A different way to experience art

This Sunday, April 22nd, from 10:30-11:30am you will have the opportunity to see art in a new way with Exercises for the Quiet Eye (EQE), a guided gallery experience for artists and visitors with Annie VF Storr, Faculty, Brandeis University. As a complement to the exhibition More Questions than Answers, mixed-media works by Conny Goelz-Schmitt, Storr will lead participants in a series of exercises emphasizing experiences of art that encourage patient reflection, appreciation, and an attempt to avoid the rush to understand, or determine a set interpretation for what we see.

“Works of art engage us, through senses, through intellect and through emotion, in rich, complex, rewarding, and inconclusive ways. In the moment, they can suspend us in time, fully open and aware. That experience in itself is precious and rare. It has been called “the transcendent moment” however long it lasts.” EQE aims to cultivate this experience of suspended consciousness, and to give viewers habits of practice to reach it in their personal encounters with art. Let this be your introduction to a new way of viewing art, and take it with you on future visits to galleries and museums.

Conny Goelz Schmitt: More Questions than Answers is on view in the Kingston Main and Center Galleries, and On-Kyeong Seong: Displacement is on view in the Kingston Project Space through April 29, 2018.

See a review of More Questions than Answers in Delicious Line:
https://deliciousline.org/review/236

When artists are Among Friends

The exhibition Among Friends at the Kingston Gallery in Boston, is a rare opportunity to see the confluence of years of dedicated and professional art-making through long-time friendships.

‘Downhill Road’ by Judith Brassard Brown

Though Judith Brassard Brown‘s and Wendy Goldberg’s approach to the landscape and their use of materials in expressing its sensibility differs, their work complements each other in a unique and unexpected way. Artfully hung, the show intersperses Brown’s textured and layered larger scaled mixed-media paintings with Goldberg’s moody, intimate pastels along with a focus on the poetry of Martha Rhodes. Rhodes graced the opening reception of this show with a beautiful reading of her multi-layered poems from her latest book, The Thin Wall.

 

‘Early Spring Clearing’ by Wendy Goldberg

Though they work with different media and with different scales, each has a tenacious connection with the internal and external landscape of this human journey. It is this preoccupation that has kept them in contact as they pursued their education and developed their work over the years. Funny, intimate, romantic, scathing, unnerving and beautiful in turn, the paintings, pastels, and poetry in Among Friends comprise a show worth viewing before it closes on November 26th.

Among Friends is on view in the Kingston Main and Center Galleries through November 26, 2017. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday 12-5pm. We will be closed on Thursday, November 23 for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Gray Area

by Veronica A Pérez

In a moment of strained societal binary, the visibility of anyone who inhabits a marginal space becomes extremely more important. There is never a moment when we can see things for what they are. Everything’s changing, constantly in flux. What happens when we can pluck a moment from the crowd and examine it? Would there be clarity or more confusion? In terms of art, these grey areas provide throughways for discussing and sharing personal stories, not to simply highlight difference, rather to embrace. Given the particularly divisive time we live it, it becomes imperative to forge dialogue through creative intervention and to signify that aside from our inherent differences, we’re all in this together.

The Kingston Gallery is calling for new work for an exhibition entitled “Gray Area”. We are looking for artists whose work is relevant to our current contemporary world in its lack of clarity or abundance of ambiguity. The subject is open to interpretation, and can address the title conceptually or formally. How does this moment of murkiness provide you with understanding? Or does it disorient? Is the endless barrage of the 24-hour news cycle breaking you down or building you up? There is so much to that is being said in these ambiguous spaces today. And it’s time that we speak.

ONLINE SUBMISSION DEADLINE:  Wednesday, November 22nd, 2017 @ 5PM

The full Call For Art is on Kingston Gallery’s website:

http://www.kingstongallery.com/exhibitions/2018/february-gray-area.php

This exhibition is juried by a committee of 6 Kingston Gallery Artists: Mira Cantor, Susan Emmerson, Julie S. Graham, Veronica A. Perez, Jamal Thorne, and Chantal Zakari.

