March 2020: Focus on Donna Dodson

For Women’s History Month, March 1st-31st, I am exhibiting a small installation of my work at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center, 515 South St, Waltham, Mass. The gallery hours are 9a-5p Mon-Fri., https://www.brandeis.edu/wsrc/

Cardinal goddess, wood, paint 2010 by Donna Dodson

"The Cardinal goddess was created as an icon to future possibilities, as if women could hold high office in the Catholic Church. What would that look like and what would it mean for women's spirituality? She is decorated with olive drab wing patches and blood red war paint.  

Stork mother, wood, paint 2011 by Donna Dodson

"Stork mother brings the baby in her tummy instead of her beak. She is both a celebration of fertility and motherhood as well as a subversion of the popular myth of the baby bringer."  

Bantam, wood, paint 2011 by Donna Dodson

Bantam is dominant as only a grandmother or matriarch of a family can be. Bearing the symbolic colors of the rooster, she is the bread winner of the family and its powerful head

February 2020: Focus on Mac Dewart

“ I am preparing for an April installation at Harvard University, four one-ton sculptures in granite and bronze that will sit outside Memorial Hall for two months.

Recent museum and university acquisitions of my work include the Boston Athenaeum, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Rutgers, SNHU, and the Kruizenga Museum in Michigan. Recent commissions include a 16 foot high steel sculpture for Katonah, New York and a bronze cross for a Washington DC Church.

I am finishing my ten year involvement with the Episcopal Cathedral in Boston. I served on the rebuilding committee, dreamed up the idea for a sculpture in the Pediment (Donald Lipski’s Nautilus), dreamed up the idea for the Friedel Dzubas banners, brilliant colors, 14 ft. long for the sanctuary walls and lastly built the back lit bronze cross over the front door.

I have an illustrated book, a sculptor’s journal called “Hammer and Tongs” making the rounds of publishers. I did a reading with Robert Pinsky at the Poet’s House in New York and another collaboration on a bronze edition is underway. I am revisiting a sculpture I did in 1972 that overlaps with a long poem of Robert’s from that time, ‘An Explanation of America.’”

-Mac Dewart

January 2020: Focus on Jodi Colella

“I’m encouraged by the ability of art to build communities and increase awareness of social/political issues that advocate for change. I’m excited to be participating in a few this January.

Currently exhibiting in Human Impact at Fuller Craft Museum is my installation Once Was, a memorial to those lost from the opioid epidemic. A 12-foot tall, 2-sided tower is covered with 3600 poppies, each one representing 200 individuals who died from opioid related causes since 1999. Stay tuned to WGBH TV’s Open Studio in January to see the interview by Jared Bowen. 

Over winter term, as part of a Social Justice curriculum, I’ll be working with 80 young women from Malden Catholic Codivisional High School. We will be stitching banners to raise awareness about 25 million refugees who exist globally, while discussing social justice themes and how they relate to the cause. The final pieces will be included in the larger exhibit 25 Million Stitches, a brainchild of artist Jen Kim Sohn in California.

The social engagement Full Circle at Cary Memorial Library in Lexington MA, is a collaborative public art installation that considers the politics and social contexts of mending as an expression of compassion and repair. We begin with a framed 8-foot circular canvas to be embellished by visitors who will patch, repurpose, stitch, and add personal items that will ultimately represent a compelling rendition of Earth and community as we bring value and use back to fabric.

Visit my blog for the program of events and to learn more about the project: http://jodi-colella-39mb.squarespace.com/material-and-process

Please join me for a gallery talk about Yayoi Kusama at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston on Sunday, January 12 at 2 pm. “

-Jodi Colella

December 2019: Focus on Caroline Bagenal

LINES OF DIVISION, LINES OF CONNECTION

 “I am currently working on two films. The first film is based on an outdoor piece that I made in the Italian Garden in Maudslay State Park, Newburyport in September 2019. For this piece I used sayings in Latin and English collected from old sundials. The inscriptions are poetic and philosophical, addressing the passage of time and the movement of the sun. The idea for the piece came from finding the remains of an old sundial in the Italian Garden.

