Cynthia-Reeves Gallery Announces September Museum Highlights

CYNTHIA-REEVES announces the international premiere of New York-based artist, Anita Glesta's WATERSHED video installation at London's annual Totally Thames Festival, Tuesday, September 22 - Sunday, September 27, 2015. A public art project addressing climate change through large-scale imagery and sounds of ocean life and flooding waters, WATERSHED acts as a moving information "billboard" about global warming that will be projected onto the face of the National Theatre [Lyttelton Flytower], facing the Thames River itself. The project's multi-sensory experience aims to offer the public a chance for intimate reconnection with nature, a phenomena so often lacking in the urban environment, along with the opportunity to reflect on the local effects of climate change in waterfront cities.

"WATERSHED was filmed by the artist in Colombia South America. Her live footage is of the Piracu fish, an Amazonian fish that was once at the point of extinction in a feeding frenzy and swimming peacefully in the Pacific waters. The large scale projection WATERSHED which she filmed and editied in a unique painterly way, addresses climate change through visual seduction. The moving imagery invites people to learn more about the issues affecting the planet's water due to the warming of the oceans and the rising of the tides. The mesmerizing imagery is at once healing and provocative".

SHONA MACDONALD

Land Ho! Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, Massachusetts

September 27 - January 10, 2016

Land Ho! is a group exhibition that celebrates the timeless lure of the landscape in art. From majestic mountains and gently rolling hills to bucolic pastures and dewy, green fields, our landscapes are ever-changing terrains with the power to move, excite, and inspire us. Artists have been spellbound by the beauty and mystery of the landscape for centuries, and it is a rare and wonderful treat when landscape paintings from generations past hang side by side with works by twenty-first century talents. Land Ho! aims to wow FAM visitors with exactly that unique and thrilling art-viewing experience.

Land Ho! features artwork by eight New England contemporary artists -Carrie Crane, Sally Curcio, Leila Daw, Warner Friedman, Michele Lauriat, Sandy Litchfield, Shona Macdonald, and Sue McNally - in direct conversation with over thirty landscape paintings from FAM's permanent collection. This exhibition is organized by Curator Mary M. Tinti and Koch Curatorial Fellow Emily M. Mazzola.

RAY RUSECKAS

Close to Home: Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Brattleboro, Vermont

Exhibition Continues Through October 25

ARTIST TALK: Thursday, September 10 at 7:00 p.m.

The hillsides, forests, and glades of the Connecticut River valley are Ray Ruseckas's stomping grounds and inspiration. Ruseckas renders the changing dynamics of land in all seasons, deftly capturing fleetingatmospheric effects as well as the rhythms and proportions of place.

Ruseckas manipulates pastels like no other artist. His surfaces retain only a vestige of the dry, velvety softness we usually associate with the medium. He achieves a more painterly, liquid pooling of colors both subtle and rich. Deep earth tones melt into gossamer tints, and he deploys a seemingly infinite range of blacks and whites.

The artist's command of his medium heightens the dramatic tension. Through refined tonal shifts or contrast between light and dark, Ruseckas produces an effect of psychological apprehension, a frisson between what is seen and what is implied or felt. - Mara Williams, Chief Curator

STEVEN SIEGEL

BIOGRAPHY: CYNTHIA-REEVES, 1315 MASS MoCA Way, N. Adams, Massachusetts

September 19 - November 1

ARTIST RECEPTION: Saturday, October 10, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.

"As with most of Steven Siegel's work, an environmental critique is implicit -- in Biography the litter of consumerism composes the look of our world. But the piece is complicated by its composition. Materials like plastic and polyester are mixed with beads and yarn, bound into brilliantly colored bunches and laced into a chaotic harmony. Much like Jackson Pollock, who organized a shambolic mess of paint into symphonies of color and texture, Siegel commands the detritus of our culture into a frantic rhythm, nailing contemporary anxieties about the environment to the wall. Siegel may image our world out of rubbish, but the result is ravishing, glittering, and glistening in all its synthetic, inorganic wonder." -- Allese Thomson Baker, Artforum, 2011

SARAH AMOS

SELECT WORKS: CYNTHIA-REEVES, 28 Main Street, Walpole, New Hampshire

September 5 - October 17

"Like many artists working today, printmaking plays a pivotal role in Sarah Amos's creative expression. Artists such as Terry Winters, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, and Trenton Doyle Hancock, among others, embrace printmaking as a significant part of their artistic practice, along with other media, such as painting, sculpture, installation and so forth. But for Amos, who trained as a master printer at the renowned Tamarind Institute in New Mexico, and then worked at the highly experimental and collaborative Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York City, printmaking lies at the heart of her artistic process."

"One key element of Amos' artistic approach is her penchant for mark making-she has spoken of her compulsive need to produce art as a means of comprehending the world around her. Printmaking offers a host of options for mark-making and layering that are germane to Amos' artistic concepts. She culls from an arsenal of techniques, but primarily exploits the linear and tonal passages she can create with carborundum etching and the multi-level built up and recessed surfaces and diverse textures of collagraphy. She will also use multiple passes through the press to attain the desired effect. Her attraction to printmaking lies less in its ability to make multiple editions of a completed image than in the specific aesthetic effects different methods can produce. Although she has made some painting studies on canvas, her strong preference for the textural variety and subtle overlays of imagery that she can achieve by combining printed elements with painted, drawn, stitched or other hand applications to produce unique works prevails." -- Sarah Amos: Complex Geometries, Shelley R. Langdale, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings, Philadelphia Museum of Art, June 2015