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Kingston Associates|Everything Leaves a Mark
April 3rd - April 28th, 2024
Opening reception: Friday, April 5, 5 to 8 pm
Blueprints: A Botanical Cyanotype Demonstration, April 28, 12:30 - 1:30 pm
Ten Kingston Gallery Associate Member artists present Everything Leaves a Mark, a show of works exploring the marks we make, leave behind, or endure. Interpreting this theme they express the impact of memory, experience, and linguistic nuance on identity and imagination. Using a variety of two- and three-dimensional forms the artists respond to both concrete and abstract ideas about what constitutes leaving a mark, mentally, societally and environmentally. This is a show by a collective that intends to make the viewer consider how we affect the world around us.
Everything Leaves a Mark features the following artists: Stacey Cushner, Sally Dion, Madge Evers, Jim Fenzel, R. Galvan, Jane Lincoln, Jeffrey Nowlin, Jade Olson, Brett S. Poza, and Anne Sargent Walker.
Selected Works
"Milkweed" by Anne Sargent Walker. "I have been thinking about the ‘mark’ humans have left on this precious planet and its flora and fauna for many years, and trying to put my care and concern for it into my paintings. For this round I wanted to also show the mark of time and the seasons on the natural world- which is changing constantly and not always for the best. Ands I also wanted, as someone who has painted representationally, to show the mark of the artist in my new paintings- the strokes, the application of color and shape, resulting in an expressive product. One painting I painted upside down, without righting the photograph I was working from. In another I worked quickly and vigorously to suggest rather than perfectly represent- and yet still make the subject recognizable. It has been fun to loosen up."
"Sunflowers" by Anne Sargent Walker.
"Thing That Can't be Mailed" by Brett Poza.
"What marks remain forever?" by Jade Olsen Thinking of ceramics as objects that last forever, and of stories as everlasting, I have focused on storytelling in painting and on ceramic vessels. Playful cartoons coexist with melodramatic gangsters and femmes fatales. The theme is carried forward in paintings that echo and weave film noir into real life. Archetypal portraits are frozen in timeless melodrama. The limited palette further points to film noir and graphic novels while it heightens the tension between the characters. The character archetypes of this work interest me because they are nearly always enmeshed in a deeply moral dilemma. They are engaged either in grasping for something keenly desired, or they are obsessed with meting out punishment. Each feels justified in their role. For me, these characters recall my childhood in a religious cult emphasizing judgment and punishment, where morals were simultaneously rigid and self-servingly fluid. Considering marks as graphic lines or shapes, and as a collection of scars or experiences that form a personal history, this work is a way for me to find beauty in the marks I carry and the marks I have made."
"Tree Fern" by Madge Evers. "Messages in a late afternoon wind: watch for falling branches, bring layers, use 300 gsm weight paper if you’ll be rinsing plein air. As I lifted a five-foot newly washed cyanotype photogram depicting giant Toe Toe Grass, the September wind marked the paper with tears and folds. A period of crushing disappointment gave way as I realized that forces beyond my control - floating spores or mushroom worms or fresh plants interacting with, and altering, cyanotype chemistry – often leave marks on my work. The torn cyanotypes were marked with the force of the wind, but not irreparable. I adapted the kintsugi technique, used to repair broken ceramics with tree sap and powdered gold, to patch them. Kintsugi is practical; it highlights an object’s history and explores qualities of recovery and resilience, created through the act of mending."
"Book of Leaves" (front) by Jane Lincoln. "Leave it to me to apply the show title literally. I collect leaves on my daily walks in nature. These are used to create monoprints where unexpected marks occur. The monoprints become leaves in an accordion book. This is my work. Take it or leave it. "
"Book of Leaves" (back) by Jane Lincoln
Jeffrey Nowlin
"Towards a Blue Planet" by Stacey Cushner. "This is not my usual artist statement but an important one in not leaving “marks” on this planet. I’d like everyone who is reading this to take personal responsibility to not leave behind a further environmental mess. This is to Challenge yourself this year to take your trash out with HoldOn bags (https://holdonbags.com) which are compostable, to send old clothes to recycling programs to divert textile waste (www.retoldrecycling.com), to commit to zero waste places to try to live plastic free in the kitchen, the bathroom, and in cleaning spaces (Bostonians, see www.sustainablejungle.com), and to go paperless and stop junk mail (www.DMAchoice.org and www.OptOutPrescreen.com). Create your own ever-expanding list and keep a reminder to reduce waste in your home. Keep this planet blue, carbon negative and climate positive."
Jeffrey Nowlin
"Flat Iron Interlude" by Jim Fenzel. "The effects of a law repealed still linger. Sometimes merely for a brief period. Other times, the deep roots and profound impacts cannot be erased by merely changing the laws which created them. In this country segregation is not only de facto, but de jure—actively, relentlessly enforced by rule of law. The marks created are not remnants left behind, but tentacles spreading, growing, mutating into the future."
"Trust in Me" by Jade Olsen
"Listening to Stones" by Brett Poza. "Using both her background in psychology and her love for drawing trees, Brett S. Poza has responded to this year’s theme, Everything Leaves a Mark, by building The Book of Holes ( El Libro de Huecos). Loosely using the Baum Test (draw a tree) as a metaphor she has constructed a metaphorical timeline of significant and overwhelming events in one person’s life, burning both bilingual text and images into thin sheets of plywood."
"Five Skelllig Grasses" by Madge Evers
"Avacado Army." by R. Galvan Run Time Error Once, I asked my parents, why would a boy want to be an avocado? "He wants to be a lawyer," answered by mother. At least that’s what it sounded like she said. Sometimes words get stuck in her mouth. In the same way, words get stuck in my head. English, Spanish, and everything in between were spoken in my US-Mexico border town home. And, a boy on a TV public service announcement said confidently, "Yo quiero ser abogado.” Or did he? From this memory, or misunderstanding, I am building on my previous investigations into mark making as text and language. Through drawing I’m working to see a critical moment in self-perception: the way one relates to their loved ones. Through my mother’s response, the absurdity of a boy wanting to be an avocado was recast as a conventional ambition to be an abogado, an attorney. Consequently, the surrealist potential of being an avocado was erased. To recover that imagined possibility, that unseen but felt space between language and meaning, I am using marks to connect viewers and viewers turned readers to the influence of imagination and identity.
"Evrything Leaves a Mark Cross Stich" by Sally Dion
Sally Dion
"Towards a Blue Planet no. 2" by Stacey Cushner