Highlights from the Boston Art Book Fair

November 17, 2022 Abigail Ogilvy

Earlier this month we participated in the 2022 Boston Art Book Fair put on by the Boston Center for the Arts. It was an exciting opportunity to explore the galleries, artists, collectives, and creatives in our city. Check out some of our favorite booths we saw:

Boston Art Review

The Boston Art Review brought an assortment of issues to purchase. It was wonderful to see AOG artist Pelle Cass’ work featured at another booth at the Book Fair. Cass’ photograph is featured on the cover of Issue 03: Tracing Movement.

bostonartreview.com
Instagram: @bostonartreview

View of the booth for the Boston Art Review in the Cyclorama at the Boston Center of the Arts.

Praise Shadows Art Gallery

Praise Shadows had a mix of books, posters, and other art objects to check out. We were excited to see one of our new favorite books, Designing Motherhood, out on the booth’s spread. It was a great opportunity of visitors to get a taste for what this growing gallery has to share with the Boston art community.

praiseshadows.com
Instagram: @praiseshadowsart

View of the booth for Praise Shadows Art Gallery in the Cyclorama at the Boston Center of the Arts.

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

The ICA Boston had a selection of prints, books, and merchandise to choose from. We loved checking out the current exhibition book, To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood. The work of Barbara Kruger and Dr. Woo were showcased on apparel, as well as prints of Jordan Nassar’s work that is currently on view in the exhibition Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth.

icaboston.org
Instagram: @icaboston

View of the booth for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in the Cyclorama at the Boston Center of the Arts.

Adri Tan

It was great getting to chat with Tan about their process and learn more about their work. Tan uses portrait photography to explore identity and authority of self. Digital textile patterns are created by restating the body into repeating patterns in the zine, I Objectify Myself to Subvert Your Gaze. The textile becomes an object, allowing for the portraits of the artist’s East Asian models to reject the stereotypes and to yield autonomy of themselves. In another zine, Fashioning a Sense of Self, Tan's photographs reclaims and explores the identities of women and non-binary people of color by allowing the models to wear what they felt most themselves in. We can’t wait to see what else they will be working on next!

adriannatanphotography.com
Instagram: @atangerinee

View of Adri Tan’s booth in the Cyclorama at the Boston Center of the Arts.

Paige Mehrer at Plum Press

We are delighted by the work of Paige Mehrer of Plum Press. Her whimsical images are enchanting and there mystical blues and purples of her palette drew us in!

paigemehrer.com
Instagram: @paigemehrer

View of Paige Mehrer’s section of the Plum Press booth in the Cyclorama at the Boston Center of the Arts.

Kareem Worrell

We got to have an engaging conversation with photographer Kareem Worrell about his photograph and practice. At his booth he presented the zine, Passenger, which features Polaroids from the passenger seat of a pivotal road trip he took at the beginning of his career. He told me that he had lost the photographs from the trip for over 15 years, but thought of them often. This body of work inspired a new series call Lonely Highway that documents views from the passensger seat once again. His book, Mile Marker, is a part of the ongoing he was selling at the fair. The book showcases seventeen years worth of images that capture the ever-changing landscapes and unique atmosphere that only occurs on the open road.

kareemworrell.com
Instagram: @kareemworrellphoto

View of Kareem Worrell’s booth in the Cyclorama at the Boston Center of the Arts.

We were thrilled to exhibit three of our represented artists: Pelle Cass, Cassandra Jones, and Kristina McComb, alongside these talented creatives in Boston. It was a great opportunity for us to connect with our Boston community in a way we had not done before, and the whole team felt excited and energized by the fair - we are so grateful for all of the amazing visitors we had. Through a collection of prints, books, and small sculptural work, we showcased new and returning work by each artist: prints by all three artists gained excitement while Cass’ and McComb’s newly released books were a hit. The remaining inventory is still available for purchase on the buy now page for the fair.

Gallery intern Lauren Hill and Assistant Director Kaylee Hennessey at the booth

Press Release: Fresh Faces 2022

January 21, 2022 Abigail Ogilvy

Fresh Faces 2022
January 19 – February 27, 2022

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to present our fourth annual Fresh Faces, an exhibition that introduces new artwork by the Northeast’s most talented student artists, located in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont & New York. The exhibition features 27 artists working in a variety of styles and media.

