Artist Profile in Seven Days

What a wonderful profile Rachel Jones did of me in Seven Days today! I feel really  honored, and also that she really grok-ed me. Here it is, with nice photos by Jeb Wallace-Brodeur, including the one below:

Long Haul Photos by Jack Rowell

Jack just sent me the photos he took just before the opening on Sept. 7. I am so pleased with this show, and thrilled to have high-quality images of the installation.

Thank you, Jack Rowell. Jack's special gift is portraits of people, I think, so here's one he took of me!

Great Reception at AVA, Fabulous Installation

My Opening Reception at AVA was last night and it was great! Most Central Vermont folks were at Art Hop in Burlington and Art Walk in Montpelier, but there were lots of people I'd not met before who came and were super enthusiastic about the work, which was most gratifying!

Here are some images taken by me and my husband, R.D. Eno:

The gallery in which Long Haul was installed is wonderfully wonky, with walls at many angles. Mila Pinigen did a great job of installing the work. It felt to me as though the pieces were floating around in the space, bouncing off the walls and moving in a new direction, like bubbles in a screen saver. Very cool.

This is the view from the main entrance to the space (It has signage on the wall straight ahead now that wasn't there when we took this shot...). Baggage, which is hard to photograph because of the plastic cover and two different kinds of light (natural from a window behind and tungsten cans overhead) is on the left. It's one of my favorite pieces, so I tried to create a tiled image, below, that shows all the passengers with their baggage. I put it in as a large file, so you'll have to click on it to see the whole thing...

Here's one more overview shot. Jack Rowell, a wonderful photographer and kind friend, came and took some photos too, which I hope he will let me put up here once he's finished processing them.

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.

Art the Vote!

 Have you been wanting to help turn Congress Blue in November 2018? Here's your chance to donate to that goal AND receive an artwork by me, or another Vermont artist!

 Make a donation to the Lean Left Vermont Victory Fund PAC, which supports candidates in critical swing districts in Maine, New Hampshire, and New York, and get a work of art. It's a win-win!

 For more details on Art the Vote, go to https://www.leanleftvt.org/art-the-vote

This is the piece I've donated, which you can have for a donation of $315.

Painting Class at GIA

The theme of this class was Layers, and our major project was a large 4x3 foot canvas that each student painted in acrylics. They started on Day One with a 2" wide brush, and filled the canvas. On Day Two they got a 1" brush, and had to cover the canvas again, leaving no part of the Day One painting larger than my hand. On Day Three they got regular flat and round 1/4" and 1/8" brushes, and had to make modifications to each 12" square section. On the final day, they could also use china markers.

Here is an overview of the wall on which the final paintings were displayed, as well as gifs of each student's work (and, third one down, one by the class's assistant, Asa Waterworth, who also kindly photographed the work from which the gifs were created):

 

 

 

We also tried a number of different  ways of painting on transparent layers. And at the end, we spray-painted disks for mobiles using stencils students cut from mylar, or sprayed over natural materials.

Governor's Institute on the Arts Sculpture Class

I'm back from the Governor's Institute on the Arts (GIA), held at Castleton University from June 24 - July 8. It was exhausting, exhilarating, and very wonderful. There were about 80 students participating in many different classes at the GIA this year, and I taught a sculpture class and a painting class.

The main project for the sculpture class was making an assemblage in a suitcase related to the theme of migration. I had gathered old-fashioned suitcases (the kind without wheels), which I brought with me, along with several boxes of "stuff" I thought might be useful in creating the assemblages. The students were very resourceful about finding other materials too (like dirt, wood, grapevines, and stones). One of the students suggested a title for our installation: Case Studies.

Here are the individual works. Two students made pieces related to their own families' immigration stories -- an ancestor who came from Italy and opened a farmstand, and a great grandfather who came from Eastern Europe after a terrible massacre, hoping for a better life, but wound up working in a coal mine at the age of 12.

Two of the suitcases made work directly addressing the current global migration crisis, the first one , showing two sides of the southern border.

The one below presents the cases of children removed from their families, with their "files" and possessions mounted in the case (which was a government-issued briefcase).

The last suitcase sculpture was a conceptual piece, in which the "borders" represent artificial barriers separating sections of soil and stones that are essentially the same.

The sculpture class also made mobiles and altered books. All the work was extremely impressive, and I felt privileged to participate in this wonderful program. Thanks also to Haleigh West, a wonderful class assistant!

In a future posting I will show work from the Painting class.