 

SUBMISSION LINK: https://kingstongallery.submittable.com/submit

**Please prepare carefully; no revisions are possible after submission is complete.

Notification: Friday, December 15th, 2017 (by email). 
Delivery of work: Sunday, January 28th, 5-7PM & Monday, January 29th, 10AM-2PM
Exhibition: January 31-February 25, 2018 
Opening Reception: February 2, 2018 from 5-8pm
Pick up work: Sunday, February 25th, 5-7PM; Monday, Feb. 26th, 10AM-12PM

Questions? Email: submissions@kingstongallery.com

Unexpected Detours Create Openings in a Once Rigid Studio Practice

by Lynda Schlosberg

After my solo show The Conscious Web at Kingston this past February, my studio practice took a three-month hiatus as I tended to a family member’s medical emergency.  My life was put on hold for weeks and then months. While that was all happening, I also moved my studio, taking my time making improvements to the new space as I slowly moved in. Once the dust settled I quickly began preparing for my Project Space show.

Sometimes a break from the creative process is a good thing. But too long a break, and disruptive “life-related” detours, had my creative thinking—and process—in a bit of an upheaval, not to mention a brand-new workspace that I had to adjust to. Usually a studio change is not a big problem for me, but this new space (a nearly triple increase in size) demanded some physical and emotional adjustments. I needed to find a specific way back into my work, and to feel comfortable in this new space.

While I had been working the previous year and a half on the paintings for The Concsious Web, new ideas had been steadily floating around in my head. Some of these were strong enough to break through the clutter of the insanity of my life and I used that as a starting point. Often in my process I “test” patterns and colors before committing hours and hours of laborious mark-making only to find I made the wrong choice. I do this by painting on clear acetate on top of an existing painting. The little test sheets become a kind of work of their own. When I was developing Breeding Ground I made this test sheet:

I loved how the spaces between the dots made the “threads” in the work visible by the absence of marks. I wanted to try a whole painting with just the dots defining the threads to see what would happen. So that’s where I started. I also decided that the easiest way back into my work was dropping all color decisions and working only in black and white.

It started with these four pencil drawings. I was interested to see how the exact same composition of threads would look in a variety of presenting them, as solid lines (positive and negative), and as dots (both positive and negative):

These studies then led to a whole bunch of studies that I worked on for a couple of months. Working on paper mostly, and combinations of graphite and gouache. (and yes, a few color pieces thrown in)

By now it was July, and time to get serious on a big piece for my upcoming exhibit! I decided to take yet another new approach to my process and started with the inspiration of a satellite photograph of glaciers in Greenland. This generated a starting point with some very large shapes defining a lot of the composition.

It started here:

Over the next two months I slowly introduced all of the mark making I had been playing around with in this piece. Going slower than usual and being very careful and conscious of my decisions.

And ended up with this finished body of work (just in time) for my exhibit Interwoven.

 

Interwoven is on view in the Kingston Project Space through October 29, 2017. For more information visit: http://www.kingstongallery.com/exhibitions/2017/october-julie-graham-incidental-matters.php

Improbable combinations and Incidental Matters

by Jessica Burko

Upon entering the gallery space this month it is the quiet subtlety of the exhibition that first makes an impression. Incidental Matters is the latest body of work by Julie S Graham in which she portrays her reactions to the randomness of structures and histories that she sees impacting one another in time and space. These personal encounters reflect the arbitrary relationships between seemingly disparate forms and an echo of conversations between them can be heard as voices within the gallery walls. Graham finds inspiration for her work in industrial spaces where she contemplates marks on walls and details in the architecture often missed by the casual eye. It’s the minutiae in these spaces that speak to her of the past and the rich history of who and what came to pass.

The title of her exhibition Incidental Matters is meaningful in the understanding of her focus; what appears secondary and inconsequential becomes substantive and imbued with relational meaning. Each piece on view is a multi-layered painting transformed through its development; sanded, scraped, built and rebuilt. Of her work Graham explains, “I favor unusual color juxtapositions, materials that are used purely out of functional need and shapes that that are not intentionally designed, but rather appear from the history of their making.” It’s this organic process that fosters an exchange between canvasses, mimicking observed things connected at random in the world.

The center gallery of Graham’s exhibition is produced with a slightly separate approach. This grouping, presented in unexpected configurations of small works, is titled Remains. The canvasses in this adjacent space begin their lives from leftover paint and surplus materials from larger works. As Graham explains, “Each piece holds the histories of preceding works until it finally takes on a life, and reason, of its own.” With this statement she circles back to her original insight of seeing beneath the surface into the often hidden nature of change.

Incidental Matters is on view at Kingston Gallery through October 29, 2017. For more information visit: http://www.kingstongallery.com/exhibitions/2017/october-julie-graham-incidental-matters.php

Join us this weekend to view Julie S Graham’s evocative work while experiencing live music with Palaver Strings. Sunday, October 15, 1:30 – 3:30pm. This event is free and open to the public.

Thoughts on naming artwork

by Kathleen Gerdon Archer

Kathleen Gerdon Archer, A Single Picture Appeared, 34″ x 48”
2017, polypropylene print on Sintra

Gallery owners prefer that artists work have titles but deciding on one can be frustrating work for an artist.

My titles are sentence fragments taken from favorite books: those that perfectly explain in words what I am saying with my photography. It is amazing that writers, photographers and other creatives can portray the very same thoughts, as if of one mind, in such uniquely different media. 

My recent photographic series, Fare Well: The Art of Ending, employs a narrative structure with timelessness, geology, and personal family history at its core. My effort is to show the scope and immensity of one life.

To make my photographs I first build an ice sculpture filled with memorabilia pertaining to the person I am profiling. With each form I create, an individual life is celebrated in all its scope and importance.

Tinkers, the beautifully written Pulitzer Prize winning book by author Paul Harding became the source of the titles for my work of the last seven years. It is a huge story in a small volume. The Pulitzer board called the novel “a powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality.” 

The sentence fragments I choose as titles pair the author’s beautiful words with my abstract image, leaving room for the viewers interpretation.

Kathleen Gerdon Archer, Phantoms in a Silver Mist, 36 x 36”, 2017,
Polypropylene Print mounted on Sintra under Plexiglas

Kathleen Gerdon Archer, Sleep is Another World, 42 x 48”, 2017,
Polypropylene Print mounted on Sintra under Plexiglas

Kathleen Gerdon Archer, Not at Ease in this World, 45 x 48”, 2017,
Polypropylene Print mounted on Sintra under Plexiglas

The exhibition Fare Well: The Art of Ending is on view at Kingston Gallery through October 1, 2017.

Like a moth to a flame…

By Laurel McMechan

Our installation team curated the exhibition heated to unite the space through a system of chromatic hot spots. As you enter the gallery, the crisp lemon yellows, intense oranges and pinks connect across your view. Like a moth to a flame, Rachel Sevanich’s painting Circus Act I pulls you into the farthest gallery.

heated, Installation view. Photo by Tatiana Flis

The formal elements of line and pattern undergird the rambunctious color of the exhibition. Swirling lines from Rachel Thern’s paintings, the cast shadows of Rachel Mello’s wire drawings and stitched threads adorning On-Keong Syeong’s paintings echo the fragile stilted legs of Tatiana Flis’s delicate sculptures.

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Like a patch of shade to rest in, the middle and rear gallery spaces swim with earth tones, calmly smoldering like the intense red of fresh cherry juice staining your hands and the effervescent green of ripe watermelon rind. Nat Martin’s black and white photographs remind you of the inky void after the fire has gone out and winter’s chill before the spring blooms again.

Nat Martin, Landscape #3, archival inkjet print, 2017

heated is on view through August 27, with a Closing Reception from 12 – 3pm. Included in this exhibition are Kingston artists Jamie Bowman, Tatiana Flis, Jane Lincoln, Nat Martin, Laurel McMechan, Rachel Mello, On-Kyeong Seong, Rachel Sevanich, Rachel Thern, and Anne Sargent Walker.