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Artscope Magazine | January/February 2025

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January/February 2023

SMALL FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY

// Artscope Issues, January/February 2023, Reviews

by Marta Pauer-Tursi

All the senses will trigger memory, but for many people, a visual image opens a locked door to personal history, often forgotten or detached from the routines and obligations of daily living. Gail Winbury’s extensive body of work currently at the Southern Vermont Arts Center is a powerhouse exhibit that explores the joys and struggles that we all experience as we add layer upon layer of history to the being that transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. The show, “The Girl Who Drew Memories,” invites the viewers to probe their own personal histories by interacting with the paintings, poetry and objects on display. Winbury was inspired by a close, immersive look into the details — the small fragments of memory — that have guided the events and choices of a narrative that is unique to her own life and yet capable of unlocking the repositories of the mind in her viewers. The … [Read more...] about SMALL FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

// Artscope Issues, Features, January/February 2023

by Elayne Clift

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

A CONTEMPORARY TAKE

// Features, January/February 2023

by Elizabeth Michelman

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

WELCOME January/February 2023: FROM BRIAN GOSLOW

// Artscope Issues, January/February 2023, Welcome

by Brian Goslow

Welcome to our first issue of 2023! Our devoted Artscope Magazine staff have worked overtime throughout the holiday season to ensure we provided you with a strong selection of exhibitions for viewing over the next two months and artists to put on your must-investigate and must-see lists over the year ahead. We start with the Bates College Museum of Art that has two great exhibitions — “And So Did Pleasure Take the Hand of Sorrow and They Wandered Through the Land of Joy,” in which eight contemporary artists take the lead of Marsden Hartley and “Expressions of Compassion: Selections from the Barbara Morris Goodbody Photography Collection,” a show filling half the museum with photographs that, Elizabeth Michelman writes, was worth the trip up north to Lewiston, Maine from the Boston area. Rachel Portesi’s “Hair Portraits” have been making their way around New England — most recently at … [Read more...] about WELCOME January/February 2023: FROM BRIAN GOSLOW