Jared Abner is a recent graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology’s furniture design program where he earned a BFA. While at RIT, Jared was introduced to the imaginative furniture and sculpture of his professor, Andy Buck. Buck’s work inspired Jared to play and explore the medium of wood and the contingencies of his tools. Jared continues this exploration in his Boston based studio.

Patrick Brennan, *Polyethylene Leviathan,* Acrylic on plastic, 11.8 x 11 x 7.9 in., 2021

Patrick Brennan is a Boston-based LGBTQ artist and recent graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design sculpture department. He works with a variety of concepts and media but his primary focus since September has been on found object collages using army men formed into ouroboros shapes to critique the plastics industry, military-industrial complex, and toy companies. In addition to his art practice, Patrick is also an art educator, currently employed by the education department at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Vicente Cayuela Aliaga (b. 1998) is a Chilean multimedia artist and photographer based in Waltham, MA. Born in a family of wood and textile workers, Cayuela developed an early affinity for aesthetics and manual work at his family’s carpentry workshop. Meeting at the intersection of photography, object-making, readymades, and digital media, his current series of constructed photographs explore seldom- talked issues about infancy and adolescence including loss, trauma, lack of guidance, sexual alienation, drug addiction and social isolation. In 2018, Cayuela received the full Wien International Scholarship to study Fine Arts with concentrations in Sculpture and Digital Media at Brandeis University. Since then, his sculptural and photographic work has been exhibited in multiple undergraduate exhibitions across the Boston area and received support from multiple fellowships and production grants. In 2021, his sculptural cyanotype work was exhibited in his first group museum exhibition at the Winter Solstice show at the Griffin Museum of Photography. His ongoing series “JUVENILIA” is being exhibited in March at the Griffin Museum of Photography’s Lafayette City Center Satellite Gallery as part of the Photography Atelier 35 group exhibition. Cayuela is a Studio Honors candidate at Brandeis University where is also the 2021–2022 Starr Warner Curatorial Intern at the Rose Art Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Liam Coughlin, *Preservation*, Charcoal and plaster, 30 x 24 in., 2021

Liam Coughlin, born and raised in Townsend, MA, creates large-scale land-based site-specific artworks, sculpture, and multimedia installations using wood, stone, fire, charcoal, plaster, film, and photography that thematically engage ideas of temporality, religion, ritual, and human being’s symbiotic relationship with nature. He often incorporates open flames, burn-carving and charring as a technique to achieve an aesthetic balance between the controlled, structured form and the improvisational, free form gesture. Drawing inspiration from the early land art movements of the 20th century as well as mid-century surrealist experimental film art, Coughlin’s work incorporates a great deal of physical exertion and performance as he harvests large logs by hand and burns them over open fires before capturing these moments of transmutation through video and photography. His studio work and land art practice aim to invite the viewer to heighten their spatial awareness, contemplate their personal connection to the natural world and think critically about how that connection may serve as an intervention in or promotion of the natural spaces they experience regularly.  Coughlin is based between Waltham and Townsend, MA. In 2017, he received a BA in English from Brandeis University where he is currently pursuing a post-baccalaureate in fine art.

Olivia Leigh Curtis is a sculptor who was born in the year 2000 and raised in Massachusetts. She attends MassArt where she works primarily with glass and ceramics, and enjoys experimenting with phenomena across media. She finds wonder in the world around her; an activity that drives her process-based studio practice. When Olivia is not in school she works as an apprentice at McDermott Glass Studio in Sandwich, MA. She has also interned for Toots Zynsky in Providence, RI.  She has shown work in Saugus Iron Works’ “Contemporary Cast Iron” Show and is the 2021 recipient of the Stephen D. Paine Scholarship. She will graduate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2022.

Veronica Dannis-Dobroczynski is an artist from Detroit, Michigan pursuing her MFA at Boston University. Her work explores embodiment and identity through crops of the body, focusing on queerness, intimacy, and hyper-fixation.  

