A unique glimpse into Somerville’s thriving visual arts community, Party of 5 exhibits the work of the 2005 Somerville Arts Council Visual Art Grantwinners Angela Cunningham, Alice Grossman, Mary Kenny, Nancy Murphy Spicer and Ken Richardson. Selected through a competitive process juried by their peers, this show illustrates the “buzz” being generated about Somerville’s art scene is richly deserved. This exhibit meets the challenge of mounting an exhibit with 5 diverse artists working in very different mediums in a forceful and exciting manner.
Reading by SAC Literary Fellowship Grantwinners 2005: 12 November 2005, 7 p.m., The Nave Gallery
Lisa BORDERS takes us to Cloud Cuckoo Land • Jaclyn FRIEDMAN slams down ferocious verse • Melissa GLENN HABER tells an admirably strange children's story about dragons and war • Leonina HERINGER has cleaned your house and is ready to talk • Tracy STRAUSS shares poems of truth about childhood trauma • Patricia WILD shows how the reality of race is stranger than fiction
Angela Cunningham
I make wheel-thrown and hand-built clay objects, most intended for contemplation, that are primarily drawn from bowl and vase forms. My visual references include body, floral, vegetable, fruit, and marine imagery. Although I often use organic imagery, I am concerned primarily with human things such as feelings of wonder, erotic delight, desire, vulnerability and exposure. I want people to irresistibly be drawn to touch my pieces as though they are running their hands down someone’s back, and, through this, to elicit feelings of intimacy, tenderness, and empathy. However, as much as I want to seduce, I equally want to push people away – to awe people with the beauty of an object and perhaps repulse them with the details. Intimacy involves distance as much as it does closeness.
More and more, my obsessive process feeds the content of my work. I have given myself over to investment. This obsessive attentiveness serves to fetishize my objects, thus heightening their preciousness and seductive power. Interestingly, my pieces often seem to be magnified, as though they are a microscopic world that has been enlarged. Fetish objects are often figuratively pulsating and magnified, with a central magnetic aura that concomitantly turns in on itself and emanates outwards, that both distances and draws near. It is this elusive duality that intrigues me most.
Alice Grossman
The places in Alice Grossman’s photographs have a quiet mysterious life of their own, images that have the immediacy of a dream. They may seem enticing, but at the same time foreboding. She is drawn to photographing the semi-private and public spaces of yards, gardens, and parks, places where people go to get outside of themselves by connecting with the natural world. Grossman is interested in the evidence of the human hand in the creation and nurturing of these landscapes. Some people totally control their own small corner of nature, others add ornament or build shrines for protection and guidance. Still others have created visual poetry in idyllic public or private spaces. The artist uses a medium format plastic camera with an unsharp, unpredictable lens, printing them digitally on archival watercolor paper. The resulting images have an idealized aesthetic that suggests 19th century landscape painting, but with an unsettling theatrical feeling that brings them into the 21st century. Grossman was selected for the 2nd Annual Juried Summer Exhibition at Tufts University Art Gallery this spring. She holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and teaches photography at the Pingree School in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.
Mary Kenny: email
Mary Kenny is showing toylike miniature sculptures and animated shorts. Beautiful, humorous, and disturbing, her sculptures are brought to life using stop-motion animation in a style reminiscent of the '70s Christmas specials of Rankin & Bass. And like many toys, video games and movies in our culture, her work confronts the viewer with images of death, violence, and pop culture.
Nancy Murphy Spicer : email
Nancy Murphy Spicer makes the examination and redefinition of drawing a focus of her art. The resulting works are physical drawings, sculptures, works on paper, and installations.
In the past several years, her work has played on the edge between two- and three-dimensionality using latex paint as both a painting and sculpture material. In the Somerville Arts Council Grantwinners 2005 exhibition at the Nave Gallery, Murphy Spicer will show a selection of drawings from a new series of works on paper. The drawings depict forms that mimic the fluid movement of poured paint.
Murphy Spicer has shown her work in a number of galleries in the Boston area including the Boston Drawing Project at the Bernard Toale Gallery, Green Street Gallery, Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts and Tufts University Art Gallery. She has been invited to create site-specific works at the Atlanta College of Art Gallery and the Memphis College of Art Gallery. Her 2002 two-person show with Chris Nau was named one of the ten best gallery shows by the Boston Globe. In 2004, Murphy Spicer was chosen for the New England/New Talent exhibition at the Fitchburg Art Museum. Her work is on view at the White Columns Curated Artists Registry in New York as well as on her website. Murphy Spicer will have a solo exhibition at the Bernard Toale Gallery in March 2006.
Ken Richardson
Ken Richardson's photographs are part of an on going series based on themes of
transportation and wheel culture. For the past few years he has
been photographing in the streets and at car shows, motorcycle
rallies and races of all sorts. The photographs are an examination
of the relationship and self-expression of people and their chosen
methods of transport. The pictures also look at the environment
created by a culture in transit. The works in this show are 16x20
black and white silver prints taken this year. Ken is a native of
Massachusetts and is currently living in the Union Square
neighborhood of
Somerville.
