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Artscope Magazine | January/February 2025

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CAPSULE PREVIEWS FOR ARTSCOPE 96

// Capsule Previews, January/February 2022

Gary Buch, From the Toula Glacier, at Cove Street Arts.
by Brian Goslow
“Straits of Magellan,” an exhibition featuring paintings of the southern tip of South America by Lola Chaisson, takes place from January 5 through February 12 at 6 Bridges Gallery, 77 Main Street, Maynard, Massachusetts. The show will feature sketches, photos and memories in which Chaisson captures the spirit of a voyage taken shortly before the pandemic. “Rather than focus on being ‘stuck at home,’ I picked up my brushes and looked back to the open vistas where mountains stretched up to the clouds and down to the sea, in my mind, switching the view of my living room back to the views along the passage from Punta Arenas to Ushuaia via Cape Horn.” An opening reception is scheduled for January 8 from 1-3 p.m.; the exhibition will also be viewable online at 6bridges.gallery.
In curating “Passing the Edge,” Leonie Bradbury has put together a show that “celebrates artists’ mark making as a meditative labor in order to capture the wondrous world around us.” The exhibition of framed and unframed works on paper features works by Kim Carlino, Michele Lauriat and Jane Sherrill, and will take place from January 6 through February 24 at the Fort Point Arts Community Gallery, 300 Summer Street, Boston, Massachusetts. “The tactile nature of the works on paper are paired with the individual obsessions of the artists with pattern and mark, creating a sense of the hand as metronome. The act of mark making helps us keep time with the world, while also compelling us forward. One could say that such mark making served as a life raft during the Covid Pandemic, but it has been there for most of our lives.” A reception is scheduled for January 27 at 5 p.m.
How we survived the past two years is also the focus of “CONFLUENCE,” works created over the past many months in isolation by Meg Bloom, Phyllis Crowley, Roberta Friedman and Kathy Kane that can be seen from January 7 through 30 at City Gallery, 948 State Street, New Haven, Connecticut. “It is a convergence of our separate visual imagery, presented in one small space, without attempting to come together to make a singular statement,” Bloom said. For Crowley, confluence is about “combining images, collaging ideas and associations, and considering distortions” to help her bring together an emotional experience. Friedman’s recent work focuses on process and how working in a confined or limited space changes how we create. “With the intention of exploring the paths that a long narrow surface would take me on, I set out to delve into the confluence of that shape and the encaustic mono prints that emerged on rolls of Asian papers, or on thin tissue papers.” The end result was “a cacophony of color and expression.” Kane immersed herself in the creation and culture of kimonos that she “painted and collaged, assembled and completed in situ,” a visceral process she called, “instinctive, unreasoning and most enjoyable.” 

Domenic Esposito, an artist and social activist, uses his artwork to convey his painful experience “playing the role of intermediary, protector and savior in his brother’s struggle with addiction, isolation and detachment from family and society.” His gigantic opioid spoon sculptures, placed in front of the FDA and major pharmaceutical companies, gained widespread attention and played a major role in calling attention to the issue and holding those companies accountable for the effect their products have had on society. His new exhibition, “Vox Clamantis,” will contain much smaller, but no less powerful, work during its stay from January 7 through 30 at the Piano Craft Gallery, 793 Tremont Street, Boston, Massachusetts. “Through his work, he shares the underlying ‘collateral damage of opioid addiction’ and what it means for all those affected by this tragic, destructive force.”

Over 20 paintings exploring “the weight of burden” by Manchester, Maine-based artist Hélène Farrar will be on view from January 9 through February 25 in “What We Carry” at the Maine Jewish Museum, 267 Congress Street, Portland, Maine. The encaustic works were created in response to the current social climate and culture. “We react and respond to the world without one breathe in between,” Farrar said. “We don’t see the someone next to us. That someone could be carrying with them an entire room-full of drama, a deep disconnect to others, severe loneliness, or a radiant joy that could spread like wildfire. Where has it become our nature to engage before listening or looking?” A reception is scheduled from January 9 from 2 to 4 p.m. and an artist talk is slated for January 23 at 2 p.m. Updates can be found at HeleneFarrar.com.
Copley Society of Art, 158 Newbury Street, Boston, Massachusetts, continues its tradition of starting each year by introducing its new membership to gallery viewers; this time around, its “New Members Show 2022” will include the 27 members that have been accepted into the gallery in 2020 and 2021 and takes place from January 13 through February 13. “Selected by the Membership Committee of the Copley Society of Art, new members are accepted for membership only if their work is truly outstanding. This year, our new artist members represent a great variety of artistic genres and media, including; pastel, photography, oil and watercolor.” The exhibition will also be viewable online at copleysociety.org.
“Shared Habitat Earth,” a combination exhibition and call for action, features over 20 artists from the Greater Boston area — including June August, Claudine Bing, Helen Canetta, Richard Alan Cohen, BJ Comerford, Barbara Eskin, Barbara Fletcher, Gillian Frazier, Becky Kisabeth Gibbs, Jill Goldman-Callahan, Lisa Goren, Marjorie Kaye, Marianne A. Kinzer, Yvonne Lamothe, Susan Leskin, CJ Lori, Preetha Mahadevan, Lisa Reindorf, Nora Charney Rosenbaum and James Varnum — and will take place from January 14 through March 4 at the Conant Gallery in the Richardson-Mess Performing Arts Center at Lawrence Academy, 25 Powderhouse Road (just off or Route 40), Groton, Massachusetts. A festive opening including live music is scheduled for January 14; regular gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from noon-4 p.m.

