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Exhibitions: Current | Upcoming | Past

Exhibitions: Past



Remembrance
Memorial
Monument



January 23 – February 20, 2020

Remembrance Memorial Monument Remembrance Memorial Monument Remembrance Memorial Monument Remembrance Memorial Monument Remembrance Memorial Monument Remembrance Memorial Monument Remembrance Memorial Monument Remembrance Memorial Monument Remembrance Memorial Monument Remembrance Memorial Monument

Remembrance, memorial, and monument are variations on notions of commemoration.

The nature of memorialization is to remind us; to provide a mnemonic device or object through which we can know that something important has happened. The earliest records of ancient artifacts and ornamentation are often associated with remembrance and monument. We have been doing this for a long time. To some degree, all of art is about memory.

Many art objects that adorn public spaces are commemorative. They serve to remind us of events on a particular piece of geography; one person’s heroism, or a collective embodiment of loss, as in a military burial ground or place where a genocide may have occurred.

This is the second exhibition in our trio of programs for the year that looks at ideas of remembrance. For this show, we have the opportunity to look at 16 artists whose works embody many ways of thinking about loss, hope, resilience, and affirmation.

Kathleen Hancock
Director




The Artists


Douglas Breault shapes his work around the search for an online record of his father. Gleaned from online materials such as photographic images, he imagines structures that attempt to align loss to the permanence of digital identity. Breault is an interdisciplinary artist frequently overlapping elements from photography, painting, sculpture, installation, and video. Breault holds an MFA from Tufts University and has recently exhibited work at New Systems Exhibition, the Stove Factory, and Imago Gallery. He currently teaches art at Bridgewater State University.

Linda Di Frenna honors process as much as outcome. The materials she works with are the left overs, things that reveal their history through association, wear and tear, and rediscovery. The results of her intentionality are to both comfort and disquiet. Di Frenna received an MAE from Rhode island School of Design and teaches studio art classes through the Bristol Art Museum. She is the recipient of the 2018 People’s Choice Award at the Fuller Craft Museum and an Award of Excellence from Mystic Museum of Art.

The ritual of memory is manifest in Dawn Edmondson’s work. She uses wax and plaster to preserve, and in the process, create iconic images and objects. She is Associate Professor in Interior Design and Humanities at New England Institute of Technology. She has recently returned from The CRIT LAB RUC Rural Residency for Contemporary Art in Lombardy, Italy.

Mary Edwards sound installations are a sensory delight. In 2013 she presented an original work at the gallery for the exhibition Perseverance/This Bright Morning. These two new pieces are an homage to notions of solitude and resilience in the face of adversity, as well as to the nostalgia of place and the promise of a better tomorrow. Edwards is a composer who uses sound as an environmental or architectural element with the objective to enhance the listener’s spatial experience, while creating a narrative immersion through cinematic scoring techniques. She holds an MFA from Goddard and lives and works in New York.

Transcendence is at the heart of Marcia Goodwin’s work. She likens her creative process to the shamanic process of the Munay Ki. Goodwin’s work is a means to healing and spirituality. She has shown work in the past as part of our All Media Juried exhibition series. Goodwin, a graduate of the MFA Program at UMass Dartmouth completed her master’s program in 2016. She continues to work in her studio in New Bedford.

Jennifer Halli’s work is a rumination on religious rituals and their comforting familiarity. Her work includes symbols such as clay, texts, and references to prayer and devotion. After completing a BA in Art Education and teaching in North Carolina, she studied ceramics with Robert Barron in Kardella, Australia and Peter Callas in Belvidere, NJ and recently graduated from the UMass Dartmouth as a Distinguished Art Fellow.

Mary N. Hurwitz’s two works are memorials to herparents. Each piece contains tangible references that give shape to her memories of childhood family dynamics. Hurwitz received her BFA in Graphic Design from Syracuse University and has an MA in Art Education from UMass Dartmouth. Currently teaches Visual Art in the Taunton Public School District. Recent exhibitions include Annual Members Show, Attleboro Arts Museum, Attleboro, MA; and Biennial Members National Juried Show, Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA.

