We are pleased to present our summer Voyage exhibition which includes artists Mark Adams, Ana Guerra, Lois Harada, Buck Hastings, Kirstin Lamb, Kelsy Patnaude, Serena Perrone, Matt Tracy, and Ben Watkins. Particular points of view are represented by prints, paintings, and mixed media works. The idea of passage whether idyllic, fraught with peril, contemplative, or dystopian is paramount in the examination of these perspectives on travel and discovery.
Kelsy Patnaude in the monumental work Thalassic 2019, takes on a panoramic voyage of heroic dimensions in her 16 foot canvas created with oil paint and photographic transfer. The female sailor is the protagonist and the sea is an unleashed and vigorous depiction of mother nature. She writes, The longing to experience the unknowable – from awe to terror – calls many to the sea. Lois Harada’s Signals 2021, also speaks to the sea with a suite of twenty-six letterpress prints representing the A-Z nautical flags. Traditionally used to visually converse with sea-faring counterparts, her prints couple bold graphics with the phrase that each is meant to convey, providing space to interpret these nautical warnings in our day-to-day life. Bringing the fantastic and the measured together are Mark Adams’ works, created directly on used navigation charts giving a spring board to the mystical figures, ships, fish, and angels winging through the air as in Cadiz to Barcelona 2021. About his work, Adams says: I’ve been acquiring stories through journeys, made of a few short steps or many miles. Naturalists and artists from Anna Atkins to Walton Ford, and from Alexander Von Humboldt to Aldo Leopold, have inspired me. I’m always amazed to see what makes it onto the page and how it translates experience into visual language, made in the intuition of the moment.
Buck Hastings and Matt Tracy create journeys through an urban dystopian vantage point. In Hastings’ 6-10 Digester 2021, a raucous view of Providence’s highway with unearthed jumble of construction materials meets intensity and awe with his other-worldly color. In Matt Tracy’s work entitled Great Town but the Traffic is Nuts 2019 we see an aerial topographical view of a fictive city with a multitude of linear compositions indicating roads, complete with heraldry such as a squirrel, palm tree, pyramids and water. Ana Guerra’s Map 2010 paintings, as counterpoint, provide a contemplative space for the materiality of paint. In these highly abstracted landscapes, earth, sky, and water converge and retreat.
Serena Perrone and Kirstin Lamb both use trees as way finding markers. Lamb’s magnificent work entitled Woods Painting 2021 depicts a detailed scene that one can imagine walking right into the painting and meandering through the forest. Each spot of paint is laid down on printed grid underscoring the path the artist takes to create the work. Serena Perrone’s Alberi: Site Specific Portfolio 2014-15 is a suite of 12 etchings of individual trees in her native Italy. The exquisite etchings are intensely detailed with thousands of marks. The colophon accompanying the portfolio indicates the exact longitude and latitude of the location of each tree. These sites are named after the towns in Italy in which the trees reside, furthering the concept of a travel log and memento of the artist’s personal journey.
Ben Watkins’ Pangea IV explores voyage as a process through material. Created with plaster filled with vibrant paint colors, the indication of continents running together reveal the endless potential of novel systems at play.
Bon Voyage!
