Exhibitions: Current | Upcoming | Past
Exhibitions: Past
While We Waited: Art in Response
Works by
Adria Arch
Lisa Barthelson
Phyllis Ewen
Christine Kim
Stephen Remick
Susan Strauss
Milo Winter
C.C. Wolf
February 3 – April 7, 2022
“How do I begin? I am not the first person to write about art during the pandemic and there are already so many thoughtful and provocative responses about what it means to live with the ongoing impact of Covid.”
—Stories From the Pandemic, May 6, 2020
In the beginning, I was at times relieved to step outside of my routine. The lockdown offered a welcome perspective about what I do, what we all do. Having a different relationship to time allowed me to pay attention in unexpected ways to my environment. And as I began to reshape my relationships (and expectations) to so many things, I realized that the familiar expressions of life are that way, in part, simply because we expect them to be that way.
Our first exhibition of 2022 features the work of Adria Arch, Lisa Barthelson, Phyllis Ewen, Christine Kim, Stephen Remick, Susan Strauss, Milo Winter, and C.C. Wolf; eight of the artists who originally participated in our Instagram Exhibition Series in 2020 called Stories From the Pandemic.
Their works meander among notions of landscape and memory, waiting and possibility, and are a vehicle to document and record impressions of what we are all experiencing. Taken together these works offer structure as solace and a means to confront and shape what we cannot control.
For Lisa Barthelson and C.C. Wolf, the impulses in their process of making are very distinct, as are their interests in subject matter, and the compositional territories they examine. But elements they share are attempts at making sense of things.
C.C. Wolf confronts the shifting fragmentation of the familiar into less comforting structures, but nonetheless she captures the essence of our fears of the unknown in richly symbolic, succinct, and powerful images. Lisa Barthelson’s collages make use of the resources available to her. She repurposes materials from her studio as well as from her “family’s post-consumer waste stream” into collages. Sewing and knitting also comprise her work.
Adria Arch’s suspended works are an invitation to connect. “In an age of rampant consumerism, the questioning of authority, and a dearth of honest human connection, these installations call for physical engagement. They remind us that humans crave interaction and that we were all once playful and curious children.”
Phyllis Ewen has been making daily drawings since the quarantine began. Her view then was the garden, ever present but ever shifting, especially during a time of year, when so many plants made themselves known again, a response to the awakening and urgency of the spring season.
Christine Kim made “The Covid Suit” at the beginning of the pandemic. She wrote then, “I was at home with a sense of anxiety, in an apocalyptic state of mind. Using materials that I had at hand, I intuitively began the process of making this piece. It was not until the completion of this costume that I came to realize how relevant the use of protective gear was to the current Covid pandemic.”
Susan Strauss splits her time between New England and the Southwest. The works in the exhibition are “about discovering the spaciousness and freedom of being far away from home in a new place that is very different. They are about waiting and contemplation. They appear descriptions of the present.“
Stephen Remick is a prolific artist and most of us know him as a landscape painter. These small portraits of healthcare workers caring for patients with Covid-19 are strikingly different. The paintings are inspired by selfies found on line of nurses and doctors. They are exhausted and vulnerable, their faces bruised by masks.
Milo Winter wrote, “Since landscape is my art, it has been hard to be stuck inside, so I’m doing paintings from remembered experience. The images tend to be divided roughly in half, which could be related to my feeling of being inside and outside at the same time, perhaps a sense of isolation.”
Art, even in its most conceptual forms, is often an act of materiality, something that relies on tangible consequences for conveyance. Validation comes in many forms. Now as we mark another year in the struggle against the pandemic, we still do not know what lies ahead for any of us. But we can take a small measure of comfort that we are all on the same journey together.
Kathleen Hancock
Director
Biographies
Adria Arch
Adria Arch is an artist living in the Boston area. Her recent work features sculptures made from lightweight plastic and comprised of biomorphic shapes. Suspended from the ceiling and walls or floor, this work combines the formal concerns of painting while extending into space like sculpture, thus their hybrid nature.
