Press Release: The Sixth Season

Wilhelm Neusser
October 14 - December 13, 2020
460C Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition by Boston-based painter Wilhelm Neusser. In this newest body of work, a thicket of forsythia or a chain link fence create a space just out of reach, suggesting a longing for an indeterminate place or time. The show’s title, The Sixth Season, refers to a mysterious missing panel in a series by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Like the work of this 16th century forerunner, Neusser’s paintings invite speculation. What or which time is lost? The Sixth Season contrasts our nature as social beings with the experience of a season lost, the pandemic spring of 2020.

Wilhelm Neusser, Downhill (#2023), 2020, Oil on linen, 48 x 40 in., Photo credit: Julia Featheringill Photography

Neusser’s latest paintings evoke a sense of isolation akin to his well-known cranberry bog series. Only this time, instead of distant figures, subtle details in the landscape elicit powerful emotions: a glinting sunspot off a chain link fence, a spontaneous splattering of forsythia that stands in stark contrast to the hazy background. Previous works like Neusser’s “Fruitlands/Interchange” bring to mind old masterful depictions of nature like Thomas Cole’s “View from Mount Holyoke.” In his new paintings, Neusser builds further on this theme, fluidly integrating the manmade and the natural world. In doing so, the artist invites a multisensory experience. Surrounded by the pollen haze of the flowers that symbolize the start of spring, the viewer relives a change of the season experienced by all of us so differently this year.

In light of the current pandemic and the political state of the country, we long for the days of the past and a return to a sense of normalcy. But what is it exactly that we long to return to? The “new normal” is left to each of us to contemplate and to define. Neusser’s paintings pay homage to isolation, to the loneliness that socially and physically distances us from the world. But the works do not stop there. Instead they add a shock of bright yellow or a playfully stripped piece of fabric to show us that there can be beauty even in times of darkness. Do these colors reflect a brighter, more equitable future? Neusser’s work allows us to reflect on this past year and move forward with strength amidst uncertainty. 

Wilhelm Neusser, Picnic (#2026), 2020, Oil on linen, 48 x 40 in., Photo credit: Julia Featheringill Photography

Wilhelm Neusser’s artwork has been widely exhibited and he has received numerous awards and fellowships. His recent museum exhibitions include the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, 2019), the Fruitlands Museum (Harvard, MA, 2019), and MASS MoCa (North Adams, MA, 2018). In 2020 he was honored with a finalist grant in Painting from the Mass Cultural Council. Additional awards and recognition include the MASS MoCA Studio Program (2017), Vermont Studio Center (2013), Finalist, Wilhelm-Morgner-Prize, Soest (2010), International Artist in Residence, Boots Contemporary Art Space (St. Louis, MO, 2009), ZVAB Phönix Art Prize (2007). Neusser’s work has been included in notable publications, including The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, Artscope Magazine, Boston.com, and Big Red & Shiny.

Wilhelm Neusser was born in Cologne, Germany. He relocated to the United States in 2011, and currently lives and works in Somerville, MA.

Wilhelm Neusser, Bright Horizon (#2001), 2020, Oil on linen, 47.2 x 39.4 in, Photo credit: Julia Featheringill Photography

Press Release: Tidal Flexing

Amanda Wachob: Tidal Flexing
August 28 – October 11, 2020
460C Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA

Click for available artwork

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to announce Tidal Flexing, our first solo presentation of Amanda Wachob’s artwork. A true innovator in her field, Wachob has become internationally known for redefining the fine art of tattooing. Her recent body of works on canvas are created by using tattoo ink and a surrealistic technique called Decalcomania.  It is also the process used in preparing "marbled" tattoos. The final impressions are printed digitally onto temporary tattoo paper, and then applied to canvas instead of skin. The tattoo ink creates an abstract visual ebb and flow, combining neon colors with dark hues and areas of intentionally exposed canvas. The resulting organic shapes are reminiscent of an extraterrestrial shoreline that calls attention to the artist’s process. In addition to the artworks on canvas, Tidal Flexing introduces Wachob’s first limited-edition print on silk.

Jupiter's moon Europa is one of the only celestial bodies in our solar system besides Earth that is said to hold the potential for life. Its surface is wrapped with lines, striated with cracks, and fractured with beautiful patterns due to the process of tidal flexing, or the continuous stretching and heating of its icy layer caused by the shape of its orbit around Jupiter.

The inspiration for this body of work, Amanda Wachob writes, “Sometimes, we rotate around one another like moons or satellites.  With a gravitational pull of sorts, sometimes with an unexplainable magnetism.  Our orbits around one another can be imperfect, off-balance or elliptical, and we can experience stress, friction and fractures.  It is this pushing and pulling and stretching of one another though, that can break us open and be the catalyst to create the conditions for new life.”

Amanda Wachob, Possible Blueprint, Tattoo ink and temporary tattoo paper on canvas, 48 x 36 in., 2020

Amanda Wachob is a New York City-based artist who is internationally known for her innovative and conceptual work with the tattoo medium.  Her canvases include fruit, leather, linen, and skin.  She has done projects with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design, The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and The Whitney.  Pioneering the watercolor tattoo movement and actively bridging the gap between tattooing and fine art, she has been named one of the 50 most creative people in the world by AdAge.  She has exhibited her work in galleries and museums worldwide.

Press Release: Oh To Be a Painting

Curated by Katelyn Ledford
August 10 – September 13, 2020
Online Exclusive

Available artwork: https://bit.ly/2XCeXNi

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery is proud to present Oh To Be a Painting, featuring the artwork of Hangama Amiri, Destiny Belgrave, Sean Downey, Ada Goldfeld, David Heo, Nicolas Holiber, Joshua Jefferson, Erin Loree, Sean McGaughey, Kiernan Pazdar, Madeline Peckenpaugh, and Samual Weinberg. Our third online-exclusive exhibition, guest curated by Katelyn Ledford.