The second film is based on a dance performance and concert in my exhibition Crossing Lines at Boston Sculptors Gallery in October 2019.  My sculptures are large brightly colored  3 dimensional structures made from willow branches and marsh reeds.

 On the one hand my sculpture uses lines to explore division and enclosure and on the other to signify connection and complex relationships. The dancers interpreted these ideas through bodily gesture and movement and in physically engaging with sculptural elements.”

-Caroline Bagenal

October 2019: Focus on Christopher Abrams

Since Chris just closed his solo show “Lie of the Land” the inspirations for the show are still on his mind…

“My grandfather always had model trains, and my grandmother collected dolls and dollhouses, so growing up I always found my way to the attic and got lost in miniature worlds when I visited. Later, I kept that interest going doing some professional work as a model builder for architects.

Continental Divide

 I’m not sure when I decided to pair this with politics—I’ve never made political work before—but I wanted to explore how we created, and then fell short of, an American mythology, through small-scale vignettes that promise an intimate experience but leave viewers asking, ‘how did we end up here and now, in this national condition?’.

From Sea the Shining Sea

The works in the show are purposefully ambiguous; they leave unanswered questions about whether the pieces represent the ambitions of some anonymous individual or a commentary about the state of our country’s civic life.”

-Christopher Abrams

10/1/2019

Huddled Masses

June 2019: Focus on ELLEN SCHÖN

“I am spending the month of June at Guldagergård International Ceramic Research Center in Skaelskor, Denmark. Guldagergård is a ceramic artists’ residency program with a world-class facility, located on the beautiful grounds of a public park near a harbor and beach. I am honored to be one of twelve residents here. We share dorm rooms and take turns cooking dinner for each other, which makes for a friendly group.

 Artists have their own workspace in a 24-hour access studio building. The facility includes gas kilns, electric kilns, and wood-fired kilns, as well as all kinds of clay and glazes, a plaster mold-making lab, and a slip-casting room. We also have access to a research library, photo equipment, a 3D clay printer, a silkscreen print workshop, as well as Guldagergård’s own extensive ceramics collection. It is an inspiring place!

I arrived here with no specific plan for developing a new body of work--only a feeling of some pressure to create, since I have a show at BSG coming up in March 2020. I have chosen to work with fairly groggy clay—they call it chamotte here—which is also plastic, responding to strong manipulation without cracking. Also, I have signed up to participate in a soda/wood-fire kiln firing in a few weeks, a method I have rarely used.

 In the past I have made abstract, non-functional vessel forms. My work, I have been told, “explores the limits of abstraction.” However, since I began working this past week, the vessels seem to be transforming into objects, more clearly evoking birds, fish, or flowers. I have some trepidation about this trend, as I do not want the pieces to be cute. On the other hand, I don’t want to censor myself, so I am letting the work evolve as it will. Still, I anticipate abstract evocation, rather than literal creatures. Or maybe it’s okay to be cute. We’ll see.”

 Ellen Schön

6 June 2019

Guldagergård

May 2019: Focus on Kirsten Reynolds

“I’m currently working on two new architectural installations that will be included in the exhibition, ‘Close to the Line,’ on view in the Burt Chernow Galleries at the Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT, September 5 – October 12, 2019.  Curated by Barbara O’Brien, the exhibit proposes an investigation of geometric abstraction through a performative lens.  The exhibit will also feature paintings by Finnish artist, Mari Rantanen.

Scale model, "Switchback," 2019 for the Housatonic Museum

In the main gallery, the installation titled ‘Switchback,’ is a grouping of tall trestle-style wood frames that support monumental fragments of architectural arches; they appear to whirl overhead and fall around a painted yellow platform. Viewers will be able to walk through the installation, passing first through the wood frames, then under the arcs and onto the platform.  As they move through the layers of space, they become participants in the installation’s theatrical ‘stage.’  