“SPECTRA,” the creative cross-state teaming of Tracy Silva Barbosa (Duende Glass, New Bedford), Kim Carlino (Eastworks, Easthampton)and Sandrine Colson (Western Avenue Studios, Lowell), remains on view through March 5 at the ClipArt Gallery at Clippership Wharf, 65 Lewis Street, East Boston, Massachusetts. “The show represents a plurality of spectrums where art exists, whole and valid unto itself; or the wavelengths of energetic radiation; extending beyond both materia and mechanica to the truly spectral — that gossamer grail of Post Contemporary Art: the sublime. The visual melodies of Barbosa, Carlino and Colson’s works harmonize through their innate affinities commanding a glimpse outside the everyday: a golden hour of an exhibition, their momentary impressions immortalized. Works range from oversized to compact.” Gallery hours are Saturday from noon-4 p.m. and by appointment.Celebrating the career of an American artist renowned for his mastery of tone, color and composition, and for a teaching career that deeply influenced future generations of painters, “Lennart Anderson: A Retrospective” opens on January 14 and continues through March 18 at the Chauncey-Stillman Gallery at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, 84 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, Connecticut. “Curated by artistic directors Amaya Gurpide and Jordan Sokol in collaboration with the artist’s estate and the New York Studio School, the exhibition brings together over 25 paintings and drawings from both public and private collections, including paintings from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Bank of New York Mellon Collection, as well as from Anderson’s own gallery, Leigh Morse Fine Arts.” Gallery hours are daily from 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Through her art, Tehran, Iran-born Haleh Fotowat “aspires to explore subconscious forces of the mind that give rise to spontaneous gestures she makes as she draws. Equally inspiring for her are the forms and structures found in all forms of life, from subcellular ultrastructure of different types of cells to macro scale shape of a multicellular organism.” Her latest collection of works, “Multicellularity” will be on view from January 22 through February 27 at Galatea Fine Art, 460 Harrison Avenue #B-6, Boston, Massachusetts, sharing the SoWa gallery space with Frank Capezzera’s “The Self as Universe: Figurative Musings in Cosmology (or the All-Encompassing Universe)” and “Unquiet,” a showcase of works Newton Open Studios curated by Claudia Fiks. All three shows will have their opening reception during the February 4 First Friday from 6 to 8 p.m.
“The Carriers: Joiri Minaya and Anne Austin Pearce” bonds together “distinct bodies of work by artists who question the colonial urges and histories around collecting, controlling, and exploiting nature and representation.” Minaya’s “Containers” series of performative photographs show her in natural environments wearing bodysuits constructed out of fabric patterned with tropical flora and fauna. Pearce’s small sculptures exist “somewhere between collectible decorative glass vessels and emollient blobs.” The show is scheduled to run through February 26 in the Hunt-Cavanagh Gallery at Providence College Galleries’ Reilly Gallery at the Smith Center for the Arts, 1 Cunningham Square, Providence, Rhode Island.
“Nourishing the Senses: Current Works by the Members of the National Association of Women Artists, Massachusetts Chapter” will be on view from January 26 through February 19 at Wedeman Gallery, Yamawaki Artand Cultural Center, Lasell University, 47 Myrtle Avenue, Newton, Massachusetts. “Our five senses create moments delivered through time—historical moments, ours or others’ epic stories, along with hands-on experiments exploring the mystery of the mind and body.” The show’s opening reception is scheduled for January 30 from 5-7 p.m.
Featuring over 40 paintings created between 1818 and 1886, “The Poetry of Nature: Hudson River School Landscapes from the New-York Historical Society” will be on view from January 28 through May 22 at the New Britain Museum of American Art, 56 Lexington Street, New Britain, Connecticut. The exhibition “illustrates America’s scenic splendor as seen through the eyes of over 25 leading Hudson River School artists, including Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, John F. Kensett, Albert Bierstadt, as well as lesser-known, but important artists, Josephine Walters, Christopher Pearse Cranch and Louisa Davis Minot, among others and will include the addition of works by Robert S. Duncanson, the first Black artist of the Hudson River School to gain international acclaim.”
Catalina Viejo Lopez de Roda’s “Self Care” exhibition of drawings, paintings and animation remains on view through January 29 at HallSpace, 950 Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester, Massachusetts. “The works in ‘Self Care’ were made in response to the pandemic,” she said. “The groups of women that appeared in my previous work have disappeared and a single woman remains in isolation in each of these works. The voyeuristic qualities which have permeated my work have moved from private to public spaces. The women in these works live in abundant wild environments which at times threaten to consume them. Each figure accepts that cats falling from the sky, lactating at a public museum or getting ambushed by a rainbow are all part of their existence. Each woman has no goal and no desire to be anything but what she is.”
Seventeen powerful and energetic alpine scenes captured in oil, watercolor and graphite make up the current “Gary Buch: Avalanche of Paint” exhibition that’s on view through February 5 at Cove Street Arts, 71 Cove Street, Portland, Maine. “My interest lies in the struggle to arrive at a sustainable image, abandoning its mounting history, leaving a sense of insight and possibilities. Mapping the essence of mountains without illustration, but rather a portraiture of immersion in the mountain process, akin to ideoplastic rendering or what is known versus what is seen.” The gallery notes that there’s an urgent value to the Maine painter’s capturing of “the awe-inspiring majesty of these ancient, imposing, and seemingly immovable natural monuments in the flux of climate change.”
(Due to changing safety restrictions, please call the gallery or museum prior to departure to confirm the venue is open or if there are any special requirements needed to attend. Capsule Previews are compiled, in part, through information gathered from press releases sent to Artscope.)