From the curator, Katelyn Ledford:

We didn’t need a pandemic to make us realize we view a great deal of art online. While the accessibility in doing so is extremely important and necessary, painters are constantly wondering, “Is it enough to view my work only online?”

Oh To Be a Painting addresses this question through 12 artists whose work begs the viewer to touch and feel them through the screen. Each artist’s unique handling of materials instills a longing to see them in person instead of zooming in on a compressed JPG. Subject matter and themes vary from portraiture to improvisation yet all offer a juiciness for the eye to feast upon. While these paintings exist strikingly as flattened images, they lose an integral part of being a painting, the ability to immerse the viewer. Artists are supreme adapters, ever evolving with their circumstances, but how do painters adapt their work to a virtual art world (or even should they)? I, as a painter, do not know. However, I do know that I wish I could see these paintings in person.

About the artists:

Hangama Amiri, as an Afghan refugee woman, produces textile works that evoke her personal diaspora as a means to investigate the politics of gender in Islamic culture, while also celebrating feminine subjects that have been deemed taboo. Her work begins by culling fabrics from stores in New York, which are imported from markets in India and bazaars in Afghanistan. She then cuts and stitches together various textiles, fabrics, and clothing into visually seductive compositions as a way of celebrating Afghan women’s feminism and identities in visual art. The act of sewing these different sources together in her work becomes a metaphor for uniting fragmented identities that have had to live in multiple geographies around the world. In these fabric installations, Amiri chooses to not only forefront women-dominated spaces, such as beauty parlors, but also subversive depictions of items banned by the Taliban, such as red lipstick, shiny fabrics, and nail polish. The artist uses these symbols to give Afghan women a sense of freedom and power in their own sensuality, sexuality, desire, and pleasure; this is in contrast to the Islamic norms of women’s bodies being something very private, secret, and hidden behind a veil.             

Hangama Amiri, Zhvandun (Life), 2019. Chiffon, cotton, silk, silk-screen fabric, white belting, lace, and found fabric. 146’ (H) x 124’ (W) in.

Hangama Amiri (b. 1989 Peshawar, Pakistan) received her BFA (Major in Fine Arts) from NSCAD University in Halifax NS (2012) and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2020). She was a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Sciences in New Haven, CT (2015-2016). She has exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally, recently in New York, Toronto, France, Italy, London (UK), and Sofia, Bulgaria. She won the 2003 Portia White Protégé Award, and in 2015, her painting Island of Dreams won a runner-up honorable mention at RBC Canadian Painting Competition.                         

Destiny Belgrave, Daddy In The Wicker, 2020. Papercuts, Gouache, Watercolor, Glitter. 14 x 11 in.

Destiny Belgrave was born and raised in Brooklyn NY and nurtured, with a Caribbean and African American upbringing. Currently she is based out of Queens, NY where she lives and works. She graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018 with a BFA. She is a current fellow of the A.I.R Fellowship Program and a current resident of the BRIC workspace Studio Residency and the BRIClab Residency. Belgrave was also a recent breakout star at SPRING/BREAK art show in NY, where she showed a solo show of recent works. Her work upholds and uplifts Blackness, family, and culture, along with domestic and familial activities, spaces, and objects. The works are often mixed media pieces but they almost always use papercuts as the primary medium.

Sean Downey, No Place That Does Not See You, 2020. Oil on panel. 14 x 11 in.

Sean Downey’s work considers our relationship to screens, and the screen’s relationship to, and origins in, painting. Images have always been, in part, an attempt to crush space and time and to lure viewers into an Orphic journey, or down a click hole. Much of the artist’s recent work is sourced from spaces built in virtual reality. He collages disparate forms, subjects, and images and then processes these sources through a very handmade approach to painting. VR spaces are treated as a still life or landscape that can be returned to repeatedly throughout the process, adjusted, and mined for visual information to serve the needs of the analog painting process. The confusion and distortion of source imagery has also become a way to keep his approach and response hovering in an abstract space even as the images remain for the most part recognizable. This in-between state seems to mirror Downey’s own experience, as a consciousness attempting to sift through and make sense out of a nonstop onslaught of thoughts, memories, and experiences.

Sean Downey received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from Boston University. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston, MA) and LaMontagne Gallery (Boston, MA), and has been included in recent group exhibitions at Richard Heller Gallery (Santa Monica, CA), the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA (Portland, ME), the Leroy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University (New York, NY), LaMontagne Gallery (Boston, MA), and Park Place Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). Downey is a founding member of the curatorial collaborative kijidome, winner of the 2015 James and Audrey Foster Prize from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. His work has been profiled in recent editions of Art Maze Magazine, New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, and the I Like Your Work Podcast. He currently lives and works in Fairfield, IA, where he is an Associate Professor of Art at Maharishi International University.                                                       

Ada Goldfeld, Quarantine Chair, 2020. Colored pencil on paper. 14 x 17 in.

Ada Goldfeld’s work explores quiet, everyday moments that are emotionally and often politically charged. In her studio, she spends time with the objects, people, and spaces she paints, discovering the textures, patterns, and atmospheric conditions that point to the underlying significance of the subject matter. Through this careful observation, she aims to make paintings that sting you with believability, as if to declare: this is what this experience was like, and now you have no choice but to see it. Now you have no choice but to feel it.             

