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Beyond Words photographs by Vaughn Sills

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In this series of tableaus, Sills joins together the world of nature, objects found outside her family’s Prince Edward Island cottage, with the world of intellect, a 1932 Oxford English dictionary. “I chose the objects – a squirrel’s skeleton, poplar saplings, broken egg shells lying on the forest floor -  because of their extraordinary beauty and because they seem to hold the mystery of life and death.” Sills opens the aging pages of the dictionary to the word for the object, then, using wire, pushpins, tape and thread, as the “grammar” with which she works, she creates fragile constructions that, like each object, is delicate and cannot last. “Although words fall short of conveying the miraculous presence of the object, they matter; they name what I see, they describe a color, a shape, an attribute. Thus in my photographs I wish to portray not only the beauty of the object but the lure and beauty of language itself.”

Bio

Vaughn Sills has exhibited her work in galleries and museums throughout the East Coast and Southern US. Her work is in a number of collections, including the DeCordova Museum, Polaroid Collections, and Fidelity Investments. She has been awarded grants from Artadia Dialogue for Art and Culture, the Polaroid Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and New England Foundation for the Arts. Her book, One Family,  was published in 2001 by the University of Georgia Press. Places for the Spirit, Traditional African American Gardens will be published in fall, 2010 by Trinity University Press. Sills is a professor of photography at Simmons College.

Recent Work paintings by David Moore

For over thirty years, David Moore has explored the daily ritual of place, realized in his paintings by dramatic lines, gesture, and color which become micro and macro metaphors for topographical and biological synapses. Much of Moore’s recent work has been inspired by the Ceide Fields in Ballycastle, County Mayo, Ireland which he visited during a residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation. These are the oldest known field systems in the world, over five and a half millennia old. It is a unique Neolithic landscape of world importance, which has changed our perception of our Stone Age ancestors. The remains of stone field walls, houses and megalithic tombs are preserved beneath a blanket of peat over several square miles.

Bio

David Moore earned his MFA degree in painting at Bard College, NY, where he also studied Theosophy, Sufism, music, photography, and the luminist paintings of the Hudson Valley. He has received residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Millay Colony, Blue Mountain Center, the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, NY, and the Ballinglen Art Center in Ballycastle, County Mayo, Ireland. Recent honors include the prestigious Pollock/Krasner Award and a Painting Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. David’s musical experience has also influenced his paintings. For the past 35 years he has revived the lost art of playing the Musical Saw. He records and performs across the country, and has been featured at Boston Symphony Hall, on ‘The Today Show’, and NPR performing jazz, blues, folk, and alternative music.

Seeing Pink: photographs by Lisa Kessler

Seeing Pink:
Lisa Kessler explores the idea of the color pink in America. “Pink is simply a color, but it is also an idea, one that confines and liberates, and ultimately holds a mirror to our culture.”  Her documentary-style photographs examine our notions of what is real and what is fake; what is biologically determined and what is socially created. Kessler captures pink as the color of love, sweetness, and vulnerability but also of power, eccentricity and pornography.  Just as the the idea of pink can represent a wide spectrum of meaning, her photographs provoke a similarly broad array of emotions.

Bio:
Lisa Kessler’s photographs are in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She was a finalist for the Honickman Foundation First Book Prize in Photography, Center for Documentary Studies for her work on the clergy sex abuse crisis. Her short film “Heart in the Wound,” exploring the impact of that crisis through the voices of survivors, premiered at the Boston International Film Festival in 2009 and was shown at the Fear No Film Festival in Salt Lake City, Utah. “Facing Peace,” a documentary portrait series in collaboration with families surviving violence was exhibited at Lesley University in 2008. Kessler teaches photography at Montserrat College of Art and is currently preparing “Seeing Pink” for book publication.

Animal: photographs by Elliot Ross

Animal:
Elliot Ross explains that each image in Animal “is not only a portrait of a non-human animal; it is, in many ways, both a self-portrait (for each of us has, to some degree, DNA in common with other species) and also a question: What can be knowable and what is unknowable of individuals of other animal species?” Ross photographs his subject animals and applies digital imaging techniques he describes as “akin to sculpting with light.” He strips away their actual surroundings to show them against a black background that adds depth, cognition and personality. Thus each of his numbered beings is a subjective and mysterious work which grows out of the objective record that a photograph represents.

Bio:
Elliot Ross’s work is in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,  Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium and the Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley.  Images from “Animal” were recently exhibited in a solo show at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester MA and in group shows:  “New Visionaires,” New York Photo Festival, Brooklyn and “The Museum of Unnatural History,” ClampArt, New York.  Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam will publish the artist’s book “Animal” in the fall of 2010.

Mary Kocol and Rebecca Doughty

May 6 – May 30, 2010   Reception:  Saturday, May 8,  6 – 8p.m.

Gardens & Arboreta: photographs by Mary Kocol

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Gardens and Arboreta
Mary Kocol photographs the landscapes of the Northeast coming back to life – the short-lived and fresh color transformations in spring and early summer. This series was made with a plastic Diana camera.  Kocol has been making pictures with this toy camera for over twenty years. “I’m intrigued by how the plastic lens interprets light – with luminescent color and soft glare.” Light is an important subject in Kocol’s work and the distinctive soft focus of the camera lends a surreal, nostalgic, and ephemeral quality to her photographs.

Bio
Mary Kocol is a fine art and editorial photographer in Boston. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), she has received many grants for photography, animation and filmmaking. In 2009 she was a finalist in the International Garden Photographer of the Year competition, Kew Gardens, England. Most recently, Kocol has exhibited at Gallery Naga, Boston, MA and the Julia Margaret Cameron Museum, Isle of Wight, England. Her work is in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Victoria and Albert Museum and many others public and private collections. Editorial clients include The New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, and Doubleday.

Short Stories: paintings by Rebecca Doughty

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Short Stories
Drawing is at the core of Rebecca Doughty’s work. As a kid, Doughty absorbed the print and moving pictures of the time– comics and funnies, Looney Tunes and MAD. The images that most intrigued her were wry and deceptively simple, a description that well applies to Doughty’s work. “I studied the protagonists engaged in their curious adventures, the humor and satire, and the deeper, darker subtexts.” The animal characters that inhabit Doughty’s paintings and drawings represent a kind of theatre, where stories and complex human predicaments are told through subtle gestures. “I find within the limits I’ve set regarding materials and scale, there’s a mine of expressive possibilities.”

Bio:
Rebecca Doughty has been making paintings and drawings since the 1980’s. Her work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center – New York City, the Boston Drawing Project, DeCordova Museum, Clark Gallery, and the Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown.  She has received fellowships from Ucross Foundation, The Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland, and awards including The Massachusetts Cultural Council, The Berkshire-Taconic Community Foundation, and Blanche E. Colman Foundation. Her work is in numerous public and private collections.

April 1 to May 2, 2010 -

hours:  Thursdays – Sundays, noon to 6 pm

Reception:  Saturday, April 10, 6 – 8p.m.

photographs by Judith Black and Moira Barrett

Judith Black – In My Own Backyard

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Artist Statement:
Using images of family as a touchstone for memories reveals a deep collective need to make our personal narratives and memoirs a true representation of the past, which of course they can never be. In thinking about how to make sense of almost 30 years of photographing my immediate family and self, I realized that the photographs I exhibited were our family album made public, or perhaps the reverse, my “art” made useful within the domestic space. The photographs are actual physical memories, evoking stories, truths and lies, all of which are ever changing.* For this exhibit, I work with one theme, one location, one space in which many of my photographs have been taken: the backyard.

*Abstract from a paper delivered at National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists: School of the Visual Arts, New York City, New York, 2002

Bio:
Judith Black is a professor of Photography at Wellesley College. Her research and work examine the self and family in the genre of family portraiture. Her photography has centered on black and white large format portraiture of her immediate and extended family.  Black received a B.F.A. degree from Quincy College, Quincy, IL and an M.S. in Visual Studies at M.I.T.  Early on, a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled her to pursue her work documenting her family.  Her photographs have appeared in numerous national and international exhibitions and publications over the past 20 year and is in museum collections nationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Polaroid International Collection, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, and the Houston Museum of Fine Art.

Moira Barrett – Thicker Than Water

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Artist Statement:
In life, we all struggle to find a place of comfort and connection, whether it is in our biological families or the circle of friends that we call our families. We all come into and leave this world alone; each of us falling prey to a feeling of separation that can only be relieved by finding our own point of kinship with others. In “Thicker Than Water,” I explore these points of connection and alienation as they pertain to my own family. As a lesbian couple with an adopted Chinese daughter, we each try to make connections that will comfort us and define who we are. Although we find warmth in our created family, it is not always enough to protect us from the undercurrent of alienation that runs through us all. We must work hard to maintain the connections that keep us grounded and feeling that we are loved. My aim is to explore the push and pull of these contrasting feelings as expressed in our family dynamic, while we question and test our identities and relationships.