Anna Demko is a 21-year-old process based sculptor, who works primarily in latex. “Because of the skin-like quality of latex, I take it and flip the perception of everyday objects by giving them human qualities. I enjoy the very long process that is drying many layers of latex over and over. My process involves casting metals, woodworking, and drawing in chalk pastels, though latex will always be my favorite material. Being able to take something that starts in a liquid form, turning it into a flat solid, then a 3- dimensional object is a process I hold very dear to my heart. I have been a sculptor for a little over 3 years and have been studying at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.”

Leslie Donahue, *Pool II*, Oil on canvas, 36 x 24 in., 2021

Leslie Donahue “mines visual references from unusual places. Advertisements, screenshots from trash television, low-quality photos sent by my mother, blurry images from online marketplaces, and other fleeting snapshots of the world around me are obsessively collected and carefully analyzed for elements of truth. Appropriating these images adds to an ever-expanding narrative in which I convey the strangeness that is living in America in 2021. Emotions are indirectly expressed and dissected through color, composition, and brush strokes. A disillusioned form of social realism approaches abstract expressionism with humor and an appreciation for beauty in the unexpected.”

Grace Hager is an observational painter currently living and working in Portland, Maine. In 2015, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting with a Minor in Art History from the Maine College of Art & Design. She has spent the past six years livingin the New Haven, Connecticut area, and recently relocated to Portland to return to MECA&D to pursue her Master of Fine Arts. As a representational painter, her interests in image making and object making intersect in what is being depicted and how. 

James Ming Johnson was born in Bangkok Thailand in 1990, and raised in California. He lives and works in Waltham, MA where he is currently a post- baccalaureate student at Brandeis University. His work deals with history, memory, and American identity. He previously studied at the Art Students League of New York, and at Stanford University, where he received a B.A. in Film & Media Studies.

Justin Kedl is a sculptor, cartoonist, and designer born in Minnesota and raised in Colorado. He discovered a love of sculpture halfway through his three-year career at Gordon College and graduated with a BA in both sculpture and design. He is currently pursuing an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History through Azusa Pacific University's online program. Most notably, Justin was one of over 30 artists to work on Natura Obscura, an immersive installation at the Museum of Outdoor Arts in Colorado, and he was a Young-Artist-in-Residence at the Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center in Skælskør, Denmark. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He now lives with his wife in Beverly, Massachusetts. 

Catherine LeComte is a Boston-based artist whose work consists of personal narratives. Her practice incorporates photography, installation, and video; utilizing various techniques to bring forth emotive reactions through her work. She uses photography as a tool to examine her familial relationships, memory, and personal experiences with trauma. A native of New Hampshire, but currently resides in Boston, MA, she has worked for more than a decade as a photographer. She holds a BFA in Photography, and is currently attaining her MFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art & Design.

Hailin Li, *Flower Series: One*, Cupboard, paper, ink, 40 x 30 in., 2021

Eva Lewis is an artist from Dayton, Ohio. She graduated with a BFA in 2017 at Wright State University. Lewis went on to do a local fellowship at the Dayton Art Institute, study through a residency with Mount Gretna School of Art and show in Dayton art exhibitions while teaching art to k-12 students. In 2020 she joined Boston University as a candidate of their MFA painting program - she is projected to graduate in 2022. Lewis currently resides in Boston Massachusetts with her cat, Titian.

Hailin Li is currently a sophomore student at the School of Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. Most of her works are oil-based or acrylic paintings and linear drawings. She explores the nontraditional approaches and use various colors as the most important medium throughout her artistic works. She also inspires from all the encounters she had in the daily life with people and objects and transform these into the visual works.

Billy Lyons’s artwork has always had the theme of his childhood, involving drug abuse and domestic violence. “Sharing my experiences of being born cocaine positive, living in poverty, and being exposed to addiction and domestic violence through my paintings helps me to connect to my audience. Painting and mixed media are my passions, focusing on creating autobiographical narratives about my upbringing. I tend to paint dark subject matter with loud playful colors, creating imagery that is almost juvenile. The idea behind painting this way helps connect my work to my memories of my adolescence while also creating an uncomfortable contrast.”