Arch has had solo exhibitions at Danforth Art in Framingham, MA, the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, MA, and the Hunt Gallery at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. She has completed site specific murals at Lesley University’s Porter Square building in Cambridge, MA, Stonehill College, and Danforth Art in Framingham, MA. Her work is included in many private and public collections including the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Fidelity Corporation, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Most recently, Arch showed installations at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, Brattleboro Art Museum in Vermont and at the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA.
Lisa Barthelson
Lisa Barthelson grew up in a family of artists and has been making art since childhood. Her work is inspired by a reverence for the natural environment, and the drive for sustainability through re-imagining and re-purposing of the byproducts of family-living excess. Barthelson has exhibited throughout New England and New York. Her mixed media, printmaking, sculpture, and installation work have been featured in curated exhibitions of contemporary art at the Fitchburg Art Museum, the Newport Art Museum and the Danforth Art Museum.
Commissions include site specific wall sculptures for Kronos. Inc. and Worcester State University. Artist-in-residence fellowships have been awarded by Vermont Studio Center, VT, Playa, OR, and The Kimmel Harding Nelson Arts Center, NE. Barthelson works from her studio in Worcester, and from her home in Rutland MA.
Phyllis Ewen
Phyllis Ewen’s studio is in the Brickbottom Artist Building, Somerville, MA, where she was a founding member. Her work has been exhibited extensively and is in many public collections, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Boston Public Library, Harvard and MIT, the Decordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and in numerous corporate and private collections.
In her “Sculptural Drawings”, she explores the rising seas and drying rivers affected by global warming. Her recent series, LAND AND WATER, was recently featured in the Spotlight Gallery at Lesley University, College of Art and Design; and has shown at the Rekjanes Art Museum in Iceland in 2016-2017. In the recent years Ewen has had solo and small group shows in Boston, Cape Cod, Maine and Fall River MA.
Christine Kim
Christine Kim is a mixed-media artist with a BFA in Jewelry & Metalsmithing from The Rhode Island School of Design. Her experience is in precious metals and stone setting but her current form of artistic expression is costume design. She models each costume within a specific setting to execute the narrative of the piece.
Stephen Remick
Stephen Remick was born and raised in Vermont. After receiving an associate degree in architecture from Vermont Technical College, he moved to New Bedford, MA, earning a BFA in Painting at Swain School of Design in 1986 where he met his future wife, the artist Anne Carrozza. He worked in Boston at Jordan Marsh’s in-house design firm for a year. He started a painting and paperhanging company and moved to Dartmouth where the business grew to a dozen employees. Slowly, he reduced employees to just himself to concentrate on art. Anne and Steve raised a son and daughter, now adults. Remick mostly paints landscapes, with a heavy bent on winter, and abstracts, but in 2020 he took a full-stop, painting portraits of healthcare workers in shock from working with COVID-19 patients. Currently, landscapes are making a return with a concentration on plein air painting when the weather permits. His paintings are in private collections throughout the US and abroad.
Susan Strauss
Susan Strauss is a founding member of the Brickbottom Artists Building in Somerville and has received grants from the Millay Colony, Mass Arts Lottery, Mass Artists Foundation, and Public Works RI. Her work has been exhibited in many group and solo shows throughout the New England area including Gallery at 4, Tiverton, RI; Deedee Shattuck Gallery, Westport, MA; Gallery NAGA, Boston, MA; Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI; New Bedford Art Museum, New Bedford, MA; Tufts University, UMass Boston, Boston University; Prince Street Gallery, New York, NY, and Atlantic Gallery, New York, NY. She lives and works in Westport, MA and Cottonwood, AZ.
Milo Winter
Milo Winter is a Providence based painter. He studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the University of Oregon. He has taught classes and arts workshops to adults and children of all ages. Exhibitions include Ruth Siegel Gallery, New York; Van Vessem Gallery, Tiverton, RI; AS220 in Providence; the Pawtucket Arts Collaborative Foundation Show; and at Hamilton House in Providence. His work is held in a number of private collections.
C.C. Wolf
Born in New York City, C.C. Wolf studied at Hunter College and the Art Student’s League before earning her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. For three years she lived, taught, and exhibited her work in Florence, Italy. She returned to New England and continued to exhibit her work both locally, nationally, and internationally. She is a founding member of 19 on Paper, a Rhode Island-based art group founded in 1986. She is also president of East Side Art Center located in Providence since 1992.
