Bromfield Gallery
450 Harrison Avenue
Boston
April 1 through 25
IT'S AS IF ONE WERE GAZING DOWN TWO DIVERGENT ROADS CITED IN A 1916 ROBERT FROST POEM: "THE ROAD NOT TAKEN." TWO ARTISTS WALK THE OVERGROWN PATH OF THEIR OWN CHILDHOOD MEMORIES; ONE UTILIZES A COMPOSITE OF IMAGES, WHILE THE OTHER DEPLOYS A TROMPE L'OEIL MONTAGE. THUS TWO PERSONAL TRAILS TRACK POETICALLY INTO THE PAST, CONVERGING BACK TO A SINGLE POINT OF ORIGIN IN A SHOW TITLED "ARTIST BIO" AT THE BROMFIELD GALLERY.
Two distinct interpretations are typically given to the Robert Frost poem, one treating it as literal and the other as irony. Likewise, artist Kathy A. Halamka’s journey “Postmemory Quilts” is an ironic composite of real images from her childhood, concocted with evocative, borrowed icons of her Korean cultural heritage; artist Gary Duehr’s trompe l’oeil images are framed as literal “Fractures,” albeit tendered as retro-fiction, superimposed over his childhood family photographs retrieved from a trip home when his father died a few years ago.
In her South End and in his Somerville studio, I sat down respectively with
Halamka and Duehr for a leisurely discourse to view their works and hear them delineate the impetus of their art..
Halamka said her work is mostly about energy and transition — and memories. Her art is expressed as a floor-installation: a selection of 150 equilateral triangles of birch wood, each piece
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