2020 SEASON
NOW MORE THAN EVER
An installation by Laura K. Reeder
ON VIEW
APRIL 17 - MAY 17, 2020
Now More Than Ever...is a challenge to our dangerous ability to use glowing screens to distance ourselves from a physical world, from climate crisis, and from social injustices.
Digital media anchors our bodies to chairs and desks, and our eyes downward to little focal points that can be held in a hand. And yet, these same glowing screens are keeping us safe from pandemic and keeping us connected to each other...Now More Than Ever.
"The two-thousand images installed in this space were taken with digital tools and mostly with my cell phone while I walked and worked through a new career and community life in Massachusetts over the past ten years. Textures, landscapes, meals, and memories are strung overhead and around to help us look up and move through space to discover details that we may otherwise overlook on our way from here to there. The body of details emulate papel picado, prayer flags, and other banners used across cultures to express relationships between nature and humanity.
The photos are from everywhere...from housekeeping, as relief from overwhelming consumption, and as resistance to the sense-dulling administrivia of forms and institutions that frame our lives. Soundscapes reinforce movement through a world of overlooked detail. Large landscapes from walks in eastern and western Massachusetts surround us.
Movement through this space is an extension of a walking art practice that cultivates conversation between people and our environments."
Laura K. Reeder has found that art has greater meaning when it reaches beyond a gallery and into everyday life. Her walking drawings are free-form labyrinths known as Cultivators, crafted on the North Shore of Massachusetts and around the world. A more complete archive of her works can be found at laurakreeder.com
Dr. Reeder has a PhD and BFA from Syracuse University, and an MFA from Boston University. She has taught in and through the arts with PK-12 youth and adults in schools, galleries, and community organizations with Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and through ten years as founding Executive Director of Partners for Arts Education, providing resources to all counties and boroughs of New York. She currently consults with community arts and research organizations and teaches Advocacy and Policy in Arts Education to graduate students at Boston University.
LEFT HANGING AND FRONTS
Two Projects from Nicholas Fraser
ON VIEW
MAY 29 - JULY 5, 2020
Nicholas Fraser’s LEFT HANGING project transforms would-be love letters into meticulous shrines to longing and a monumental exercise in oversharing. He converts unanswered internet dating site messages, his failed efforts to spark a connection, into an intimate portrait whose tireless sense of hope and humor belies a weary awareness of the artificial, projected nature of these online communications. Each message is hand cut with the letters left attached and dangling. Some are warped and distorted, the stretched letters echoing the author’s initial efforts to shape the message for its intended recipient. Others are layered over images dense with competing texts. Legibility is thoroughly compromised, undermining attempts to decipher the message.
The once private notes, intended for a singular audience of whom the viewer knows nothing, are writ large and hung for all to see, reveling and wallowing in a peculiar contemporary phenomenon and its inevitable failures. Fraser celebrates persistence, with each dated message revealing years of effort, and our unquenchable compulsion to achieve a simple, universal goal: to connect, to be understood, to be loved. That each carefully crafted message failed utterly, perhaps left unread even by its initial recipient, matters no longer. Making the effort, despite repeated dead-ends and failures, becomes the point of pride and celebration, a reason to take essentially ridiculous messages out of the drawer and elevate them to proud, public proclamations reminding us that failure is an inevitable and necessary step toward success.
Fraser's ongoing video project FRONTS has captured more than 2,800 storefront scenes since 2010. His quixotic goal was to collect a comprehensive video-based lexicon of signage as raw material for his own projects. Each video captures the day-to-day activities of the street-scape, documenting a wide ranging portrait of 21st century culture. Filmed mostly in NYC, these storefronts serve as witness to the momentous and mundane even as they too are continuously transformed. Fraser will present a mix of his finished Fronts-based videos and an edited selection of the raw footage as a continuous stream visible both online and in IS's storefront window displays.