Most recently, Goldfeld has considered how the pandemic has reshaped her life in New York City. While quarantined in a cramped studio apartment, she has faced a stillness that she notes “is foreign to me.”  Goldfeld has watched as chairs remain untouched for weeks, shirts accumulate dust, and magnets slip off her mini-fridge. One day bleeds into the next, each steeped with a sense of helplessness. Through drawing, the artist has recorded this passage of time.                                                                     

Ada Goldfeld currently lives and works in New York City. She graduated from the dual-degree program between the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, receiving a BFA in studio art and a BA in art history and religion. In 2018, she completed an MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Alongside her studio practice, Goldfeld is an avid teacher, instructing college and extracurricular art classes in the tri-state area.

David Heo, Exerting Agency, 2020. Construction paper, charcoal, crayon, colored pencil, acrylic gouache and painted paper cutouts on paper. 12 x 9 in.

David Heo’s artwork Exerting Agency was made to present a toxic dynamic he had recently witnessed. “It's unfortunate because it's this awful power dynamic that keeps perpetuating over and over again. I know everyone knows what I'm referring to. We've all experienced this unaddressed imbalance at some point, whether it's an intimate moment, a group hang, or within a professional platform. I hate seeing this. NOBODY should feel like they can't exert their agency because of the fear, anxiety, or consequences that quietly looms.”

David Heo (B. 1992, Georgia) is a Chicago-based artist. He received his Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In recent works, Heo commonly utilizes history, to illustrate a range of folklore from grand, mythic metanarratives to quiet frames of daily life. Heo renders the traditional into the contemporary as he processes his personal experiences at the moment. By using the symbology classic to historical paintings and illustrations of mythology and folklore—the horse, the tiger, the dog—Heo typologies the people he meets and interactions during nights out. Heo’s work has been exhibited internationally and featured in various publications.

Erin Loree, Tropics, 2020. Oil on panel. 20 x 16 in.

Through painting, Erin Loree explores themes of transformation, inversion, and duality, with an emphasis on the process as a journey of discovery. She works without references or a plan and engages in a dialogue with the work, allowing each mark to reveal the next while flirting with the edges of abstraction and representation. Working wet-into-wet, the artist builds up thick sections of paint using a variety of conventional and unconventional tools, and then removes and reapplies the material to create richly-layered surfaces that evoke emotional states and psychic spaces.

“My process a material and symbolic renewal of matter, form, energy, and meaning. I allow the work to continuously changes states as globs of paint move around the surface, dragging, shifting, and relocating, in search of their final destination. The images appear to have lived before settling down, unfolding out of themselves, in accordance to their own inner logic. The work does not follow prescribed formulae of conventional painting, but instead continuously tests and expands the possibilities by which a painting can occur and be experienced.

Drawing inspiration from the cycles of birth, death, growth and decay in natural world, my work reflects the notion that everything outside of us and within us is in a constant state of becoming and transitioning. Forms appear melt and morph into one another, making it difficult to tell where one ends, and another begins. The movements are cyclical, and the images, regenerative. Each painting conveys a vivid expression of energy and motion captured in time, where radiant light seems to emerge from within.”

Toronto-based artist Erin Loree received a BFA from OCAD University in 2012 and a Certificate of Advanced Visual Studies from OCAD’s Florence Program. She was awarded the 2012 Medal for Drawing and Painting upon graduating from the OCAD, as well as the Nora E. Vaughan Award, and an Ontario Arts Council grant. She has participated in numerous group shows including Kim Dorland-curated I ♥ Paint 2 at Angell Gallery in Toronto, Younger Than George: 12 Painters in their 20s and 30s at George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco, and ‘O Canada’ at Beers in London, UK. Recent solo exhibitions include a museum exhibition at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound, Ontario, Forth and Back at Peter Robertson Gallery in Edmonton, Alberta, and Snakes and Ladders at Angell Gallery in Toronto. In the fall of 2016, she completed the Bill and Isabel Pope Residency in painting at NSCAD University in Halifax. Other residencies include Artscape Youngplace in Toronto and Sachaqa Centro de Arte in the Peruvian Amazon Jungle. Loree's work has been featured in MOMUS, the Toronto Star, CBC Arts, Beautiful Decay and the Huffington Post. She is represented by Peter Robertson Gallery in Edmonton, Canada.


Joshua Jefferson, Portrait of Sylvia Von Harden, 2020. Acrylic and flashe on canvas. 26.5 x 22 in.

Josh Jefferson has made visual art seriously since the late 1990’s with a singular drive that combines material experimentation and visual simplicity, comics, collage and a fetish for the lush verso of antiquated source material; a tactile, albeit intellectual result of his fondness for the past. He is as unafraid of forging a face from 3 strokes of brush, pen and ink splatter as he is of layering a dozen disparately drawn discards into a harmonious whole. Jefferson doesn’t seem to concern himself with end results, but the laboratory’s immediacy is his prevailing enchantment. He makes marks with learned abandon; he erases them with naiveté and concision. His practical approach is alternately reverent and iconoclastic, whether rubbing frottage over vinyl lettering, painting with a broad brush or concentrated draftsmanship, his work is a celebration of abandon and control.” --Scott Zieher

Joshua Jefferson has been the focus of numerous articles, including a full feature in the April 2016 issue of Juxtapoz. This year he received the highest level of Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in Painting. Recent exhibitions include one-man shows at Zevitas Marcus in Los Angeles, Gallery 16 in San Francisco, and TURN Gallery in New York City, as well as group exhibitions at Zieher Smith in New York City and Zevitas Marcus in Los Angeles.

Sean McGaughey, Group Hug with My Multiple Personalities, 2019. Oil on canvas. 36 x 30 in.

Sean P McGaughey’s paintings are indebted to the history of painting and pull from the vast history of image culture. His canvases built from a repetition of lines and forms pushing, pulling and confronting each other, while his sense of color works to subvert the action. A narrative built up from the action of lines and forms begin to dissolve, opening up a subconscious space for the viewer to insert themselves.            

