Rachel Portesi was nine years old when she took her first Polaroid of a Sunday morning cartoon on the television screen. At 16, she began taking photographs of people and places with a Pentax K1000. Nearly three decades later, she continues refining photography in her Vermont studio as a uniquely personal art form while adding new techniques such as wet plate collodion tintypes, film and 3D imagery to her multimedia art forms. Portesi’s work in various media is featured in the exhibition, “Rachel Portesi: Looking Glass,” on view from January 15 through March 1 at The von Auersperg Gallery at Deerfield Academy, in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Among her most notable, and now recognized work, are her hair portraits that use the early photographic method of collodion tintype, which she discovered after Polaroid film was no longer available. “It’s finicky, slow and time-consuming,” … [Read more...] about THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
Features
A CONTEMPORARY TAKE
Only 45 minutes beyond Portland, in Lewiston, Maine, a winter trekker will revel in two exhibitions at the Bates College Art Museum unique to its own holdings, on view through March 18. On the main floor, in conversation with Bates’s renowned Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection, Museum Director Dan Mills has brought together eight contemporary artists whose works illuminate the wide-ranging sensibility of this Modernist giant who styled himself the “Painter of Maine.” The lower gallery showcases the cream of a collection of contemporary photographic prints recently donated to Bates College by the well-known Maine photographer and philanthropist, Barbara Morris Goodbody. “And So Did Pleasure...” follows as an inspired second act to last year’s major Hartley exhibition at Bates. Each artist has selected one of Hartley’s drawings from the collection that speaks to their work and offers … [Read more...] about A CONTEMPORARY TAKE
AN INNER SENSE OF WHOLENESS
Olivia Bernard’s exhibition of sculpture and two-dimensional work spreads out under the sloping roof of The Stoneleigh- Burnham School’s Geissler Gallery. Hanging sheets of white scrim bound the space on one side, separating her work from that of another well-known installation artist, Karen Dolmanisth. Bernard’s self-curated selections, which span her output of the last 26 years, combine earlier with later works to propose more of a gist than a direct path connecting the lot. Each sculpture demands enough space that, when one is in its presence, the next one hovering nearby does not impinge on one’s sense of being alone with another being. Each piece holds its own, capturing the viewer’s attention and indeed anxiety. As with Giacometti’s figures, one finds that on more intimate approach the works feel larger and more charged. The abstract work is grounded in cumulative experiences … [Read more...] about AN INNER SENSE OF WHOLENESS
BEAUTY AND MORTALITY
t’s probably not a coincidence that Vaughn Sills’ exhibition opened the day after the area’s first frost warning, the warm tones of “This Precious Life” bringing needed heat to those in attendance at its opening reception in the Art Center Gallery at Anna Maria College in the Central Massachusetts town of Paxton. The exhibition, billed as “a select retrospective view of the last 40 years of a photographic life,” is broken into four portions: “Knowing Our Distance” (images exploring the past and present in Sills’ life), “Beyond Words” (utilizing objects and plants found outside her grandparents’ Prince Edward Island cottage), “True Poems Flee” (photographs taken of structures and atmospheric events in P.E.I.) and “Inside Outside” (still-life floral settings infront of photographs from P.E.I., an act she calls, “the juxtaposition of the human-inhabited environment with the wild, untamed … [Read more...] about BEAUTY AND MORTALITY
WELCOMED IN SOMERVILLE
Somerville Museum is hosting the exhibition titled “Sanctuary City,” organized and curated by Julia Csekö, the recipient of the museum’s Community Curator Grant. The exhibition is a group show that includes emerging and well-established local artists. Invited by Csekö, artists were requested to present contemporary artwork that resonates with the theme by exposing sensitive considerations, challenging the idea, the significance, elicited by individual interpretations of the term sanctuary and the concept of a sanctuary city. In 1987, Somerville’s City Council adopted a resolution establishing Somerville as a sanctuary city. It seems appropriate for the museum to serve as a platform for artists to express their understandings and communicate personal experiences associated with the theme. The concept becamehighly polarizing and has been questioned nationally. Csekö is a … [Read more...] about WELCOMED IN SOMERVILLE
ART FOR OUR EARTH
Printmaker Bethia Brehmer’s Wisconsin youth has stayed with her through her changes of venues from Sheboygan to Madison, to Amherst, Massachusetts and Cape Cod, where she’s lived for decades. Her vegetarian, pacifist parents took her on walks through the woods instilling in her a desire for peace, harmony and nature. She’s a world traveler who lived in Ghana, and has visited India, China, Bali and Europe. Her passion is to connect people to nature through art (she loves that “ART is in eARTh”). But her work is not just about the natural world. It also encompasses a mandala-like symbology, as well as quoting from other artists and cultures, to create a unique runic consciousness, (imbued with a wee tinge ofAubrey Beardsley). And it is not all peace and love; sometimes the political speaks, as in a piece she did of America as Shiva, or when she imprints clocks with messages about running … [Read more...] about ART FOR OUR EARTH