Nicholas Fraser’s installations, videos and sculpture have been featured at the Drawing Center, SpringBreak Art Fair, Interstate Projects, Dorsky Gallery, Flux Factory, Bronx Art Space, Art in Odd Places, La Mama La Galeria, Jack the Pelican and Taller Boricua. All Consuming, a public sited sculpture, was commissioned for Randall's Island in 2015, the same year he participated in the Bronx Museum's AIM program. His video Follow was featured in the Museum's 2015 AIM Biennale. A solo exhibition of his work was on view at York College/CUNY during 2015 and at Hofstra University's Rosenberg Gallery in 2016. He was awarded a 2014 NYFA Fellowship for his ongoing video project Fronts. He earned his MFA at the School of Visual Art. Born in the U.K., he lives in Brooklyn.
You can see the gallery’s virtual “opening reception” on Instagram TV.
UCHRONIA
An installation by Jason Varone
ON VIEW
JULY 24 - AUGUST 30, 2020
UCHRONIA, featuring the Berkshires- and Brooklyn-based artist Jason Varone, is an exhibition that explores the interaction of data and the physical world through traditional painting and digital projections. In this exhibition, Varone weaves together different textures of electronic data to create a dynamic picture of our evolving world.
“My experiences with technology have informed my relationship to the natural landscape, and by extension to painting. I’m interested in the information ecosystem we have created for ourselves, and how extensively it has infiltrated and degraded our habitat. Today, to even catch a glimpse of the real world one must look past clouds of misinformation. An unsettled reality exists behind the noise.”
UCHRONIA investigates reality, or unreality. By combining traditional ideas of the landscape in art with dynamic content, these works reveal a tension that exists in nature: a struggle between the physical and the digital.
“I don’t consider landscape as something to passively observe, and then, depict in a painting, but rather as a force that can only be defined by the data flowing through it.”
Jason Varone (b. 1976, Brooklyn, NY) lives and works in both the Berkshires in Massachusetts and Brooklyn, New York. His work has been exhibited in many venues, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, The Boston Center for the Arts, The British Film Institute, The International Center of Photography, and Art in General in New York City. In 2013 he was named one of the “top ten artists to watch in Bushwick” by Hyperallergic. He received his M.A. from New York University in 2002, with a focus on video and installation.
HOUSE FIRE HOUSE PARTY
An installation by Danielle Klebes
ON VIEW
SEPTEMBER 18 -
OCTOBER 25
HOUSE FIRE HOUSE PARTY is an immersive art experience that transports viewers into a world featuring a crowd of life-sized wooden impassive introspective party-goers, vibrant colors, apocalyptic imagery, satirical insensitivity, and a disco ball.
The figures in the exhibition are captured in moments of uncertainty and isolation, close in proximity but emotionally distant. They are positioned in a liminal space with no clear entrance or exit pathway. There is a sense of the in-between without a clear narrative regarding what comes next. They are deep in their individual interior experiences while the world burns around them. The exhibition explores themes of apathy, loneliness, temporary remedies, and crowds in the age of COVID-19.
Danielle Klebes is a multidisciplinary artist based in Massachusetts. She has exhibited at notable galleries and museums across the United States and in Canada and Croatia. She is spending much of 2019 and 2020 participating in domestic and international artist residencies. Danielle received her MFA in Visual Arts from Lesley University College of Art and Design in Cambridge, MA, in 2017.
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
An installation by Grier Horner and Riley Nichols
ON VIEW
NOVEMBER 7 -
DECEMBER 6
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE is a memorial to Beth Hall Horner by her son Grier (aged 85) and her great-granddaughter, Riley Nichols, whom she never met.
"My mother was a warm and humane person plagued by bouts of manic depression." Horner said. "Have you noticed how those officiating at funerals always say the deceased will live on in the hearts of those who loved them? Well, I'm one of the few people left in whose heart she is a presence. What happens to Beth once my wife Babbie, my sister Britt and I and a handful of others die? Does the end of her "second life" mark the end of her existence?". That question gave birth to this show.
Grier Horner is the retired associate editor of the Berkshire Eagle. He is a graduate of Brown University and took graduate studies at Stamford University under a Knight fellowship. Riley Nichols is a senior at Hamilton College majoring in philosophy and minoring in art. Their installation utilizes paintings, photographs, and projected images to capture elements of his mother's life as a young woman.
Horner has had a multitude of solo shows in Western Massachusetts, including Pittsfield, North Adams, Stockbridge, Worcester, and Great Barrington. This is Nichols' first exhibition.
