Travel, time and place
The gallery says:
“‘Travelling’ suggests a sojourn to a destination in some form or another, and the concept of ‘place’ is examined along multiple vectors by this group of artists. Rebecca Skinner’s interior/exterior photographs of abandoned places contain a textural richness revealing a morphological study not merely of paint, brick, and wood, but also the chronological layers of story. The vibrant cityscapes that fluidly leap from the brush of Chris Plunkett….{T}he intensity of his palette turns recognizable metropolitan scenes into urban spectacles out of fondly remembered dreams.’’
'Beauty of decay'
She explains:
“I started making art to explore a very personal physical experience that started over ten years ago. After several years of surgeries to rebuild my jawbone that was being destroyed by benign tumors, I create art to intimately explore beauty, mortality, and rejuvenation. As my practice has progressed, I have found that there is great beauty in aging, evolving and even in decay. These themes have led me to explore the idea of ‘Impermanence”’ while at an artist residency in France last year. This film shows the continuation of the ‘Impermanence’ concept in which I created a sculpture of seagrasses and jute at another recent artist residency. I wove the seagrasses with jute into small basket forms that float in the ocean water, seeming to rejuvenate and come back to life. The result is a meditation on nature, life, and its impermanence.”
Memories of landscape
She tells the Gallery:
“I love hiking, particularly in wild, desolate places, and am fascinated by looking at the way light falls on the landscape when I am out on the trail, creating shapes that are craggy, or geometrical, or diffused—or shifting from one to the other. Sometimes I look at the sky or a mountain pass and try to remember the individual parts of the scene for later, when I will imagine the parts rearranged, the lights and darks reversed, or perhaps just one form that caught my eye. My dream travels take me to treks in Tibet, Alaska, Wyoming—I look at pictures of the landscapes in the places I’d like to go, and those images work their way into what I’m making as well. I am in awe of nature and the colors that exist and arise organically and atmospherically. Although I’m not painting the landscape representationally, my observations and memory of it is ever-present in my work, in some form.’’
‘Moment of vulnerability’
Mr. Lexy, a Boston-based artist who was born in Haiti, says:
“That painting exudes so much power, and when I took that photo {the inspiration for the painting}, I took a picture of my grandmother while she was over at the hospital waiting room waiting to get care. I thought that picture was a moment we should turn around, and I looked at her eyes and took that picture. Being in a hospital waiting room is a moment of vulnerability, so I like to flip it and give it a sense of power. My grandmother has always been my personal hero.”
'Unpredictable, happy accidents'
Photos by Dennis Stein at Fountain Street Fine Art, Boston. He tells the gallery:
“I have always been drawn to mundane and ordinary subjects, and attempt to give them visual strength. I walk around with a camera or two, and just photograph whatever catches my interest. I then sort through what I have and see what threads there are that run through them. Cameras are fun to use, especially older ones. I recently bought a 1936 Zeiss Ikon Ikoflex TLR for $ 60. It works great. Each film camera, each lens, each kind of film has their own personality, in a sense. So when I combine this camera with this lens and this film, I get a result that is different from another combination, which could be subtle or quite different. I have a few Holga toy cameras, one of which has a funky shutter. A Russian 35mm camera doesn’t always wind to the next frame properly, so I get overlapping negatives. I hand-hold a pinhole camera and make an exposure as I am walking. The resulting images can be totally unpredictable, happy accidents.’’
Mr. Stein is based in the Boston suburb of Medfield. Hit this link for his site.
(Pictures below are not by him.)
Metaphors for climate change
See Vicki McKenna’s show “Geology and the Physical World,’’ at Fountain Street Fine Art, Boston. Sadly, the show closes Oct. 25.
She says:
“Trained as a geologist, I see rocks as telling a story if you know how to interpret them. Photographs also require interpretation for they are the ingredients of a story rather than the story itself. The viewer assembles them into a narrative that is personally important.
“My works are photo illustrations that combine multiple photographs and are intended to collapse present and future into one image. All my previous work has been straight photography. I’ve captured an image in the camera, edited, and printed it. My use, here, of editing software to create a composite image is a departure that seemed justified by the challenge of incorporating the element of time into the final image.
“I was motivated by considering the effects of rising sea level. Each image is a montage of two or more photographs. I have merged one photograph representing the current environment with other photographs representing a possible future. The composite image isn’t meant to be a scientific thesis, but a metaphor for a possible result of climate change. In some images it is easy to identify the elements of the individual photographs. In others, the blending of photographs creates an image that almost seems realistic. The ambiguities of scale and detail in the montage are intended to create a sense of discontinuity or unease.’’
See:
https://www.fsfaboston.com/growingagallery/2020/10/23/geology-and-the-physical-world-vicki-mckenna?mc_cid=37b6bc98f3&mc_eid=296ccbd81d
Pictures of the shifting
Crane Beach is a gorgeous 1,234-acre state-owned conservation and recreation property in Ipswich, Mass., just north of Cape Ann. It has a four-mile-long sandy beachfront, dunes and a maritime pitch pine forest. Five and a half miles of hiking trails through the dunes and forest are accessible from the beachfront.
The land was given by the Crane family, whose fortune was from plumbing supplies. (One of the family bought my great-great grandfather’s house in Woods Hole, on Cape Cod. — Robert Whitcomb.)