To Do With as You Wish
Seven Vermont artists were invited to show pieces of their choosing in the Spotlight Gallery beginning November 9, 2018. When one asked if there was a theme, the answer was “fill your wall with work you love.” The stunning result is “7Women 7Walls.”
The work they love is made with fiber, encaustic painting, collage, and frottage. The mood is bright, solid, and outspoken; the colors are rich. Here is more about the artists and the way each approaches her work.
Mary Admasian
Mary Admasian’s work embodies intuitive expressions through abstraction. Her “Shadowlands” collection compels viewers to look inward toward the spiritual and philosophical — that pivotal energy between darkness and light, acceptance and denial, that throws into relief the personal boundaries that inhibit us as well as move us forward. The paintings are created on birch panels using spray paint, acrylic paint, watercolor pencil, graphite, colored pencil, and cold wax materials to create a surface in layers.
“The selected work for this exhibit …
has the intention to reflect the personal fire from within us.”
Visit Mary Admasian’s website.
Alisa Dworksy
Alisa Dworsky’s creative work includes drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installation, and architecture. She believes that innovation and insights in art are supported by a cross-disciplinary practice and finds that her work in one medium will influence work in another. Alisa often uses linear materials, such as ribbon and rope, to define space and form. For her “Fold” series, she employed a technique called frottage (rubbing) using graphite to transfer the qualities of ribbon to paper.
“I shift lengths of ribbon beneath the page as I work.
These drawings are simultaneously representational and abstract, static and dynamic. Embedded in the two-dimensional drawings are qualities of three-dimensional space and material.”
Visit Alisa Dworsky’s website.
Karen Henderson
Karen Henderson is interested in the connections between self, place, emotion, and time, and is intrigued by seasons, atmospheres, and the time of day. She tries to recreate these natural occurrences, evoking emotions associated with them through the use of color, line, and texture. Karen uses dye techniques (batik, shibori, color removal, rust print) as well as stitches, tucks, layers, and other manipulations of fabric to create her textural weavings and fabric pieces. She also incorporates mixed-media techniques like painting with textured acrylics, monoprint, and colored pencil alongside her fiber approaches.
“The pieces I chose for this exhibit …
explore three different themes that I use as jumping-off points of inspiration for my artwork. The themes are: reflection, paths, and the ephemeral. (And inspired by another theme in the show, there are 7 pieces.)”
Visit Karen Henderson’s website.
Evie Lovett
Evie Lovett’s “Thaw 2018” series of encaustic painting was inspired by photographing the Connecticut River in winter. Patterns she saw, as well as the sense of both ease and peril she felt while on the river are incorporated in the art. Conducting research into historical photographs of the river, she became mesmerized by glass plate negatives of miniscule figures skating on the long-ago frozen expanse — forgotten people. She has woven these thoughts and threads into her encaustic paintings.
“For this show, I chose new work that was surprising me,
with brash color and a less deliberate, freer sense of gesture. I’m working to be less controlling of the outcome and to have greater faith in the process. This work inches toward that goal.”
Hannah Morris
For Hannah Morris, process is integral to the stories she paints in her multi-layered collages. She begins with a base-layer collage made from vintage print materials she has gathered around the world. As she works, the images she’s absorbed during her travels tend to appear of their own volition. Hannah arranges, layers, paints over, and ultimately refashions the narratives so they become trails of details, left for you to gather.
“I want to trigger your memory …
believing that vision is shaped by thousands of remembered moments.
Janet Van Fleet
Janet Van Fleet’s work incorporates a vast array of found objects. The diptych in this exhibit, “Re-Circulation,” incorporates words generated by a free associational, meandering path. She also loves circles, and the idea of recursion, or coming around again. Her piece is reworked over an oil painting from a series she created in 1997-1998. The paintings in that series were exhibited in the Spotlight Gallery twenty years ago in an exhibit entitled “Brown, Brown, Falling Down” — a clear case of coming back around.
“The title of my piece in this exhibit …
comes from the first sentence of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: Riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
Visit Janet Van Fleet’s website.
Kristen M. Watson
Kristen Watson’s work focuses on conceptual installations and intuitive painting that begin with concentrated introspection and behavioral observation rooted in her study of spirituality and social psychology. Her “Fractionate” series is based on pixels, which make up nearly everything we look at now. Magnifying digital images makes them pixelate, and our view of the big picture becomes microscopic, distorted. We are unable to clearly see the whole. The cascading effect of these myopic thought patterns have fractionated our personal relationships, communities, and the very structure of our country.
“This series serves as a compelling metaphor …
for human behavior with regard to how we navigate, and are influenced by, news and Internet.
Visit Kristen M. Watson’s website.
— Meet the artists at a reception November 9, 2018.
— More about the Spotlight Gallery.
— compiled by Susan McDowell