Bio:
Photographer Moira Barrett is studying for her MFA in Visual Arts at Lesley University/Art Institute of Boston (AIB.) A graduate of  Buffalo State University with a BA in Art, over the years, she has worked in a variety of positions in the graphic arts industry including silkscreen artist, color lab manager, and photo retoucher while completing coursework in photography and graphic design.  Moira is married to Johanna Schulman, a financial planner, lives in Cambridge, MA and is the parent of Annie, age 11.

November 21 to January 3, 2010 – Holiday Art Fair and Exhibition

 

Small Works including: mixed media and painting by Nancy Hart, photographs by Emily Corbato, Polaroid transfer prints by Carol Krauss, fiber-art by Cassandra Goldwater, jewelry by Flo Shulman and photobooks by Andrea Rosenthal, Meg Birnbaum, Emily Corbato, Mark Orton and Karen Davis. (left: “Jeanne”, mixed media by Nancy Hart)

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October 23 to January 3, 2010

Nadine Boughton, Emily Corbató, Carol Krauss

Gallery 1:  The Pleasures of Modern Living
Photocollage by Nadine Boughton

selected images from exhibition

Using vintage magazines and materials, Boughton scans and compose digital collages, piecing together fragments of memory into new narratives.  ”My intention is to blend the nostalgia for the past with the darkness beneath ‘the pleasures of modern living.’  I am interested in the portrayal of women and domestic culture; the illusion of security; food as an object of desire and comfort; and the grip of materiality.”

Nadine Boughton, a native of Rochester, NY, studied photography with Garry Winogrand and at the Visual Studies Workshop/Rochester and Lesley and Radcliffe Seminars. “The Pleasures of Modern Living” was recently exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography. Her work has also appeared at the Danforth Museum of Photography and Boston area galleries including:  Panopticon, Nave and Bromfield.

visit Nadine’s website

Gallery 2: Constructions
Photographs by Emily Corbató and Carol Krauss

selected images from exhibition

Emily Corbató and Carol Krauss’s elegant black and white photographs of buildings in steel and wood, modern and traditional are unified by skeletal structures, form and light. Side-by-side, Frank Gehry’s MIT Stata Center for the “intelligence sciences” and the anonymously built barn in New England can be viewed with a fresh perspective.

Emily Corbato has exhibited throughout New England and the US. Her work is in private and public collections including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Museum of Computer History (CA) and the Fitchburg Art Museums.  An exhibition of her landscapes from Plum Island, MA, “Absolution of the Wind”, can be seen at Boston University: Rubin-Frankel Gallery, through December 21, 2009. She has been an Artist/Scholar at Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University since 2001.

Carol Krauss is an award winning photographer who has exhibited throughout New England. Krauss is currently President of the Board of Emerson Umbrella Center for the Arts where she maintains a studio. In addition to her freelance and publication work, she teaches black and white photography in Concord MA.

September 11 – October 18, 2009

Corn Dogs, Blue Ribbons and the American Pastoral

Photographs by Meg Birnbaum

selected images from exhibition

 

Artist Statement:

This is a portfolio of photographs taken over a two-year period at fourteen summer fairs in New England ranging in size from small 4H events to giant ‘expos’. I was immediately attracted to the young members of 4H and Future Farmers of America. The deep connection with their animals was particularly intriguing and, for me, enviable. Coming from an urban area, I was surprised and delighted by how open and generous the 4H and FFA communities were.

I found fairs to be a complicated balance of startling innocence and huckster sleaze. Everything is for sale, from whirlpool baths to religious salvation. So many disparate elements, and all exist in harmony against a backdrop of gleeful screams, bells and whistles, mixed with the pungent essence of livestock and the aroma of fried food. “We’ll fry anything,” one sign read, and indeed they do: fried dough, fried Oreos, and fried cheesecake just for starters.

This project presents an emotional and somewhat wistful visual record of this long-standing American tradition. I shot with black and white film using extremely basic plastic “toy” cameras because I wanted to lose sharp detail and capture just a fleeting moment, the broad stroke, a distillation of my experience during those hot summer days and nights.

Meg Birnbaum is a graphic designer and fine art photographer based in Massachusetts. She has work in the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, the corporate program of the DeCordova Museum and the art collection of Meditech Corporation. Corn Dogs and Blue Ribbons has been exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography and Montserrat College of Art.

visit Meg’s website