Mouth of Penobscot River, Maine, Gary Anthes
Flaming House Ruin, Utah, Gary Anthes
Time's Shadow
Nothing Lasts, Nothing is Finished, Nothing is Perfect
Gary Anthes & Carolee Jakes
The Japanese have an artistic philosophy that reveres the beauty of aging. It holds in high esteem people, natural elements, and manufactured things that are old, imperfect, and incomplete. Sometimes called wabi-sabi, it stands in opposition to the classic Western notions of perfection, beauty, and youth. We chose the works for this show with that aesthetic in mind. In them we see a combination of mystery and a serene melancholy. For us, these attributes contribute to feelings of aloneness (but not necessarily loneliness) and tranquility.
Reception: Saturday July 10, 3-5pm
Remember, Carolee Jakes
A Well-deserved Rest, Carolee Jakes
In the Lower Gallery
There is nothing permanent except Change.
Harriet Lesser
The idea for this series started while I was driving our dog Caesar to a doggie daycare facility in an industrial part of Rockville. Each time I drove through, I could see from the road an immense mountain of car parts, appliance parts, wheels, and tires, and could hear the crashing of machinery.
The pandemic had been going on for months and continuing. Each time I passed the mountain I wanted to see more. I pulled into their driveway several times and was allowed to get closer to the moving, dissolving landscape.
I thought about how I felt during the pandemic and how I saw my life and the life of others reflected in those parts. I took photographs and worked on them with graphite, paint and photo transfer. Looking at the pieces closely I could imagine where they had been before and where they might end up: reworked melted metal or unidentifiable junk transformed into something fresh and new.
Reviewed by Claudia Rousseau, Ph.D. in East City Art
Reception: Saturday July 10, 3-5pm
Yuno Baswir: 11 New Paintings
My new paintings are the result of my ongoing creative process in using the act of painting as a way of remembering and praising God (dhikr).
In the Garden Gallery
Golden Repair
Lisa Allen
The Japanese art of kintsugi, translated to “golden repair,” is a pottery repair method that honors the artifact’s unique history and doesn’t attempt to hide the break. Rather than covering up the imperfections, kintsugi takes something that is broken and “heals” it, but not in an effort to return it to its former self.
As it has been for so many others, the past year has been a difficult one for me. On March 3, 2020, the week before the U.S. went into quarantine, my family lost my teenage nephew in a tragic accident. I was seven months pregnant and largely unfamiliar with the very painful, and very common, feeling of intense grief.
Creating these images has been a way for me to step back into a creative space, and attempt to process the grief and trauma I experienced over the past year. To me the idea of kintsugi was very fitting when thinking about grief and healing. We should not try to hide the cracks—or need to for that matter—as great loss never completely heals or disappears.
Each step of the creative process had significant meaning to me. I decided to use my late uncle’s old Nikon F camera, allowing me to experiment with something new, while maintaining a sense of old family connection. The scenes I captured were from areas of my own garden and around my neighborhood, where I spent the majority of the past year. I took the photos just as spring—a time of growth and renewal—arrived, and our community and country began to open back up.
Finally, using kintsugi as inspiration, I cut the images into pieces and put them back together with a beautiful but finicky substance, the characteristic mixture of epoxy and gold mica powder. When putting the images back together, some similarities struck me: grief can be messy and healing is very, very hard.
Twilight
Eleanor Kotlarik Wang
These works are part of my ongoing explorations fusing paint, textiles, and stitching. They are my creative responses to textiles from different world cultures. The works have become increasingly more abstract as the marks have become emotional reactions to colors and shapes found in the original stimulus.