Anthony Miraglia’s work is inspired by the novel Bitter Spring by Ignazio Silone. The book describes the impact of decisions by the powerful upon the communities who are the least able to control their own destinies. Miraglia’s work is an attempt to convey the anguish and suffering that results from endemic social inequities. Miraglia is Professor Emeritus of Painting in the Department of Fine Arts from the UMass Dartmouth. His works have been exhibited locally, regionally, and nationally. His works are held in numerous collections throughout the USA, Italy, and Asia.

Animal imagery often appears in the work of Andrea Scofield Olmstead. Her work also explores the duality of cultural expectations and realities girls and young women face throughout their lives. The Procession is a tribute to both. Olmstead received her BFA in drawing from Florida State University, and an MFA in sculpture from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her primary focus is traditional figurative ceramic sculpture and drawing. She is an assistant professor of art in ceramics, sculpture, and drawing at Fitchburg State University.

Janice Perry is a performance artist and cultural critic. Recent works examine the ways in which we look at ideas about death, the rituals and tangible touchstones of mourning, and memory. Perry is an American performance artist based in Vermont. Perry began international touring in 1981. Her interdisciplinary work has been presented on stage, adapted for radio, television, published, screened at film festivals, and exhibited at academic and cultural institutions in the USA and Europe.

Michele Provost’s works for this show are ruminations about memory and place. She includes a multitude of refences to geography, psychology, and time. Her paintings, layered and excavated, shapes embedded and scraped, offer questions about time, memory, and geography. Recent exhibitions include Memory at the Krause Gallery, Providence, RI; Observation: Recollection, Green Space at TF Green; and Legacies of Paint – The Mentor Project Group Invitational, Newport Art Museum. She lives and works in Rhode Island.

Architecture, still-life, and the human condition are filtered through Karen Rothman’s studio process. She states that process is more important than outcome and is the means to explore ways of arriving at a conclusion. As a result, her work reflects material sensibility and a singular approach to problem solving. She received a BA in Economics from Connecticut College and later was certified to teach in the Massachusetts public school system. Rothman, now retired from her career as an art teacher at the East Somerville Community School, shifted her focus to her own artistic pursuits.

Judith Ellen Sanders submission for the show offers us a different perspective—recreating an environment of our collective memory of ideas of home. And in doing so, she establishes the hope of continuity, of renewal, and the possibilities of beginning. Sanders’ dual interests in the art and sciences percolate through her work. She has shown work at the De Cordova as well as the Boston Biomedical research Institute, and her work is in a number of corporate and private collections.

Anna Lisa Sorensen reminds us so poignantly about the loss of human lives to gun violence, especially the lost promise of potential. Her works which stand to remind us of the Sandy Hook School shooting are humble. Small stones that represent a tangible reckoning, each a token of a life, a diminutive but moving memorial. Her interests in textiles and Japanese dying techniques inform her professional practice. She creates and sells dyed fabrics and garments in her Etsy Shop, Shibori Designs.

Themes of loss are pervasive throughout this exhibition. Andrew Tedesco’s ongoing tribute to his mother is one that is infused with his Filipino heritage. He writes of the multitude of ways that one can be defined by culture. Time, place, spiritual expression, and familial connections offer a fusion of possible outcomes. Tedesco recently completed his MFA at UMass Dartmouth. He lives and works in New Bedford.

Marion Wilner has always explored the realms of mystery through intersections of science and art. And in this body of work, she uses these underpinnings to make sense of grief. She grapples with the metaphor of remembrance and loss in a search for comfort after the loss of her husband. Marion Wilner was born and raised in New York. She holds BS and MFA degrees from NYU. Her work is held in a number of public and private collections including Duro Industries, Inc., the Fall River Historical Society, and Bristol Community College Permanent Collection. She is the founder of the Fine Art Program and is Professor Emerita at Bristol Community College.




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