Emily Manning-Mingle is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator. She completed a five-year BFA/MFA program in Painting and Studio Teaching at Boston University between 2009-2010, and in 2020 she returned to BU to pursue her MFA in Painting. Her interests include beauty, intimacy, collecting, archiving, and mending. Her work has been exhibited in Massachusetts, New York, Texas, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Italy. She has received several awards, including the Foundation for an Open America Painting Award, Best in Show at the Mosesian Center, and a President’s Scholarship from Anderson Ranch. In the summer of 2019, she was an artist-in-resident at Gallery263 in Cambridge, MA.

Agustina Markez, *Desde Lejos Weaving*, 16mm film strips, decorative stitches with red thread, 36 x 24 in., 2021

Agustina Markez is an Argentinian immigrant artist, based in Providence, RI. She received a Bachelor of Science in Visual Arts at SUNY Purchase, and is currently an MFA Sculpture candidate at Rhode Island School of Design. Her works in installation, sculpture, video and performance examine the way technology, constructed environments and home can merge.

James Morningstar’s artwork examines different aspects of personal identity, perception, and acts “as a vestibule for me to better understand the world around me. I use material and technical studies, research, and making to express myself, and my questions for the world at large. Identity, transformation, and curiosity have always been a part of this practice, which was largely developed as a method of distilling and processing information, no matter how light or traumatic. My visual arts are very influenced by my queer identity, worldviews, and a yearning to supply others with the feelings they may have tucked away.”

Meghan Murray is an MFA Painting candidate at Boston University. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Murray has been passionate about art-making since childhood. After graduating cum laude from Skidmore College, she completed the year-long Emerson Umbrella residency in Concord, MA. Murray then worked as an art educator while maintaining a rigorous independent studio practice. Her most recent work is a continued investigation into intergenerational American ideals and clichés as viewed in the mid-century family photo album. Murray’s fascination with nostalgia and sentimentality continues to be integral to the work.

Chen Peng (b. 1989) is a Taiwanese artist currently based in Boston. She received her BFA in Painting from Cleveland Institute of Art in 2016 and her BA in Philosophy from National Taiwan University in 2012. Chen’s works have been shown in the US and Taiwan, including a solo show at Art Taipei, awarded by the Ministry of Culture- Taiwan. She has participated in residency programs at The Studios at MASS MoCA and Vermont Studio Center. Her paintings have been included in several public collections including Cleveland Institute of Art, MetroHealth Cleveland, University Hospitals, and Fidelity Corporate Art Collection, among others. Chen is currently an MFA candidate in Painting at Boston University. 

Abby Preshong, *I’m Gonna Put You Underwater*, Inkjet print, 19 x 16 in., 2021

Abby Preshong is a photographer based in Boston, Massachusetts. She is currently a senior attending Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston for her BFA in Photography. Abby found her passion through photographing music shows, musicians, and other artists. Her current work experiments with self-reflection and the desire to alter aspects of life and actuality. Focusing on anxiety, mental health and the relation it has to the self-destructive nature of human beings.

Stephen Proski (b. 1988) currently lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his BFA in Painting and Creative Writing from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2010 and is currently pursuing an MFA in Painting at Boston University. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, with exhibitions spanning Chicago, New York, and Russia. Recently, he was commissioned to create a permanent installation for the Kansas City Museum.

Stephanie Van Riet holds a BA in Studio Art and Anthropology from Connecticut College and is currently working towards a Post-Baccalaureate certificate in Fine Art from Brandeis University. Her current art practice incorporates her experience in conservation and exploration of culture, as she reacts to the world around her through her prints, paintings and paper sculpture. She has taught various art mediums at the Philly Art Center in Philadelphia, PA and at the Charles River Creative Arts Program in MA. In addition to teaching, Van Riet has worked at many art institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Lyman Allyn Museum of Art in New London, CT, Zullo Gallery in Medfield, MA and The Print Center in Philadelphia, PA.

Malia Setalsingh was born and raised in Miami Florida and currently reside in Boston Massachusetts. “I started painting in 2018 at Artist For Humanity, I am currently working in my space in Mattapan. I am inspired by music and everyday living in Boston. I have previously shown work at Boston’s Epicenter and at Montserrat College of Art. My main focus is creativity and I'm driven by the opportunity to inspire others through my work. After completing my first year at Montserrat my focus has been to continue to develop my work and find opportunities that help me grow as an artist.”

