings satisfied / new longings arising, the thin, sharp-edged shadows, the polished look of branch and vine stripped bare and lacquered, the impossibility of single-mindedness, of coordination, control, the wildness tamed—but not quite—and the new wildness Susan put there….”

Christina Zwart: Pussy Tower

"One of the best things about this project was the involvement of my sons, ages 15 and 18. My older one went with me to the Women's March in Washington, and both of them were heavily involved -- from listening ad nauseum to the word "pussy" to gracing the gallery walls with their sentiments about our commander-in-chief."

"I went to an all-women's college and, had I had girls, it would have been a given that they would grow up as feminists in our house. It's not as expected with boys, and I've felt an added responsibility to make sure my sons treat women with respect. Just like the proud mom I saw at the march whose young son was holding a sign that read, "Even I know how to keep my tiny hands to myself," I love calling my young men the "F word."

-Christina Zwart

Chris Abrams: Orifice and Oculi

The objects in ‘Orifice and Oculi’ are heavily influenced by the time I spend with my boys, aged four and seven.  

Of course, we spend a lot of time together looking at and playing with toys and games and cartoons, but I’m also interested in the way children invest those images and objects with lives of their own.  

The objects in ‘Orifice and Oculi’ grew from a realization that I also imagine life invested in physical things, and the details I include speak to the idea of the objects ‘looking back’ at us with internal lives of their own.

-Chris Abrams

April 2017: Focus on Michelle Lougee

"Cynthia Switzer Ross and Anne Marie Crotty, directors of Flatrocks Gallery in Gloucester will be visiting my studio in April to select works. I will be exhibiting with Resa Blatman, Adin Murray and Mia Cross from May 25-July 2. The exhibition is entitled In Deep Water and will be focused on our relationship to nature and our impact on it ... particularly the sea. Included in the exhibit will be selections from my crochet plastic sea creatures, barnacles, and other works inspired by the plight of our oceans.”

-Michelle Lougee

http://www.flatrocksgallery.com/

Marilu Swett: "Drift"

My cousin came to my artist talk at the gallery and, in seeing the work, began reminiscing about our grandfathers who had been mariners, in Canada, and one a marine engineer on the docks in East Boston. Someone asked me about my installation, Untitled (Drift) and suddenly I remembered a photo of my Dad, a newspaper reporter in Boston, wearing a diving suit with a copper helmet and lead weighted shoes, readying to descend into Boston Harbor for a story. I hadn't been thinking about family history in making this piece, but there it was!

- Marilu Swett

Sculpture: Embodied Energy and Carbon Credits by Nancy Selvage

"I wanted to offset the carbon footprint of the materials that I used in my exhibition as well as my daily-life carbon footprint.

I used about 250 pounds of aluminum to create work for this exhibition. Aluminum is a material that requires a lot of energy to produce - so much so that abundant bauxite ore from Australia is often shipped to Iceland for processing with that country’s abundant supply of geothermal and hydroelectric energy. 

Using renewable energy sources for processing reduces aluminum’s carbon footprint, but not all aluminum is processed in this way, and there are mining, transport, and manufacturing considerations.

On the average 9 pounds of Carbon Dioxide are produced for each pound of rolled aluminum sheet. 

TerraPass is a company that sells Carbon Offsets. https://www.terrapass.com  The income is invested in carbon emission reduction and renewable energy projects.

At a cost of $5.95 per 1000 pounds of carbon, I offset the 2250 pounds of Carbon Dioxide produced by the 250 pounds of aluminum used in my exhibition by paying $13.38.

Then I used the TerraPass calculator to find that my personal activities generated about 25,000 pounds of CO2 this year. I paid $148.75 to offset these greenhouse gas emissions.

To compensate for the paint used in this exhibition, I held a forum at the gallery to educate artists on the responsible way to prevent any paint residue from polluting the enviornment.

Let’s all contribute to global survival by being aware of and responsible for the environmental impact of our art practices and our daily lives."