Bird’s eye view of scale model, "Switchback," 2019 for the Housatonic Museum

Building these arcs involves a process called bent wood lamination, where thin strips of wood are glued then quickly pressed around a form.  For ‘Switchback,’ each arc is a combination of three bent wood arcs of different widths that recall the ornamental architectural' features around arched openings called archivolts.   The arcs are painted mostly white, except for unexpected pops of bright pink, light blue and strips of abstracted red shapes on some of the bands.  Similarly, the platform is painted a vivid yellow with portions of orange or pink pattern, enlarged to the point where pattern is no longer recognizable.  The 2x4 wood frames are painted with a faux finish in a wood grain pattern.  Pattern and painted surface complicate the materiality of the installation as well as intensify the disrupted, incompleteability of the installation.

Scale model, "post," 2019 for the Housatonic Museum

 ‘post,’ in the second gallery, is a smaller arrangement of faux architectural elements. The title ‘post’ can both refer to a literal description of the structure, which is stationed upright, or a starting or finishing point in process.  Uncertainty, mingled with humor, that provokes thought as embodied action has been a significant theme to my work: the process of knowing as we go rather than anticipating what and where.”

-Kirsten Reynolds

Marilu Swett: Bump and Swag

“Based on the idea of biological accumulation, ‘Mass’ was made with expandable urethane foam, which when used without a mold to contain it, grows in sections in unpredictable ways. The piece surprised me!”

-Marilu Swett

Claudia Olds Goldie: Staccato

“This has been an inventive time in my creative life.  Until now, my ceramic sculpture focused mainly on the figure.  There are numerous figures in my current show, each with intricately patterned graphite pencil drawings on their surfaces that connote textile design or tattoos.

 Over time, this drawing process has proved so compelling that the drawings have become as fascinating to me as the sculpture itself.  More recently, I began to embrace abstraction as I explored new ways to marry the drawing to its sculptural form.  Accustomed to working on smaller, free standing sculpture, it’s been especially exciting for me to see my current work installed on the walls of the gallery. 

The largest and most ambitious sculpture in this show is comprised of 98 orb-shaped, individual parts. I was amazed by the rush of creative ideas that ensued by working within the constraint of one simple repetitive form.  This became a playful and seemingly limitless exploration of pattern and design.  As I worked on this piece over a period of months, and the individual orbs began to relate to each other, the sculpture began to assume the visual expression of musical articulation.  Thus, the name Staccato.”

-Claudia Olds Goldie

Intemperate Zone: a Collaborative Installation with sculptor Nancy Selvage and visual poet Ros Zimmermann

“As Ros and I grappled with how to express our anxiety over accelerating climate change, we focused on the impact of weather on one’s psyche and on efforts to understand the alarming data. The result appears to be an “under the weather” weather station. A storm of sculptural forms, words, punctuation marks, and international meteorology symbols burn, freeze, bleed, blow, and dislocate a weather vane, the station, and probes of inquiry.  . .. , ice corps, weather vein, and the station’s “instruments” are pieces around forecasting, discovery, and measurement  – recording how these things can and can’t reflect our experience of confusion and awe.  Real and imagined atmospheric conditions and states of mind unfold as do the perceptions of our role in the process.

The materials used in this show are repurposed texts and materials from both Nancy and Ros’ studios and from the language of weather reporting and forecasting. The process of recycling makes for a kaleidoscopic installation – bits and pieces from one piece may recur , re-iterate and re-generate in others, thus creating a visual and verbal vocabulary that accelerates and spins in and out of comprehension.

When I was making a model for one of my sculptures, my husband came in and said, “That looks like a hat”. This triggered the idea of making “under the weather” hats for the Intemperate Zone installation as a way of emphasizing the effect of the weather on our states of mind and engaging the public as a’fashion” models. In addition we invited a tarot card reader to pose as a weather therapist and provide personal forecasts. These informal interactions were complimented by Ros’s reading one of her poems as she created a rhythmic repeating echo of the phrases.”