Kathryn Shiber, *Bleeding in the Pasta Aisle*, Graphite, watercolor and pen on paper, 24 x 30 in., 2020

Kathryn Shiber was born and raised in New Jersey. Shiber's playful and inventive drawings, paintings, photos, and textiles have been exhibited at galleries and art shows across the United States, including The Other Art Fair, Brooklyn; Art in the Time of Corona, Dab Art Gallery, Los Angeles (publication on permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art); What is Real?, The Real House, Brooklyn; and the National Water Media Juried Exhibition, Dallas, TX. She received a B.A. in Studio Art from Dartmouth College, where she was the recipient of the Robert Read Prize for Outstanding Achievement in the Graphic Arts and the William C. Yakovak 1947 Scholarship for the Creative Arts.

Jingqi Steinhiser grew up as the only child in a family of diplomats: a performative image of rigid formality, a performance that mutated across geography. “Born in China, I lived in Russia, Mongolia, Korea, and ultimately, the USA. My aesthetic world was, thus, constructed on an unsettled foundation of dissonant cultures. In 2020. I received my BFA from the School of the Arts Institute Chicago and am now an MFA candidate at Rhode Island School of Design. Further, in 2020, I was awarded the residency at Ox-bow School of art with Merit Scholarship.”

Scott Vander Veen was born in Michigan and is currently pursuing his MFA at RISD. Though he is technically a student in the painting program, his practice relies on a background in sculpture, and he has dipped his toes into the pool of video art and text based art as well. He is a graduate of Bard college, where he honed his free-wheeling, interdisciplinary sensibility. After graduating, he lived for nearly three years as a Core Fellow at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina where he continued to refine the materially oriented approach that is essential to his practice.

Press Release: Crowded Fields

February 11, 2021 Abigail Ogilvy

Solo exhibition featuring Pelle Cass
February 11 – March 21, 2021

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to present Crowded Fields, a solo exhibition of photographs by Boston-based artist Pelle Cass. This exhibition features work from two recent series in which the artist combines thousands of images to form one dynamic composition of a sporting event. Working in opposition to traditional sports photography, Pelle Cass aims to capture not the emotion of a moment, but the chaos and physicality of the entire game, evoking a Baroque-like sense of movement and angle in his compositions.

MIT v Williams Pole Vault, 2019. Signed by the artist. Inkjet print on heavy matte rag paper — *MIT v Williams Pole Vault*, 2019. Signed by the artist. Inkjet print on heavy matte rag paper

Armed with a digital camera and Photoshop skills, Cass sets out to create compositions that redefine our notion of what “street photography” can encompass. Though we see many of these defining elements in Cass’s work - the unscripted, unposed, authentic moments in time - Cass aims to break away from the practice that traditionally catches the subject unaware or photographed without permission. Rather than chasing to capture a singular moment, his work operates as an overwhelming, singular time lapse of an event. In a single glance, a pass is made and caught, a diver exits and enters the water. Teammates interact with each other (or even their own selves) in a way that does not follow the constraints of time, existing on a singular, chaotic plane. Drawing on art historical influences, Pelle Cass writes: “I think, sometimes, of Pollock’s swarms of paint and the coiled musculature of Michelangelo’s figures. I think of floating and flying in space--literal as a high diver and as elusive as the dizzying, disorienting abstract compositions of a Modernist like Malevich.”

Futures Tennis in Brighton, 2018. Signed by the artist. Inkjet print on heavy matte rag paper — *Futures Tennis in Brighton*, 2018. Signed by the artist. Inkjet print on heavy matte rag paper

Pelle Cass’s complementary body of work, Uncrowded Fields, works to evoke these same feelings in the viewer, all the while leaving out one of the most important components of the Crowded Fields series: the human subjects. Uncrowded Fields shows tennis balls flying without direction, evidence of the human presence and movement without actually including the human figure. The viewer can’t help but to draw a connection to the world of the pandemic. For so long, we saw an absence of human life, interactions modified for safety, and even the postponing of sporting events. When placed in conversation with a photograph from Cass’s Crowded Fields series, these balls behave as players that aren’t human, but through motion and composition hint towards the human presence.