Sean P McGaughey current lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Kiernan Pazdar, Dark Place, 2020. Oil on canvas. 16 x 12 in.

Kiernan Pazdar made the painting Dark Place while mercury was in retrograde, the United States was amidst a global pandemic, and protestors took to the streets to work to eradicate racial injustice.  No tiny samples from makeup companies, joints, alcohol, or clothing could help achieve equality and yet July’s SALE SALE SALE emails and flashing liquor store signs continued to promise help. Pazdar exists in a reality that is fraught with contradictions and cruel optimism. In her series Smoke and Mirrors, the artist has been using paint as a tool to help examine the tension produced by postfeminist aesthetics and neoliberalism in the United States. She is interested in common ways of coping with the anxiety of an American Dream which feels increasingly unsatisfying and impossible. 

“My time working as a textile designer in my early Twenties informs everything that I do. I look for hegemonic desires in imagery found in lifestyle magazines, Pinterest, in television. Historical and trendy textiles to help bring symbolism into the work. Like the Pictures Generation and Pop Artists, I am continually thinking about the ways our ideas of normalcy are manufactured and disseminated.”

Kiernan Pazdar (b.1992, Glastonbury, CT) lives in Providence, RI and works in Warren, RI. Her work has been exhibited with the 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; Field Projects, New York, NY; The Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; NHAI Sharon Art Center, Peterborough, NH; The Atwater Gallery, Kingston, NY ;The RISD Museum, Providence, RI; and Woods Gerry Gallery, Providence, RI. Her work is also included in the perma- nent collection of the Rhode Island School Of Design Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Pazdar earned her BFA in Textile Design from the Rhode Island School Of Design in 2014, and received her MFA in Painting at the same institution in 2020.

Madeline Peckenpaugh’s paintings mimic interconnected patterns, light, atmosphere, and pressure found in natural and urban environments. Peckenpaugh explores these formal elements through her photography practice, which she sees as a cataloging of events or situations that she can draw upon. “The matter of factness of my photographs and their peculiarity in relation to their subject sets up an obstacle for me to work through in my paintings. Through the process of painting, I transform these cropped realities into their own particular environments. I am interested in collapsing space as well as opening up deep dimensional sections; disrupting with gesture and weaving in material changes to dodge initial expectations.”

Madeline Peckenpaugh, Testing Sounds, 2020. Acrylic and pastel on paper. 23 x 22.5 in.

Madeline Peckenpaugh received an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She has recently exhibited at 1969 Gallery (NYC), Avery Galleries (PA), Woods Gerry Gallery (RI), and Palace of Fine Arts (CA). Her artworks is held in notable public collections, including Brown University, Woodmere Art Museum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Her work was featured in Create! Magazine in 2020.

Samual Weinberg, Meat Balance. 2018. Graphite on assembled paper. 24 x 22 in.

Samual Weinberg’s series of paintings feature a series of variations on a single recurring character called the Pink Man/ Pink Men. They are cartoonishly rendered fleshy beings that are wide-eyed, like children, seemingly amazed by whatever befalls them; mischievously engaging in any number of contests, past-times and interactions that draw equally from art historical, television, and film references. The Pink Men’s stories are often influenced by archetypal sources, from school-age juvenile delinquency narratives and cult movies to urban legends and Internet forums, alternately focusing on the mundane or pedestrian moments in their world and adding to a larger ongoing narrative. This structure recalls the Sci-Fi television show, the X-Files, which would move forward with the central lines of the narrative, but often gave way to a “monster of the week” episode, each of which would stand alone but not apart. Taken as a whole, the series of paintings suggest an imagined world that seems at once familiar and a little off-kilter, where events continue to escalate towards ominous and uncertain ends.

The world the Pink Men inhabit is one that Weinberg assembles from the constant mining of sources at hand. To create these narratives, he begins by culling images from personal photos, art historical texts, screenshots from films or television programs he’s seen, and the millions of images that can be instantly conjured from a Google Image Search. A screenshot of a scene from a prestige cable television program may end up playing host to a Pink Man— matching the light and forms until he is indeed there— or unremarkable underwater photographs from an acquaintances’ vacation on Instagram may set the Pink Men in that same setting— adding to the ubiquitous nature of their exploits. “In my paintings, time and space are disjointed and relationships are tentative, as the Pink Men live in their own world only through the images of ours, they are at once a peculiar stranger, but also, they are us. Like an animator whose work passes through the Uncanny Valley between hyper-realism and horror, I am placing the Pink Men in contexts that provoke both anxiety and laughter in equal measures.”

As these uncertain narratives unfold, viewers are left unsure who or what to trust, and unsure who their protagonist is. Indeed, humor tempers the discomfort these suspicious subjects might provoke, and creates levity as viewers try to make connections between the familiar landscapes of their own lived experiences, the historic references that surround them online and in the world, and the outlandish suggestions of greater narratives that unfold in fantastical realms. The Pink Man paintings are built from, and so also reflect, the often incoherent, collective noise of our hyper-culture, as well as suggest a weirder world that may lie just behind it.

8 BADA Galleries at AREA CODE Art Fair

Gallery NAGA: Sophia Ainslie, “untitled (Bite),” 2019, flashe and acrylic on polypropylene, 2020, $8000 unframed

The Boston Art Dealers Association (BADA) is thrilled to announce that 8 member galleries will be presenting 16 artists in the first edition of AREA CODE Art Fair opening on Saturday, August 1st. BADA has a long history of supporting Boston events, so the collaborative nature of AREA CODE is exactly in line with BADA’s mission of “fostering cooperation among the city's contemporary art galleries and to create a unified voice of advocacy for contemporary art in Boston.” While AREA CODE focuses on greater New England, art fair founder David Guerra has been a Boston-local for many years.