-Nancy Selvage

March 2019: Focus on Ed Andrews

American Cocktail: 
A spirited mixture of customs and cultures within the United States

“This in-process project began with my desire to use data as a catalyst for the creation of new artwork.  Census data in the United States reveals detailed patterns of immigration from individual countries of origin and is typically charted using standard line graphs. Each country’s line graph is unique and creates a silhouette or profile that, when revolved around an axis, results in 3D forms that resemble interesting vessel shapes.  In this artistic representation, each country of origin is represented by a data-defined vessel and contains a distilled liquor that originates from, and is historically significant and representative of, that same country. 

The distillation of alcohol in the United States, plays a historic role in early commerce, the slave trade, and in the early 20th century, the anti-saloon temperance and its cohort, the anti-immigration movements. In this artwork, the cocktail, an American invention that is fundamentally about mixing and creating something new, serves as a metaphor and provides a context for the blending of customs and cultures and, through the act of sharing, creates a potential space for celebrating an open and public dialogue.”

-Ed Andrews

Distinct bottle shapes and cocktail glasses are 3D printed clear resin

February 2019: Focus on John Christian Anderson

“For the past several months I have been developing maquettes and drawings for a sculpture that will be included in an exhibition entitled Human Impact: Stories of the Opioid Epidemic. This exhibition will be at The Fuller Craft Museum from September 28th, 2019 through March 15, 2020. All of the work in this group exhibition will try to shine a light on the devastating impact the opioid crisis has created both locally and nationally while also giving voice to those families who were willing to share their stories about struggling to overcome this disorder.

Sketch for Human Impact/ welded steel, wood wire, ceramics, plaster, rubber

I spent the month of October at The Vermont Studio Center where I was given a studio with a fully equipped shop downstairs. This residency allowed me to develop new work using welded steel, rice paper and wooden forms. These pieces might be part of my show at Boston Sculptors Gallery next December.

Untitled/Welded Steel, Rice Paper, Wood

Most of my sculpture materials come to me through happenstance either biking to my studio or driving around my neighborhood on trash day. Every once in awhile I come across something special like a dumpster filled with loaves of French Bread and old plywood, which inspired me to create this piece: “

I Made This Shelf / Bread, plywood, paint, ink

Detail of back _ I Made This Shelf / scrap plywood

-John Anderson

December 2018: Focus on Christina Zwart

For the past six years, I've been fortunate to work with the incredible folks at Shorelight Education in Boston, where I've created and installed seven works that highlight the company's mission to "Educate the World." They recruit students from across the globe to study at colleges and universities in the U.S., and are committed to stewarding them from matriculation to graduation. Among the works is this grid of graduation caps in the lobby of their Seaport headquarters:

For the mortarboards, I created round button flags representing the countries from which their students hail:

And, for each tassel, created custom-made charms featuring Shorelight's logo:

I've replicated this installation in their offices in Beijing, Dubai, Vietnam and Colombia, and recently finished a larger one for their new space in Shanghai. The grid is now standard for each of the lobbies in their offices worldwide, with three more opening in 2019.

From Tom Dretler, their CEO and co-founder:

“I never expected artwork to be the key to how we talk about our corporate purpose and how we keep each other focused on what's truly important, but Christina's work has allowed us to do exactly that. Every time we bring someone new to our office -- investors, university officials, prospective employees, board members, community members -- we always tell the Shorelight story through the art that she has created. With offices in 18 countries and more than 30 locations worldwide, her artwork allows our global organization to demonstrate our common commitment to student success and creating a multi-stakeholder win. Christina herself also has become an extension of our team. She believes in what we're doing and it shows in her approach and in her work.”

Two other tidbits:

I created this "money tree curtain" for the recent opening of Medical Aesthetics on Tremont Street in Boston's South End:

And am finishing up a commission of 11 sets of grandchildren hands:

Thanks for listening! 

