Image: postcard invitation for impersonature.
impersonature is an inclusive nature-themed exhibit concerning impersonating, mimicking, rendering, personifying, and embodying the character or part of Nature. It presents various methods of looking at and representing nature simultaneously. This exhibit allows participating artists to make sense of its theme with their own creative interpretation. This is accomplished through the medium employed, the material used - be it natural or man made.
Image: (Detail) Wall drawing installation at artSPACE@16 by Leigh Hall.
Leigh Hall (East Boston, MA) presents a wall drawing installation of grass, vines, and other plants. These drawings reflect her wide range of interests and experience, from cartography and graphic design to decorative arts and natural history. “I've been fascinated by nature. I went through various stages of thinking I would become an entomologist, a microbiologist, an ornithologist; eventually I realized that it was the act of LOOKING at all these things and creatures that I was so enamored with. I became an artist.” Her work shows a keen awareness of the environment, especially the details which are easily overlooked in the day-to-day routine of life.
Image: (Detail) Wall drawing installation by Leigh Hall.
The act of art making is a quest for Leigh Hall —a search for what she finds so fascinating in the subject matter. The wall drawings she presents are a direct result of that quest. They started as an exercise to isolate the shapes and patterns in certain images. By rendering them larger than life, and often larger than people, Hall hopes to convey to the viewer the sense of discovery and exploration she feels when confronted with that rotting leaf on the sidewalk, or thicket of undergrowth in the woods.
Leigh Hall grew up in Marietta, Georgia. She moved to Boston in 1979, and later attended the Massachusetts College of Art, where she majored in painting. Hall makes her living as a graphic designer and multimedia production. She's active in both the environmental and arts communities and is a member of the Chelsea Creek Action Group, the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the East Boston Artists Group and the Atlantic Works Gallery. Her latest installation of wall drawings was installed in the Office of Arts, Tourism and Special Events at Boston City Hall. Recent exhibits include "Linear Meditations," a solo exhibit of wall drawings at Maverick Gallery in East Boston; “ARTcetera," Boston Center for The Arts; "Reliquarium," a curated group show at Atlantic Works gallery in East Boston; and a juried photography show “Photos from 3rd Space," at artSPACE@16 in Malden.
Image: (Detail) Mixed media work by Kim Salerno.
Kim Salerno (Newport, RI) displays bright colors, wacky materials and labor intensive paintings in this group show. Her work explores the tension between nature and culture. Salerno invites the viewer to consider the nature of realism, as highly synthetic images of the natural. “Naturalism, like a photo, is one way of looking at nature and I want to challenge the assumptions about realism.”
Salerno’s paintings combine layers of pictures, which have been culled from history books on subjects ranging from Hudson River School landscapes to Chinese screen painting and arabesques from Islamic pattern design. The historical images are remade in craft store materials such as seed beads, foam, pipe cleaners, glitter, polyester string, sand, and sequins. The color, materials and techniques are often associated with girl’s work and femininity. This stands in stark contrast to the heroic imagery of traditional Western landscape painting. The result is an amalgam that is neither historicist nor heroic and decidedly unnatural.Kim Salerno has been exhibiting her mixed media paintings throughout the United States in galleries, cultural centers and museums. She has won many awards including a fellowship from the Rhode Island State council on the Arts. Salerno’s work is included in several private and corporate collections. Salerno attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she earned a certificate in painting. She has a Master of Architecture Degree from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and a Bachelor of Art Degree from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Image: (Detail) Installation by Marcella Anna Stasa.
Marcella Anna Stasa (Upton, MA) presents sculptures and installation primarily formed of found objects. She uses decayed and rusted materials in combination with things found in nature, which include dead animals and their bones. “While some of these elements may seem morbid, I see a great deal of beauty in death and decay. It strikes me more as eloquent than melancholy.”
Stasa’s work reflects the admiration she has for the way in which nature adapts to humans. She uses available natural materials in her sculpture to make a statement about both the current environmental condition of the world and to focus on the beauty of it, even in a state of decay and assault. “I see my sculpture as collaboration with the natural world, where I reconfigure the materials at hand to develop new organic, yet unreal, forms by appropriating the tools and techniques nature uses to survive.”Stasa received her BFA in Ceramics in 1983 from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA. She was a New England Foundation for the Arts’ artist grant recipient in 1990. Her recent solo and group shows include “Marcella Anna Stasa” at Wainwright Bank, Cambridge, MA; “To Have and To Hold” Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA; “Manifest 2005: The Many Faces of Boston” , Copley Society, Boston, MA; “Renewal: Reconstructing castoffs into art” at ArtSpace Gallery Maynard, MA; “6th Biennial” at A.I.R. New York, NY; “Phoenix Artists’ Group Show” at Phoenix Gallery, New York, NY; “Renewed: A Transformation of Found Objects” at the NAVE Gallery, Somerville, MA; “Small Works”, a juried show at artSPACE@16 in Malden.