The big differences between AREA CODE and a normal art fair? The main section of the fair is online only, a swift and timely reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, while their “offline” section will feature public art projects around Boston. Another major difference: there was no fee to apply or participate. Additionally, in the spirit of collaboration, the sales breakdown is as follows: 50% to the artist, 35% to either their gallery/non-profit sponsor, and the remaining 15% will be redistributed equally among all section artists at the end of the fair. The art fair curators also boast some exciting names, Ellen Tani, Jen Mergel, Octavio Zaya, to name a few.

The Boston Art Dealers Association presents a strong roster of artists in the fair, read below for the full list:

Main section curated by Octavio Zaya:

  1. Abigail Ogilvy Gallery: Pelle Cass and Coral Woodbury

  2. Boston Sculptors Gallery: John Christian Anderson

  3. Fountain Street Gallery: Denise Driscoll, Georgina Lewis, Rebecca Skinner

  4. Galatea Fine Art: Joe Caruso and Vicki Kocher Paret

  5. Gallery NAGA: Sophia Ainslie

  6. Howard Yezerski Gallery: Karl Baden

  7. Kingston Gallery: Susan Greer Emmerson and Erica Licea-Kane

  8. Soprafina Gallery: Robin Reynolds

Performance section curated by Gabriela Sosa:

  1. Howard Yezerski Gallery: Autumn Ahn

Video/Digital Art section curated by Leonie Bradbury:

  1. Fountain Street Gallery: Allison Maria Rodriguez 

  2. Gallery NAGA: Lana Z Caplan

Artist Biographies and Contact Information:

Autumn Ahn, Howard Yezerski Gallery, Contact: howard@howardyezerski.com
Autum Ahn (b.1986, Philadelphia, USA) is an American artist. She is currently a Visiting Fellow as an artist-in-residence at Harvard University’s Department of Philosophy. She studied oil painting and art history at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts and also at the Scuola Internazionale de Grafica in Venice, Italy. Her solo exhibitions include, Between pink & blue is Catharanthus Roseus at Galerie 0fr., Paris (2019), a tall action is not a height at The Chimney NYC (2017), Untitled (Chamber), AIDS ACTION COMMITTEE & Alter Projects, Art Basel-Miami (2014), Latent Lavender at Ryan Lee Gallery, NYC (2014), Voy(age)ur at STREAM Gallery, NYC (2014) and upcoming show with Howard Yezerski Gallery this December 2019. She has also participated in group exhibitions with her pieces, pavement over pavement at HUBWeek for Boston’s Government Center, CASTLEDRONE CORRAL (2017), “everyoneineverforgot, fig. 1-3” at Cinema Tonalá and Fería ARTBo for The Host, Bogotá (2016), “Anunnciate” at Montserrat College of Art & Design for SEVEN, Boston (2016), Sensational Stanzas at École du Magazine (Centre National d’Art Contemporain), for TakeYouThereRadio, Grenoble/r22.fr (2015). She was the recipient of a Boston Opportunity Grant, Createwell Artist Grant, and a Constantin Alajalov Scholarship. Her work has been reviewed on Whitehot Magazine, The Boston Globe, ARTE, Art New England. She lives and works in Massachusetts, USA.

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Sophia Ainslie, Gallery NAGA, Contact: mail@gallerynaga.com
Sophia Ainslie is a South African American contemporary artist working between drawing and painting.

Her work focuses on the connection between diagnostic imaging technologies and landscape, interior and exterior, and the microscopic and macroscopic. She melds observation with imagination resulting in a relationship of connections and disconnections between black mark making and flat color, stillness of shape and active mark, movement and space. Actively pushing the formal aspects present in the work, she is interested in making the negative shapes prominent – creating spaces/places that look like something was once there, but is no longer.

Her journey overseas was instigated by a series of sponsored opportunities to attend workshops and residencies in the United Kingdom and the United States. The Hamlyn Foundation and the African Arts Trust sponsored her residency at the Gasworks in London, which led to an invitation to paint for a year in San Francisco at Yosemite Place. Having time to focus, and being in a new landscape, opened up new areas in her work. The need to have more of these circumstances brought her to Boston to finish her studies. Under the sponsorship of her patron Henny Kirshon, and the Art History Department at Tufts, she pursued her MFA, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts. After graduating she received the Anne and Graham Gund award to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Maine.

She is the recipient of the Inaugural Hendricks Art Fund for Tufts Graduates; the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for Painting, and the Artist’s Resource Trust. Ainslie maintains a studio in Somerville, MA, and currently lectures in the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University.

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Boston Sculptors Gallery: John Christian Anderson, “Crossing Over,” Welded Steel, Paper, Carved Wood, 102" x 84" x 7", 2019, $10,000

John Christian Anderson, Boston Sculptors Gallery, Contact: johnchristiananderson.101@gmail.com
John Christian Anderson grew up in a working class neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. At an early age he visited Simon Rhodias's Watts Towers, which was not far from his home. It was an astonishing site as there was nothing like it anywhere else in the neighborhood. Overtime these towers represented symbols of pure artistic vision, independence, and the down-to-earth attitude of using whatever materials are available. Later as a young student he traveled and sought out other artists and craftsmen working outside the mainstream. Over the years his work has integrated Indian and Buddhist sand painting, Fluxus objects, Minimalism, Funk Art, Bricolage and Assemblage. For over forty years he has been incorporating found material and exploring traditional and non-traditional techniques for constructing his sculptures.