Pelle Cass (1954) is a photographer from Brookline, Massachusetts. He’s exhibited at the George Eastman House, the Albright Knox Gallery, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Metamorf Biennial for Art and Technology in Norway and has presented shows at Stux Gallery (Boston), Gallery Kayafas (Boston), and the Houston Center for Photography. His work is owned by the Fogg Art Museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Polaroid Collection, the DeCordova Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the MFA, Houston. Cass’s photos have appeared in books such as Photoviz (Gestalten), Deleueze and the City (Edinburgh University Press), Langford’s Basic Photography (Focal Press), The Beautiful Sparkle: Optical Illusions in Art (Prestel), and in magazines such as Beaux Arts (France), McSweeney’s, FOAM, GQ, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, and many others. He’s received fellowships from Yaddo, Artists Resource Trust, and the Polaroid Collection.

This project has been supported by a grant from the Artist's Resource Trust.

Artist Spotlight: Mishael Coggeshall-Burr

June 27, 2019 Abigail Ogilvy

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery loves promoting dialogue with our artists to get to a better understanding of the story behind the work. We had the chance to hear from Mishael Coggeshall-Burr about how his studio practice draws on inspiration found in his travels, photography, and even in the routine of tending to his gardens:

Mishael Coggeshall-Burr and his youngest son, Nazar, in front of his latest work, Gare du Nord. Photo courtesy of the artist, 2019. — Mishael Coggeshall-Burr and his youngest son, Nazar, in front of his latest work, *Gare du Nord.* Photo courtesy of the artist, 2019.

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery: What made you want to be a painter over another medium?

Mishael Coggeshall-Burr: It is the best way I have found to express how I see the world, to let my experience of the world flow through me into something new. The act of drawing while simultaneously creating color and form, the control and the freedom of creating from basic ingredients. Oil paint is the best medium I have found to translate the rich tones, colors and contrasts of life from photographs into something so real and yet so strikingly new. I like to work wet-in-wet, mixing color on the canvas; oils generally have a long working or open time, and they continue to look wet when dry which makes the painting more alive and fresh, and easier to work on over an extended period. Oils also have a unique smell/flavor/creaminess rooted in antiquity, a romance and history that I am drawn to.

AOG: Which came first for you: film photography or painting?

MCB: They gradually grew alongside each other. As a student, painting was taught to me in the studio by observation, but I felt drawn to the outdoors: what was happening outside the studio, real life. Photography was a way to step into the role of artist-in-the-wild, snatching up glimpses of reality that would then launch longer studio experimentation. I started to take blurry, cinematic photographs to capture moments in time in a way that mirrored a memory. I noticed how light effects in a blurred photo had shapes that reminded me of brushstrokes, so combining photography and painting into one process felt like a natural step.

AOG: We are suddenly in this age where the photo has such a strong presence in painting. How important is it, for you, to take your own reference photos?

MCB: Essential. I have to have been there, have my own memories of that experience, that is crucial. My creative process is rooted in that sense of adventure you get exploring on foot with a camera, poking into back streets and alleys, country roads and thickets. Each photo becomes a memory, defined by both its physical existence as an image and the emotion it stirs when you see it. Each photo is a coiled spring of ideas, a present to be opened in the studio. I might shoot a hundred frames of one moment and just one might carry the essence of that moment within it--the light, movement, even sounds and smells.

AOG: What is the significance of using the blur to break down these familiar spaces?

Mishael Coggeshall-Burr, Pompidou Graffiti, Oil on canvas, 30 x 48 in., 2019; On view in PICNIC at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery June-August 2019 — Mishael Coggeshall-Burr, *Pompidou Graffiti*, Oil on canvas, 30 x 48 in., 2019; On view in PICNIC at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery June-August 2019

MCB: For me, a blurred image concentrates the act of seeing into a kind of “key”, a thumbnail for that experience of seeing that can be saved, carried, put away and rediscovered. The process of painting from that “key” is a reawakening or reanimation of the experience of being there. “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know,” (Diane Arbus). A blurred image, (and the subsequent painting) might be viewed as a greater secret still; but it is this same loss of detail that makes the image more relatable, induces a sense of déjà vu, so the experience ends up being more like sharing a secret, which I think is fantastic. Blur, like dreams, lends itself to interpretation. Sometimes people say things like “I feel like I’ve been there before” even though they have never physically been in that location.

