past shows

2024

Anamnesis: Jon Neuse

Anamnesis is a recollection and memory of past existences and using them in one’s life, through rational thought and knowledge. Neuse poetically explores his past to make sense of important relationships in his life.

The Shape of Idealism, Paintings by Harold B. Stone

Giants roamed the earth, or at least the house, in their PJs and slippers, or out by the grill in their crocodile shirts and white tassel shoes. These were the guys who had saved civilization a few years earlier. You can get their story from YouTube: A long, hard war, American kids shipped overseas, some of the most beautiful and dangerous devices ever created. The nuclear toothpaste was let out of the tube at the Trinity site—the final argument of kings, or at least of capitalism in its maturity. A few years later, B-58s produced double sonic booms overhead, Nike Hercules antiballistic missiles were on display at the State Fair, and our government produced a surplus of tendentious propaganda to scare the bejesus out of the citizenry. 

Terror, courage and chivalry: it is hard not to attach a higher meaning to it all, and even harder to think about any of it rationally. These paintings concern how one’s idealism can be highjacked by military imagery.

2023

A different View: Jodi Reed

Family Silver: rebecca Pavlenko

2022

othering mothering: detonation of a notion

Perci Chester

The current reality of political and environmental imbalance casts a dangerous shadow, inspiring me to create art that engenders healing – a meditation of humanity’s spiritual survival willing life back into balance. I believe art has strength that can empower community by sharing meaning in our unspoken visual language. When I incorporate and transform found objects from their original function, they open the trajectory of their history, asking questions that layers meaning. Impending motion and actual movement invite interaction with viewers and recognition of the life force within.

shape shifting verse

A collaboration by Jil Evans and Lynn Wadsworth

Collage is an art form that challenges its maker to bring a variety of materials and sources of imagery together, taking what is broken to create a new whole. The twenty collages in Shape Shifting Verse contain complex visual events that explore ideas about scale, speed, atmosphere, and subtle humor in constructed moments of animation. Using color, light, gravity and weightlessness, the compositions unlock associations that return a sense of wholeness to the lived events of our own lives. Working with torn and cut fragments from a wide range of sources, the goal of this collaboration in collage is to lead and be led by another mind through surprise and revelation until the events of the collage have a life of their own. In Shape Shifting Verse #1, a large yellow shape billows out from the center, as if from a strong gust of wind, revealing watery spaces with ghost-like waterlilies. The whole composition is tilting back and forth looking for balance. In contrast, Shape Shifting #2 has fragile looking petal shapes delicately layered that float together in the lightest of air, suggesting how the slightest breath can bring real change to what exists around you. All these psychosomatic responses remind us of our wholeness and the richly layered and even immeasurable complexity of our lives. This experience of wholeness is often compromised by trauma, illness, and routine. The twenty collages in Shape Shifting Verse are invitations to explore what forces, big and small, create our experiences of wholeness over time.