Anderson has exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States. These include the Robert Freidus Gallery in New York (solo), the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the ICA Boston, The DeCordova Museum, The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art (solo). Recently his work was included in an exhibition at the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana and the Boston Sculptors Gallery (solo). He has received numerous awards including three individual Artist Resource Trust Grants and a more recent Traveling Scholarship to study counterfeit objects in Paris. His work is included in both public and private collections. This past Fall he was commissioned by the Fuller Craft Museum to create a sculpture in response to the opioid epidemic that has ravaged communities throughout the Northeast. The exhibition, Human Impact:Stories From The Opioid Epidemic, runs from September 28 through May 3 traveling to Boston City Hall in June, 2020. Anderson is currently represented by the Boston Sculptors Gallery.

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Karl Baden, Howard Yezerski Gallery, Contact: howard@howardyezerski.com
Steeped in photographic history, Karl Baden explores how photographs are shaped, and how they shape our perceptions, in his witty works. His works abound with references to iconic photographers and their work while foregrounding the omnipresence of photographic images in popular culture. In his teasing, sophisticated images, he explores the mutability of his medium. Baden works in series and on sustained projects. He maintains a blog, called Every Day, on which he posts mug shot-like photographs he has taken of himself every day since 1987, creating an ongoing record of his aging. In In and Out of the Car (2009-12), an homage to Lee Friedlander, he presents lushly colored snapshots of the passing views outside of his car windows, capturing the uncanny fusion of his car’s interior with the outside world, itself filled with a riot of photographic images.

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Lana Z Caplan, Gallery NAGA, Contact: mail@gallerynaga.com
Lana Z Caplan earned her BA and BS from Boston University and MFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Caplan has an international exhibition record of showing in galleries, museums and film festivals and commissioned public art projects. She published a monograph of her photographic series Postcards from the Hanging as Sites of Public Executions in conjunction with Watch This – two solo exhibitions at Gallery NAGA (Boston) and the Danforth Museum (MA) in 2007. Her work has been recognized by grants, fellowships and awards including from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Puffin Foundation and the Wexner Center for the Arts and reviewed in publications such as ARTnews, The Boston Globe, and Hyperallergic.com. After many years of being based in Boston and teaching at MassArt, Caplan is now an Assistant Professor of Photography and Video at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, CA. She is represented by Gallery NAGA (Boston).

Gallery NAGA: Lana Z Caplan, “After Weston 2,” 2020, Archival Pigment Print, 15x20”, $1400 unframed

Shed on Passive Sands is a conceptual project rooted in environmentalism, the politics of landscape and an excavation/revisioning of history. The location is the Oceano Dunes near Santa Barbara, CA. What fascinates me about this landscape is how what appears to be a blank sandy expanse actually holds 12,000 years of history - from the expunged Native American inhabitants to the present-day ATV riders - with each subsequent inhabitant projecting an ownership onto the Dunes that satisfies their own needs or values. Today this site has become a political and environmental battleground between the multimillion-dollar ATV industry in the Dunes and residents in the adjacent communities whose health has been compromised from the dust the ATVs create. 

The photos and videos in this project are a constellation of the denizens of the Dunes over this vast expanse of time, focusing on the current ATV culture, the idealized version of landscape shown in Modernist photography and the museumification of the people and culture of some of the past inhabitants. 

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Galatea Fine Art: Joe Caruso, "Yellow Bird", Mixed Media, 48" x 36", 2020

Joe Caruso, Galatea Fine Art, Contact: joecaruso100@gmail.com
Joe Caruso lives in Charlestown, MA and works in his studio in South Boston.  His current practice includes painting, sculpture and ceramics. Joe shows his work regularly at Galatea Fine Art in Boston.  His work has also been  exhibited at other galleries and venues throughout Massachusetts, including the Boston International Fine Art Show, Western New England University, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, FPAC Gallery, 555 Gallery, Laconia Gallery, the Boston Convention and Exhibit Center, the WGBH Auction and Boston City Hall.

With references to ancient cultures as well as to contemporary life, Joe Caruso’s sculptural assemblages and collage paintings reflectman’s enduring belief in the sacred, in spiritual forces more powerful than himself and his strong connection to the natural world. The sculpture, somewhat crude and primitive, is made mostly from objects reclaimed from the street, from bins on trash day and from thrift shops, which are often weathered, rusted, decayed and deteriorated, suggesting age and a time gone by. Materials used in the collage paintings consist primarily of paper, cardboard and plastic used to package products delivered to our homes on a daily basis and then discarded. These materials which are no longer needed and sometimes forgotten, became a starting point for something new and re-emerge into fresh compositions, given new life and meaning. This process of transformation and change is a metaphor for the human condition, something we can relate to as we pass through our own life stages. The assemblages and collages are inspired by past civilizations, myths and folklore, as well as contemporary spiritual practices. The peace and refuge offered by a spirituality embodied in various representations and symbols is particularly relevant in the chaotic, fast paced, uncertain world that we live in today.

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Pelle Cass, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Contact: abigail@abigailogilvy.com
From Pelle Cass: "In the reshuffled time of this series of composite photographs called Crowded Fields, play prevails over competition, the stands are empty and the fields are full, and whole games are shown out of sequence. Most of the pictures were taken at lightly attended events at pools, fields, stadiums, and arenas around Boston, where I live. To make the compositions, I put my camera on a tripod, take up to a thousand pictures, and compile selected figures into a final photograph that is kind of a still time-lapse. I change nothing—not a pixel. I simply select what to keep and what to omit. It all happened precisely as you see it, just not at the same time. Beyond matters of technique and subject matter, I hope to convey the eeriness of time, a feeling of Dionysian chaos, and a sense of play." - Pelle Cass

Pelle Cass 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), Langord’s Basic Photography (Focal Press), The Beautiful Sparkle: Optical Illusions in Art (Prestel, forthcoming), and in magazines such as Beaux Arts (France), McSweeney’s, FOAM, Amica (Italy), MAPS (Korea), Boston Art Review, and Victory Journal. He’s received fellowships from Yaddo, Artists Resource Trust, and the Polaroid Collection.