AOG: After you've taken the photos, how do you pick which ones will become paintings?

MCB: Out of a few hundred images I might print two or three photographs with the right balance: inky blacks to near whites, a sea of chromatic grays with flecks of tantalizing color, a dynamic composition. I like to work from the physical object of a 4x6 photograph, almost like a talisman with some mystical quality beyond the chemistry and paper. Like a visual memory, it should be an optical play on reality, indistinct, flawed, and compressed--but beautiful, like a human thought. I love the process of painting from an imperfect image—a translucent layer-cake of memory preserved inside that smooth glossy paper—into something made with my own hands, something with distinct marks that show process but retains the original spirit of the photograph. Working from the defocused photograph is intriguing, challenging. I don’t always know exactly what the objects are that I am painting. Separated by time from the experience the photograph records, I may know it is a scene outdoors, or some sky peeking through trees, but I may not be sure if it’s a leaf, or a person, or even a building. Forms separated in three dimensions have been brought together in two, their forms carved and blended by the lens. Painting in this way takes a degree of faith: it can be a very abstract process until the very end of the work.

AOG: Your work seems heavily influenced by your travels. Does the location of your subject influence the way each painting is made?

MCB: It does during the photography stage. Arriving in a city--for example, Hong Kong--I look for interesting angles to capture the buildings, the light falling or bouncing between them, the city folk going about their day; but this is also a south Asian city built on a rock island, so I look for the intermingling of nature in the nooks and crannies, a mini rainforest in a forgotten alley, a lichen covered buddha unobtrusively placed, bamboo scaffolding, architecture or forms that signal “this is where you are” without giving too much else away. With nature scenes I look for a more diffused feeling: touches of bright color you have to hunt for amongst browns and greens, occasional man-made objects standing out with their orderliness and symmetries, the interesting visual mingling of the wild and the manmade. I majored in physics as well as painting, and my science side loves the camera work, but also the philosophical implications of the blur, the ephemerality of matter, the function of memory. Back in the studio, I approach the photos all the same as my inner critic emerges to examine the treasures I’ve collected. This temporary detachment lets me begin by seeing the images purely as promising visual starting points. Then as I switch back into a fully creative mode and work the paint, it slowly grows on the canvas and in my mind into something different and bigger.

AOG: Do you have a favorite place you have traveled to?

MCB: I grew up in a stilt house built by back-to-the-land parents in a New Hampshire forest; we had no running water, no electricity. The differences with my peers I felt growing up are mirrored when I am traveling--of not belonging, but seeing clearly. Perhaps travel is natural for some artists, those that see the world in that new way that others do only when they step beyond their borders. For me, the most worthwhile travel involves a sense of being off the grid, offline, both vulnerable to--and guided by--serendipity. Walking down the miles of snowy no man’s land road between border outposts of Tibet and Nepal; exploring hollow cement ruins in a Caribbean island jungle; walking the length of Broadway or across Paris in a day. Travel brings out an awareness of details in the mundane, the contrasts and signature elements of a place, a perspective that helps to frame the scenes I am out to capture.

AOG: On average, how much time do you spend on one painting? Do you work on more than one at a time?

MCB: I work on one piece at a time, usually spending anywhere from 10 to 30 hours depending on its size. Once I have started painting a piece it has an energy, a momentum that I do not want to disturb. There is a wonderful quote by Alfred Sisley, “Every picture shows a spot with which the artist himself has fallen in love.” I prefer this, to focus completely, to let the painting take over.

AOG: What do you do when you're not painting?

MCB: My wife and I are raising four young children, renovating an old farmhouse, and tending the gardens, all of which makes life quite full. I also support a college physics department, troubleshooting experiments and building demonstrations: work that I find complements and supports my time in the studio.

View Mishael Coggeshall-Burr’s work at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery on view through August 18th, 2019.

Blog credit: Sigourney Schultz, June 2019