The mysteries of gray/grey

“Upward” (mushroom spores on paper), by western Massachusetts-based artist Madge Evers, in the group show “Grey Areas,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, Aug. 2-27

The gallery says:

This year’s annual exhibition by Kingston Gallery’s Associate Artists explores the theme of “Grey Areas’’ from different perspectives and media. …The 10 artists interpret our world with divergent approaches to both the enigmatic concept and the color grey….They explore liminal places, ideas, and eras that generate questions - many without answers. Responding to the existential areas of an unknowable future or the space between ecosystems, they wonder how to acknowledge non-human collaborators, the myriad ‘what-ifs’ of depression, and the question of secrecy and abuses in institutions and systems of government that operate in obscurity. The diversity of work plays with grey’s ability to take on hue and enliven color, consider the spin of the stories we tell, uncertainty in understanding our world, and the difficulty of truly knowing the space one occupies in that world.’’

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“Madge Evers has adapted the spore print, a mushroom identification tool typically used by mycologists and foragers, to create biomorphic monochromatic works on paper. Like the wind and other animals, she spreads the spores of mushrooms; germinates their powdery spores as they land on paper and creates her version of a fruiting body - it forms a two-dimensional image rather than toadstool. In this interdependence with mushrooms, she wonders: How do I best acknowledge my unwitting collaborators?’’

View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Mass., after a thunderstorm—The Oxbow (of the Connecticut River) (1836), by Thomas Cole