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Fountain Street: Denise Driscoll, "Shimmer 3", acrylic on canvas, 28 x 30 x 1.5 inches, 2019, $3000

Denise Driscoll, Fountain Street Gallery, Contact: marie@fsfaboston.com
Denise Driscoll's “Shimmer” paintings begin with the notion that all living things—plants, animals and humans—are connected in an intricate mesh of being, yet each exists at the center of their own particular world. These simultaneous centers of lived experience swirl within and around us, piercing, enveloping, and permeating with or without our notice. When processing complexity, she draws diagrams, color-codes and uses the dot as a device to think on multiple scales simultaneously. Holding questions about symbiosis, coexistence, and sentience while she paints, she grasps at the slippery awareness that we live in a clash of porous and conflicting worlds. With this in mind, Driscoll's paintings have no focal point. Instead lines, loops, chains, and perforated shapes entwine and melt into each other with boundaries that are sometimes clear but often ambiguous. Swathes of iridescent dots sparkle and gleam with energy. Each canvas becomes an imaginary map of exchange, a playful, hopeful record of our entanglement with other beings and each other.

Denise Driscoll is an abstract painter who pursues the invisible and the unseen. She draws inspiration from magical realism, speculative fiction, and philosophy. She is a SOLO2017 winner at Bromfield Gallery, a Curatorial Opportunity Grant awardee at the New Art Center in 2009, and her work has been shown throughout New England. Driscoll earned her MFA in Visual Art at Lesley Art + Design, where she currently teaches. She maintains a studio at Norwood Space Center, lives in Framingham, and is a Core Member at Fountain Street Gallery.

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Susan Greer Emmerson, Kingston Gallery, Contact: sg.emmerson@gmail.com
“All art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion”-James Baldwin 

From Susan Greer Emmerson: “I make art about natural disasters: meditations on the loss of home and community and our changing climate. Experimenting with materials is central to my practice as I use Tyvek (a plastic paper) to create sculptural wall collages, drawings and paintings. 

Kingston Gallery: Susan Greer Emmerson, Gone Home/Home Gone: Kitchen Table, Acrylic on cut and molded Tyvek, mixed media and found objects, 35” x 38” x 5”, 2018, $4500

My wall sculptures depict disheveled, broken surfaces where Tyvek painfully peels away like paint or skin, exposing a raw inner core.  Everyday objects become precious; their bits and pieces become icons of the lost reassurance of a safe and intact home.  For other work I cut and mold Tyvek and create installations recalling rising seas or raging fires, and I also make fantastical drawings of collapsing debris and destroyed homes; bad dreams of what will be in store for us as the earth warms.

For my recent body of work “Bundles” I am focusing on wrapping as a way of containing or repairing whatever has gone wrong, or perhaps covering something better left hidden. With this series I am interested in exploring contrasting textures and inspiring possible narratives about their juxtaposition. 

As a seamstress and former surgeon, I enjoy the chance to cut and manipulate materials in making of my work. My art brings the human narrative and a subtle bit of humor to some serious subject matter.”

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Georgina Lewis, Fountain Street Gallery, Contact: marie@fsfaboston.com
Georgina Lewis is an interdisciplinary artist with a practice that includes drawing, sound, writing, photography, sculpture, and installation. Raised in Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia, she received her MFA in Sound from Bard College and holds undergraduate degrees from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts and Franklin and Marshall College. She has been a resident at the Millay Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and VCCA France, and a fellow at Harvard University’s metaLAB. She is a member of Fountain Street Gallery, Boston, one of the studio artists at the Boston Center for the Arts, and a former member of the Boston based new technologies group Collision Collective. Her work has been presented at numerous venues including the Visual Studies Workshop, National University of Ireland, REDCAT Los Angeles, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, the Mills Gallery, Boston University’s 808 gallery, and Grapefruits Art Space in Portland OR.

Fountain Street: Georgina Lewis, "transfer 10", digital print of photograph, 12” x 22”, 2020, $650

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Erica Licea-Kane, Kingston Gallery, Contact: erica.licea.kane@verizon.net
From Erica Licea-Kane: “My works are completely rooted in my textile training.  The grids, both visible and structural and the repetition within each piece comes from, and are inherent to the most basic levels of textile creation.  In place of textiles I create lines and texture with a pastry bag as I extrude acrylic medium to make surfaces that invoke fabric or enlarged weaves.  I work hard at pushing the surfaces of my work so that they are obscure, prompting questions about process, materials and time.

Kingston Gallery: Erica Licea-Kane, “Over and Around,” 2019, 18"x24"x1.5", acrylic pigment, acrylic medium, wood burning, $3000.

As a child I spent many hours in fabric stores with my Mother.  It was then that I learned about the nuances of cloth, the subtleties of woven color and the “hand” of fabric. I still love the smell of fabric stores and find great comfort in being surrounded by bolts of cloth.  Our shared, once a year journey through my Grandmother’s linen chest was pure magic to me because I got to touch the handmade bobbin lace and embroidered cloth, smell the cedar and hear stories connected to part of my heritage.  My teenaged years were spent engaged in hand embroidery marking the beginning of my love for repetitive and additive art making.  That predilection carried me through my years as a textile student and lives with me today as I engage in creating layered and compulsive surfaces that refer to my heightened sensitivity to time and balance.

My work invites viewers to closely explore the physicality of the surfaces, the color interactions and the importance of the edges.  I find great joy from hearing narratives about my work from viewers who often reference aerial views or topographical views of cities and almost always want to touch the surfaces.  The act of making my work is as important to me as the meaning of the work. 

The formal issues attached to abstract painting along with the historical significance of textiles to women are never far from my thoughts and significantly inform my work. I create abstract paintings from a weavers point of view.”