Image: Sculpture by Dustin Tracy.
Dustin Tracy (Cambridge, MA) shows 4 sculptures in impersonature. His work explores the dichotomy of synthetic versus natural. The pieces deconstruct man-made material, their sharp edges and tidy geometric shapes to reveal their natural basis and a primitive inner-chaos. Tracy’s work embodies the tension of being natural and the human urge to deny this, and to impersonate that other than nature. His sculptures are formed from plywood, which the artist finds already marked, damaged, used and discarded. He separates the wood into layers by repeated cycles of wetting, chiseling and prying. The pieces are then mounted on constructed frames. Tracy states, “They are reflections of our desire to be seen as civilized and orderly beings despite much evidence to the contrary. This can be seen as a personification of freewill, a human force, versus fate, a natural force.” In these pieces, Tracy captures the complex relationship within and between people these opposing forces create.
Image: Sculpture by Dustin Tracy.
Dustin Tracy received a Master’s Degree in Expressive Art Therapy from Lesley University and studied sculpture and painting at Massachusetts College of Art and The Art Institute of Boston. Tracy works as an art therapist which gives him a valuable perspective on human conflict both internal and interpersonal. His work has been included in exhibits in various parts of New England, including the Blackstone River Gallery, where he won Third place in their annual shown, and a spot in their awards show, and “Small Works”, a juried show at artSPACE@16 in Malden.
Image: Painting by Jamie Vasta.
Jamie Vasta (San Francisco, CA) creates her euphoric landscape paintings using glitter and glue. Much of her work explores the relationship between disaster and entertainment, beauty and terror. Through images of idealized landscapes and natural disasters, Vasta explores our culture’s fascination with, and separation from, the land around us. “I believe in unabashed beauty. With glitter and glue I create ecstatic landscapes - moments of serene sunset beauty or the fury of a storm. I am interested in the sublime- beauty and terror experienced inseparably, like melodrama.”
Jamie Vasta is much interested in Americana, John Ford, visions of an imaginary, idealized landscape, and The Hudson River School tarted up in costume jewelry. Vasta states, “Fascination, fear, and desire rule in the search for the untamed. In imaginations of the landscape there are vestiges of its former fear and beauty - searching for vast open spaces and maybe being eaten by bears. Watching a forest burn on the evening news is overwhelming and an entertainment in some way. We want to see danger from safe places.” The artist is in search for tranquility in the eye of the storm.Jamie Vasta was born in 1980 in Rochester, New York. She received a B.F.A. from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2003. She is currently studying at the California College of the Arts, and will receive her M.F.A. in 2006. Her work has been included in “Other Planes of There,” Adobe, San Francisco (2005), “Blurring Landscape,” GASP, Brookline (2004), “All That Glitters”, Islip Art Museum (2003), and in “Small Works” at artSPACE@16 (2004).
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artSPACE@16 (Malden, MA) is a non-commercial gallery est. in 1998. This alternative gallery is operated on a voluntary basis. It has been making today's art accessible to the community-at-large by donating space for ongoing art exhibitions and collaborating on related events within the community. artSPACE@16 has created a common ground for everyone to come together for art appreciation, an educational experience, and information sharing as well as networking. It distributes information regarding the City of Malden's artist studio space venture through postings on the artSPACE@16 website and e-mailing list. It also provides information on art resources and exhibition opportunities in and outside of Malden. Through these ongoing voluntary art initiatives, artSPACE@16 hopes to continue making its contribution in strengthening the connection between artist communities in the neighboring cities. artSPACE@16 encourages others to come play a vital role in establishing a vibrant artist community in Malden. “There is a place for everyone.”
artSPACE@16 is located at 16 Princeton Road, Malden MA 02148. MBTA & a 20min Walk: Take Orange line to Oak Grove Station. Start from Oak Grove, take a left onto Winter, cross Main to Forest (Forest Dale Cemetery is on your left). Take right onto Goodwin, right onto Floral, and immediate left onto Hill, left onto Princeton. 16 Princeton is down the hill on your right. For suggestions of driving directions please go to: http://www.artSPACEat16.com/contactus.htm
All exhibitions are free and open to the public. Exhibition is on view these Saturdays: 6/18, 6/25, 7/9, & 7/16. Gallery closed on 7/2. Gallery hours are from 12-5pm and by appointment. For further information, please contact: Sand T, Founder/Director of artSPACE@16
Ph 781-321-8058 voicemail *3, SandT.artSPACEat16@verizon.net , website: http://www.artSPACEat16.com/currentexhibition.htm
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The 27th Exhibition IN THE NEWS - visit http://www.artSPACEat16.com/archive.htm