-Christina Zwart

November 2018: Focus on Andy Zimmermann

This is a guitar which I built from parts, including a Sustainiac pickup and electronics (http://www.sustainiac.com/). The neck pickup includes an electro-magnetic string driver/transducer.

I played the guitar to make one of the tracks for a sound piece that I have been composing.

The piece is called Facto. It begins with the sound of a synthesized ‘factory’, and continues with the actual sounds of, in order, trains, cars, planes, war jets and a rocket. I did a lot of the work in GarageBand and Audacity, but the final stages were done in Adobe Audition.

https://youtu.be/5mmylhcmGV8

Zimmermann Facto    

sound file using sound effects, field recordings, and customized guitar

I also recently uploaded to Youtube a video of my piece for last summer’s Breath and Matter exhibit at Boston Sculptors Gallery.

 https://youtu.be/L0LrIvpKDfo     

Dialog Between Light and Darkness   

Video sculpture collaboration with Corey Michael Smithson

-Andy Zimmermann

Eric Sealine: Bodies of Work

At our Oct. 3rd event, I was standing by the "11 Miller Street" piece when my friends Malcolm Davis and Faith Rubin walked up.  Malcolm, who is a retired architect and painter, said,  "This space looks familiar. . .", and I said, "This is where we met, in 2000.  You and Faith were attending our Open Studios event."

11 Westminster Street

At that time I was trying to figure out how to build a studio out of my attic, and the house model (on the right, on the table) was there, with four or five different "hats", versions of how I could proceed.  Malcolm looked at the model and variations for about thirty seconds, and said, "Well, you might think about this, and this, and this . . . " and solved the problem.  I reminded him of that moment, and then turned him around and pointed across the room to the "11 Westminster" piece, and said, "And that over there is what I built.  I've worked there for eighteen years and I still love the space.  Thank you, again and again."

-Eric Sealine

Donna Dodson : Match of the Matriarchs

It has been a huge honor to work with artists Daniel Meirom, Jennifer Shahade and Kledia Spiro in the process of organizing and curating this show. I invited Jennifer to be part of my show after reading her book “Chess Bitch” and seeing her conceptual photos, videos and installations online that she creates with Daniel Meirom. She suggested a chess match with women chess players. I also invited Kledia Spiro to collaborate with us on this show. Kledia is a performance, video and installation artist who uses strength and weightlifting as a symbol of survival, empowerment and celebration. Kledia conceptualized the Battle of the Beasts performance where she featured Jennifer Shahade and Vanessa Sun playing a chess match. She also invited two male athletes in corporate attire to be the loaders of the match until she decided to push one away and even the playing field. The themes of feminism, empowerment, backlash, mythology, family, and community took shape as we created new work for the show.

One of the most gratifying parts of the show is reaching out to the chess community and hosting chess games with local players in the gallery during the show. But my favorite visitor to the gallery was a 20 something year old woman whose family came into the gallery on their way to dinner in a local restaurant. Her mother said, “I am leaving now, we’ll see you at the restaurant. These are creepy” to which her daughter said, “I know that’s why I like them, text me when you get a table.” The young woman spent an hour with me in the gallery after closing time to study the pieces- she asked me if I knew Cthulhu and HP Lovecraft. “He is the modern voice of Sci Fi who has taken it to the next level. No one is doing what he is but he makes lots of problematic assumptions in his stories about women, that I find hard to overlook. When I saw your chess set I wondered if you had tried to re-imagine Cthulu from a woman’s point of view.” Her comment made me think that disliking ourselves as women is such familiar territory and liking ourselves as women is so alien.

Thank you to everyone who came to see our show.