- Nancy Selvage

Claudia Olds Goldie: "Skin Deep"

"The figurative ceramic sculpture in my current show, Skin Deep, investigates the complex contradictions of body, mind, and perception. Focusing on the lives and bodies of women, I have examined how living and aging change the psyche and the physical body. My intent was not to create traditional figurative sculpture, but rather, to imagine honest, strong, compelling, sometimes humorous, sometimes conflicted individuals.  For this reason, I never work from models or photographs."

- Claudia Olds Goldie

"In Navigating a Dream, as in much of my recent work, the surface detail is an integral part of the sculpture and adds visual complexity to the piece.  I was inspired to begin drawing in graphite pencil on my sculptural work after seeing Sol Lewitt’s exhibition of wall drawings at Mass MOCA in 2010.   The smooth texture of the pillows in this piece served as a perfect foundation for this type of surface exploration, and I enjoyed imagining a variety of bold, graphic motifs to carry this young dreamer on her surreal adventure.  Textile patterns such as animal skins, checkerboards, dots and stripes suggest the wonders of a magic carpet ride."

-Claudia Olds Goldie

Sally Fine: "Sea Change"

My grandson's class came on a field trip from his Montessori School (22 six and seven year olds). This image above shows me explaining about sea urchins to them at the Boston Sculptors Gallery. Look at their attentive gazes! In addition, I did 2 workshop visits to his classroom in Hingham. In the first workshop we made jellyfish based on my jellyfish, but with paper and wire rather than riveted metal and EL wire. In the second workshop we made sea urchins. (See the image below.)

- Sally Fine

My grandson Ethan Fine's (age 7) sea urchin/ spaceship.

"Grey Matters" by Dennis Svoronos

One piece that stands out in this show is "The Mind Reactive Instrument" by sculptor Dennis Svoronos. It uses thoughts to generate sound. After numerous brain scans, he wanted to produce an experience that made the brain an active participant, rather than a simple specimen. Viewers don a scanning helmet and let the sculpture react to their brainwaves.

October 2016: Focus on Sally Fine

My show of 2014 was titled Catch and Release; it dealt with our relationship with fish, in terms of evolution and as a source of sustenance. "Catch and release" is a fishery conservation term.  In my upcoming exhibition, SeaChange, I have gotten more specific in terms of conservation, looking at species that are most effected by climate change, pollution and overfishing.  Some species, for example, the squid and jellyfish, manage climate change well but most do not. Whales have fallen victim to overfishing and some sea urchins have fallen victim to warming sea temperatures.  In the time between the two shows I learned to scuba dive and ultimately received my scuba certification. The dives I have done have given me a close up experience of life under the seas and an appreciation of the disastrous effects of climate change on coral reefs, the incubator for ¼ of all sea creatures. 95% of the oceans are unexplored and we need to understand better our affect on 2/3 of our planet's surface.

- Sally Fine

Nail Fish

Last Sea Horse

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"Zodiac" by Donna Dodson

Virgo is often depicted as a virgin the zodiac, so I took that concept one step further and applied it to the Virgin Mother or Madonna figure that one commonly sees in Catholic icons. The little blue penguin was my animal inspiration for this piece. The spalted maple grain patterns work perfectly to give the feeling of a belly button and delicate claws on the toes. The pale blue color adds both the narrative  and symbolism to my interpretation of Virgo.

- Donna Dodson

Virgo

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"Geology" by Andy Moerlein

Montagne Sainte - Victoire

Homage to Cezanne.

Three sisters and their little brother - an adored landscape. Bend, Oregon.

I have known so many great landscapes. I have strode free, skied deeply into valleys - I have LIVED. I feel great expanse inside me. 

Clay is earth. When I handle fine wet stone, it speaks of the many mountains it has been ground from. The push and tear of my hands, the smoothing and stretching, is the weight of gravity and the pushing of plates. I fashion the earth I love with only vague recollection or accuracy, but with undying affection.

Cezanne stood in the same place many times, observing his beloved Montagne Saint Victoire. Painting it with strained intensity, yet a familiar inaccuracy, he strove for the soul of the place. His affection for color and paint - his passion for layered space - speak to me directly.

This sculpture is akin to the classic Scholars' Rock: awesome scale in intimate whispers. A secret I share with those close enough to my heart to hear.

- Andy Moerlein

2016 ceramic, cold patina of acrylic paint, India ink, 6 x 8 x 10”

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