“Love and Practice,” the current exhibition at Catamount Arts’ Fried Family Gallery, offers the visitor more than it may have intended to do. It includes paired paintings and sculptures with the artists’ smock/shirt/pants and other apparel worn during their time in artistic pursuit. All eight artists are also staff at the Vermont Studio Center in nearby Johnson so in addition to studio time, they also serve to fulfill the daily tasks that keep that organization running.
The gallery’s introductory notes inform us that these textiles and objects are discarded, yet here they serve as another dimension in the creative process. They are mounted above, below or just dangling from the works on exhibit. Indeed, there is a dialogue of sorts going on between painting, sculpture and discarded cloth. The discerning eye will see this conversation in the drips, spots, smudges, blots and stains of pigment present in the works. In some of the works, the artists’ garb is devoid of stains, and the conversation is more private: A favorite cap, a pair of shoes, a clean pair of well-worn studio pants whose ragged edges and dangling hem tell a different story.
Bug Pericles’ “Neptune lives in my fumigated lung” is an outsize abstract work consisting of acrylics, oil, candle wax, buttons, jewels and journal sheets, flanked and supported by two thick lilac wood branches. Below it hangs the artist’s denim shirt, attached by the cuffs as if holding up the painting. Upon closer inspection, I see that the cuffs are nailed to the wood, with large iron nails. When I stand back and look at the outstretched arms and drape of the denim, I’m reminded of 14th century paintings of the crucifixion. The rich thick dabs of reds and pinks, and ochres in the painting assert their history in the smudges of the same on the denim which in the manner of installation serves almost as a smaller canvas telling a different related story.