Amy Archambault: 16 on Center

It is hard to believe that “16 on Center” is approaching its final weekend on view at Boston Sculptors Gallery. It has been a wonderful adventure since its creation beginning in October of 2017. For several years, my work has looked closely at home-renovation processes, “creative play” and a curious mashup of these worlds— an artist’s way of integrating imagery and forms from different worlds that align within their own lifestyle explorations— this intersection of art and life is essential to my practice. Early works entertained the idea of one searching for play in the tedious tasks that “DIY” homeowners encounter. This most recent body of work and featured installation have uncovered even more. I am grateful for the conversations that I have had with visitors to the gallery over the last month! Looking closely at the installation and having fully digested it, I realize that “16 on Center” has ignited a great deal of self-discovery. It utilizes the visual language that surfaced in early work— childhood play, habitat making and spontaneous creative assemblies, but couples such with a formally finished interior space yielding entirely new meaning. The work reflects my own identity as a mother, homeowner and maker. In many ways, the interior space becomes an idealized vision of what I search for— perfection, organization, finish and simplicity. I recall my childhood home and the manner in which my mother curated rooms— every detail addressed in a way that made visitors (her own children even) hesitate to cross the threshold. She had little knowledge of interior design methods, but she exuded a real confidence in “making home” and maintaining it always. I find myself living her practices, stepping into her identity— constantly “fixing” disorder within the home and competing with the disruption that naturally occurs with a small child, dog and on-going house projects. The disruption of my space and my roles. The scale of “16 on Center” becomes so important to referencing self and other. The shift in energy, building approaches and material choices also contributes to these ideas. I continue to be inspired by the work of others (Phyllida Barlow and Jessica Stockholder for example) while my own experiences push into the foreground, and I am thrilled by what is on the horizon.

Photo Credit: Will Howcroft, “16 on Center”, Boston Sculptors Gallery, 2018

September 2018: Focus on Nora Valdez

BSG artist Nora Valdez has lately been working with the community and in shows on issues of resilience, home, and immigration. This summer she directed the Stone Bench Project at The Carving Studio and Sculpture Center, marking the center's 10 year anniversary. There she worked with teens to create benches which then became a permanent part of a public park or building in a Vermont city.

She was invited for memorial Day to show her project” Immigration Nation” at the Museum of Fine Art Boston giving talks on the subject an her work.

She has been working with Urbano Project as their artist in residence doing “Alone Together, Together Alone,” a solo show addressing themes of immigration and home. She also worked with teens to empower them with an installation called “Still we rise.”

She was an artist in residence for The Eliot School, working with teens to explore the theme of home. The installation will be on display at Galatea Fine Art in November with an artist talk on November 4th.

She was an artist in residence at Salisbury University in Maryland and a mentor/Governors Institute of Vermont at Castleton University.

July 2018: Focus on Marilu Swett

My newer studio work has concerned itself with the littoral marge and what the tide brings in; objects at fishing sites in harbors; and our human interaction with the sea. I sometimes incorporate objects I find into the work: scraps of styrofoam, tree branches, fisherman's rope. I am experimenting with unusual casting methods to produce form: expandable foam with no mold, colored resin poured in layers as it thickens; fast-setting plastic poured directly onto rivulets in sand at low tide.

          Most recently, time spent in the woods of New England has prompted a renewed attention to the forest landscape: tree scars and galls; river rocks and ice formations. I want to look at the edges where woods and the built environment meet, for juxtapositions of human and nature’s activity. And I am traveling to a landscape new to me, a rural environment in Minnesota, for a residency in August. I hope to gather ideas in these diverse places about our relation to our environment at this current moment."

-Marilu Swett

Johnathan Derry: As Above, So Below

"Continuing with the nod to Susan Lyman, the fellow BSG member that Laura Evans mentioned in her blog, I too was fortunate enough to receive from her the gift of an enigmatic piece of driftwood from the shores of the outer cape. Confounded and mildly intimidated by the striking appearance of this timber, I did what I often do with unfamiliar and perplexing objects/materials, I dissect and dismantle. Reformation fundamentally is an attempt to understand the core elements of the sculpture, the ottoman and the piece driftwood, not for what they were but what they have become through the process of disassembling and reforming as one."

-Johnathan Derry