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Galatea Fine Art: Vicki Kocher Paret, "Passage: Mill Creek Canyon #5", gouache on panel, 14x11", 2020, $600

Vicki Kocher Paret, Galatea Fine Art, Contact: vickiparet@gmail.com
From Vicki Kocher Paret: “As I wander, I see my surroundings through the medium of paint. I notice formal elements, and imagine a painting composed of the patterns, textures, shapes, color, and values I see. The imagery provides a structure for the process of painting. As I proceed from one painting to the next in a series, I explore color and spatial relationships, different marks and methods for rendering the image, and their effect on the tenor of the piece.

Elements in forests and urban neighborhoods are woven together to create a sense of place, recreating the feeling of being in these environments, where trees  figure prominently.  The woods are dense, yet there are pathways through – created by light getting through to the ground or openings in the tangle of things growing. I like finding the passage through the visual chaos.  In the neighborhood paintings, trees provide a powerful visual counterpoint to the close space, patterns and colors of the buildings. Trees are an amazing element in the city – uplifting visually, spiritually, and environmentally. Paintings of still life are the result of careful observation of the nuances of shape, color and relationships. Random interactions occur among the objects, forcing play, tension, or cozy interludes, and making beautiful spaces between.In the end the paintings are the product of my desire to spend time with paint, and to portray the beauty I see in my encounters. Sometimes my subjects are beautiful in odd, quirky ways, and sometimes as expressions of the power of nature, and I am compelled to paint them in detail.

Vicki Kocher Paret currently lives and paints in Cambridge. She is a representational painter, exploring beauty in objects and place.

Her formal training began with a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University, and later she completed her Master of Arts in Teaching in Art Education at Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She is currently represented by Galatea Fine Arts in SoWA Boston. Her paintings are in numerous corporate and private collections, including Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Fidelity Investments Corporation, and Wellington Management Company, LLP.  

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Allison Maria Rodriguez, Fountain Street Gallery, Contact: marie@fsfaboston.com
Allison Maria Rodriguez is a first-generation Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist working predominately in video installation and new media. She creates immersive experiential spaces that challenge conventional ways of knowing and understanding the world. Her work focuses extensively on climate change, species extinction and the interconnectivity of existence. Through video, performance, digital animation, photography, drawing, collage and installation, Rodriguez merges and blends mediums to create new pictorial spaces for aesthetic, emotional and conceptual exploration. She uses art to communicate beyond language – to open up a space of possibility for the viewer to encounter alternative ways of connecting to the emotional realities of others.

Rodriguez received her BA Antioch College, OH and earned her MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work has been supported by grants from The CreateWell Fund, the Boston Cultural Council, the Arlington Cultural Council, The Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation and Assets for Artists.  She was awarded the grand prize at the 2017 Creative Climate Awards and a 2018 Earthwatch Fellowship to work on the Churchill Northern Studies Centre’s “Climate Change at the Arctic’s Edge” project. In 2019 she was honored by WBUR’s The ARTery as one of “The ARTery 25”, a celebration of 25 millennials of color impacting Boston’s arts and culture scene. Some noteworthy local showings include solo shows at The Boston Children’s Museum and The Dorchester Art Project, multiple Art on the Marquee projects at the Boston Convention Center, and a solo installation entitled In the Presence of Absence with 13FOREST Gallery. In addition to her artistic practice, she is also a curator and an educator.  She has her studio at the Boston Center for the Arts.

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Fountain Street: Rebecca Skinner, "Disorderly", photograph on aluminum, 17" x 11.25", 2018, $375 (edition of 5)

Rebecca Skinner, Fountain Street Gallery, Contact: marie@fsfaboston.com
Rebecca Skinner photographs abandoned spaces throughout the United States. She is a modern-day urban explorer seeking unique neglected structures and desolate places. Her subject matter ranges from large, cavernous spaces to minute details such as peeling paint and rust. Her locations are often dangerous to photograph in, whether because of rotten floors, falling plaster or asbestos (requiring a respirator), so she never goes alone. Skinner brings to her work a strong ethic of leaving a location exactly as found. She does not stage her photographs—there is a story there to be told and she does not alter it. She uses natural light and a tripod for the images. Texture, color and light all play important parts in her image making.

Skinner is a core artist member of Fountain Street Gallery in Boston and a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design. Artscope and Upworthy are among the publications that have featured her work. Skinner’s photographs have recently been displayed at First Street Gallery, NY and BSA Space, MA. Her studio is located in Natick, MA.

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Coral Woodbury, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Contact: abigail@abigailogilvy.com
Coral Woodbury’s art is a vehicle for human empathy and a way of addressing social ills. It gives voice to the voiceless and makes visible those unseen. This lifelong commitment to the catalytic force of art has informed her work even beyond the studio — in museums, education, and the addiction recovery and homeless populations. 

Her recent portraits and multi-figure paintings critically reinterpret Western artistic masterpieces from a feminist perspective. Barely a generation ago, art history texts routinely omitted women artists entirely. Using the pages of one such preeminent textbook as a ground, Coral inks portraits of women artists over images from the well known canon. Of this series, titled REVISED EDITION, Coral writes, “It is a research study as much as it is an art project, and an honoring of the women denied a place in art history. I will not have run out of them when I have filled every page.”

In parallel with this series, Coral repaints masterpieces from this canon, but with the figures recast. Instead of a Madonna or paterfamilias portrait, Coral inserts images of women artists drawn from photographs and their own work. As a historian, gazing backward, and as an artist, creating anew, her paintings are a way to heal the injustices and omissions of art history. 

Abigail Ogilvy Gallery: Coral Woodbury, “Yoko Ono,” 2020, Sumi Ink on Book Page, 11.375 x 8.625 in.