Atlantic Works Gallery To Highlight New Member Works In March
Atlantic Works Gallery (AWG) announced that its March exhibition will be Contemporary Dialogues, a group show of three of the gallery’s newest members, Richard Dorff, John Greiner-Ferris, and Joan Ryan. The exhibition examines multiple forms of artistic dialogue, and opens Saturday, March 2 with a reception from 2:00 – 6:00 p.m. and closes Saturday, March 30. There will be an AWG traditional “Third Thursday”—the gallery’s friendly, cultural community get-togethers—on March 21.
Dorff is a visual artist and set designer who works in sculpture and installation, and in this exhibition his primary interest is with the space his work occupies and how that space and the objects themselves interact with one another. “By making these connections primarily through lighting and placement, objects and space create installations that extend beyond their own physical dimensions,” he explained.
On Saturday, March 23 at 3:00 p.m., in conjunction with Dorff’s work, Fort Point Theater Channel, where Dorff is co-artistic director, will present Stations of the XX , a work-in-progress performance piece using sound and movement.
Greiner-Ferris, a politically motivated visual artist who is informed by the theater, combines his love of images and words in assemblage. “You don’t lean back in a theater seat and say, ‘Entertain me.’ For the actors to do their jobs well, the audience has to be just as involved as the actors to give the actors something to respond to,” he said. “Nor do you walk
into a gallery and just look at pictures on a wall. Pictures are something you engage with. The worst thing I could think that could happen to my art is if someone leaves the gallery and says, ‘Well, that was nice. Do you want to get some ice cream?’ I want people to discuss and fight about art.”
Ryan uses painting and drawing as a critical language to explore contemporary society, politics, and concepts of identity. In her most recent works, she incorporates a wide variety of images, cartoons, fairy tales, and political iconography combined with heightened color to confront the viewer at an intersection of a broad range of cultural moments. “This junction of imagery creates dynamic interplay and peculiar juxtaposition with the past and present,” she said. “We no longer live in a world of neat patterns , and my work imitates the way knowledge often comes to oneself, which is by fits and starts and indirection.”
Atlantic Works Gallery Contemporary Dialogues (details)
• Show opens Saturday, March 2; reception 2:00 – 6:00 p.m.
• “Third Thursday”; March 21, 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.
• Stations of the XX ; Saturday, March 23; 3:00 p.m.
• Show closes Saturday, March 30
Atlantic Works Gallery, 80 Border Street, Boston, MA 02128, now in its twenty-first year, is an artist-run collaborative space for art and ideas located in East Boston. The gallery is open to the public every Friday and Saturday, 2:00 – 6:00 p.m. For private viewing, contact [email protected]. For more information, visit https://atlanticworks.org/ .
Atlantic Works Gallery Announces Its April Exhibition
Atlantic Works Gallery announced that its April exhibition will be a two-person show by Boston-based painters and gallery members Joan Ryan and Julie C Baer composed of paintings and drawings inspired by nature. In the Woods: Nature-Inspired Paintings and Drawings by Joan Ryan and Julie C Baer will open Saturday, April 5 and run until Saturday, April 27. There will be an opening reception on April 6 from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. at the gallery and an AWG traditional “Third Thursday” reception—the gallery’s friendly, cultural community get-togethers—on April 18 from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m.
“The impetus for my work is what the Naturalists and Romantic landscape painters referred to as Ruckenfigur, where a figure is placed in a sprawling landscape contemplating life’s quandaries,” explained Ryan. But in her work, Ryan replaces the human figure with discarded objects from Western culture, specifically with the “iconic and nostalgic television set.” Ryan’s paintings contrast a lush, unabashedly beautiful “nature” to objects such as discarded TV monitors and computer-related “techno/trash.” Also on view in the exhibition will be Ryan’s installation of 300 5”x7” small works called Street Life, a survey of discarded televisions in one Boston neighborhood. Along with this installation are large mixed-media drawings that represent an entropic outlook on our propensity for consumption.
Baer explained, “My work reflects my close observation and sensory impressions of the shifting light, variegated colors, constant movement, regular yet unique shapes, and visual patterns of the natural world around me, wherever I am.” Baer’s paintings trace the seasonal unfolding of natural life cycles within local ecosystems. She works abstractly, yet botanically accurately. Her aim is to surprise viewers with unusual views and compositions to induce them to look and look again, just as she has done. As Visiting Artist at the Native Plant Trust, she is currently making large-scale yet intimate mixed-media paintings abstractly depicting the patterns and designs of fungi and lichen growing on old trees and leaf litter. Baer is exquisitely aware that nature is our collective home and humans have caused irreparable habitat, resource, and species loss. Her work responds to ecologists’ call for native ecosystem rediscovery and restoration, and collectively embodies biodiversity. Her work offers ongoing opportunities for discovery, inviting viewers to go outdoors and look around, and to care for themselves and their own habitats.
Atlantic Works Gallery In the Woods: Nature-Inspired Paintings and Drawings by Joan Ryan and Julie C Baer (details)
• Show opens Saturday, April 5; reception 4:00 – 7:00 p.m.
• “Third Thursday”; April 18, 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.
• Show closes Saturday, April 27
Atlantic Works Gallery, 80 Border Street, Boston, MA 02128, now in its twenty-first year, is an artist-run collaborative space for art and ideas located in East Boston. The gallery is open to the public every Friday and Saturday, 2:00 – 6:00 p.m. For private viewing, contact [email protected]. or call 857-302-8363 during gallery hours . For more information, visit https://atlanticworks.org.