Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Alliance for the Visual Arts (AVA) Exhibit


I'll be having an exhibit of my Long Haul work in the in the Elizabeth Rowland Mayor Gallery at AVA Gallery and Art Center from September 7 – October 2018. The opening reception will take place on Friday, September 7th, from 5pm-7pm. I'll also be giving an artist talk on Thursday, September 27th at 5:30pm. I hope you can come!


The exhibit will feature eleven of the long, shallow boxes from this series, suspended from the ceiling at various heights and angles. The above image shows one of the works, Seventeen, exhibited in 2017 at The Front gallery in Montpelier.

In my statement about this body of work, I wrote:


We’re all in it for the Long Haul, all Earth’s living organisms together, as the planet trucks its way through time and space. Each of us scans the road ahead, anxiously wondering: Will I succeed? Will I have children? Can I pay my mortgage? We look around and worry: Will Western Civilization survive? Is the Republic over? Is Fascism ascendant?

But what about the lives that do not look into the future, as we do, but flourish only in their present moments? The planet lost 58% of its animal population between 1970 and 2012, while human numbers grew from 4 billion in 1975 to over 7 billion today. Will the elephant survive the Anthropocene? How many species will disappear? Will there be any wild places left?

All these questions, all these players, and all of their stories are interconnected. Everything is bumping into everything else. The Long Haul series suggests that these diverse trajectories are braided and packed together for our voyage. Each of these sculptures has its own range of possible narratives, and you are encouraged to speculate about the stories of these components, how they interconnect, how, like side roads joining a great highway, they all converge.