To get to Lawrence Academy from Cambridge, you must fly over the super-highways of Route 2 (West) and 495 (North), then bear, with some patience, the horse and carriage — and sometimes tractor from a local farm — pace of Route 119 (North, again) to cover around 50 miles in just under an hour — with a few glances at our colorful New England foliage, before arriving in truly picturesque Groton, Massachusetts. Curator Laurie McGovern hailed us from the top of the Richardson-Meese Performing Arts Center steps and graciously guided us into the Conant Gallery, showing us around the exhibition of two, in my opinion, super-star artists. The first work to draw my attention was photographer Peter Roos’ “Mirror Water #3.” I looked at it for several minutes until I felt somewhat like I saw, or even was seeing at that very moment, what Peter saw in the diminishing grandeur of an iceberg in … [Read more...] about HIPPOS AND ICEBERGS

If, as an adult, you have read Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” you will remember that Alice is confronted with paradoxes, contradictions in logic, disorientation of time and generally puzzlement at her place in that bewildering environment. The book you may have read in middle school as a fantastical tale takes on deeper, more introspective layers of meaning in the seasoned reading and may have prepared you for the current exhibits at Burlington’s BCA Gallery. The central figure in Valerie Hird’s show “The Garden of Absolute Truths” is Alice, in the form of an avatar. This avatar appears as a hand drawn paper cutout in a video, in works on paper and in a series of book sculptures — three-dimensional collaged boxes. This more contemporary Alice explores and examines her knowledge, assumptions and orientation toward such global issues as migration, social … [Read more...] about AN INTENSITY OF COLOR

Everyone lives their lives with vivid memories of “how I spent the Covid years!” Sarah Meyers Brent ground out the Covid chaos by combing her home and the town dumps for debris to create romantic, entangling wall sculptures. Brent is an artist with an unerring sense for compositional line, texture and color, evidenced by her solo exhibition, “Out Growth,” at The Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Brent’s “masterpiece” is one of her smaller works, “Portrait of a WomanandMotherDuringaPandemic.”Clearlyasculpturalself- portrait, the work invokes the swirling, “topsy-turvy” conflicted life of an artist and mother. To make this work she collected materials including a toy dinosaur, jewelry, plastic floral leaves and breast- like globules. But the star of the chaotic swirl is a dismembered Barbie doll, who twirls, crotch-up, above the fray. The diverse objects are united by an … [Read more...] about ROMANTIC ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM