Elemental: Work by Boston Sculptors Gallery Artists
For the final exhibition of its 2024-25 season, the Flinn Gallery is pleased to present Elemental: Work by Boston Sculptors Gallery Artists. The show runs from May 8 to June 18 and features the work of 13 artists from the Boston Sculptors Gallery. The sculptors in the exhibition work with a wide range of materials – clay, fabric, metal, plastic, wood, and mixed media – and their artwork ranges in height from three inches to over eight feet.
While the sculptures encompass a wide range of materials, sizes, and techniques, they were selected with a unifying theme in mind – Elemental. This word has multiple meanings, which range from primitive or basic to the four elements of nature to the chemical elements from which many of the objects are created. Visitors to the Gallery will see artwork that can be grouped into four elemental categories: Beginnings, Organisms, Earth, and Water.
The artists are all inspired by the beauty and fragility of the natural world along with our connections to and impact upon it. For Mo Kelman,“water is the ideal subject to reflect on the laws that govern nature as it ceaselessly advances and embarrasses our every effort to keep it at bay.” In Lagoon, Kelman merges an abstracted body of silk water with bamboo structures that ensemble towers or bridges. Artist Jessica Strauss has three pieces in the exhibition from her Packing for Mars series. In Missing You, Blue Planet, and No More Polar Ice Cap, human figures gaze at images of Earth. The sculptures express “black humor, longing, and regret” as Strauss looks toward a “future when humans must flee a devastated Earth to settle on far flung and arid worlds.”
Several artists use traditional domestic crafts such as crochet, embroidery, and sewing in innovative ways. In her three sculptures Ascent, Larvae, and Nests, Michelle Lougee crochets post-consumer plastic bags into monumental sculptures, which “examine the relationships between humans, plastic, and nature amidst irreversible environmental changes”. Cascading from the ceiling, Keri Straka’s “Soft Cell Division” is composed of stuffed and sewn textiles. According to Straka, “the suspended sculpture is evocative of the ebb and flow of human life as mirrored in the blooming of a single cell.” Her sculpture, “Portal: Past” is made of multiple wooden embroidery hoops of varying sizes with water-color painted fabric embedded with a wide range of materials to represent dividing cells and biological cycles.
Since the majority of sculptors are women, it is only natural that some artwork addresses feminine sensibilities, and as mentioned, domestic life. Ellen Schön has four ceramic pieces in the exhibition. Two of her pieces – Five Hills Font and Lotus Pod – are part of her Wellspring Series. For Schön, “the pieces in this series explore the ceramic vessel as a wellspring or womb. They are meant to evoke sources of life-whirlpools, fonts, pods, seed of hope, as well as the landscape of the female body.” Several of Jodie Colella’s sculptures are ceramic and one incorporates fabric. According to Colella, her three pieces – Offspring, Seeds, and Attempts at Conviviality Exhaust Me – “comingle rigid forms with fibers to create vessels containing the stories that embody domestic life.”
Elemental is curated by Flinn Gallery committee members, Barbra Fordyce and Nancy Heller. It will include over 40 works of art by the following Boston Sculptors Gallery artists:
Jodie Colella (clay, fiber, stone, and mixed media), Carrie Crane (mixed media),
Anna Kristina Goransson (felt and wool), Mo Kelman (silk, wood, and mixed media), Michelle Lougee (crocheted plastic and wire), Ellen Schön (stoneware and fired-clay), Julia Shepley (mixed media), Keri Straka (fabric and mixed media), Jessica Strauss (mixed media), Margaret Swan (aluminum), Nora Valdez (limestone), Leslie Wilcox (steel screen and mixed media), and Andy Zimmerman (wood).
The Flinn Gallery is a non-profit organization sponsored by Friends of the Greenwich Library. The Gallery welcomes visitors daily Monday to Saturday, 10-5pm, Thursday until 8pm, and Sunday 1-5pm, and is located on the second floor of the Greenwich Library, 101 West Putnam Avenue, Greenwich, CT.
The Boston Sculptors Gallery (BSG) was founded in 1992 by 18 artists as a venue for contemporary sculpture. It is located in Boston’s SoWa arts district and has 38 member artists from Boston and New England. There is a natural kinship between the Flinn and Boston Sculptors Galleries. Both are nonprofit entities that are volunteer-run and operated with support from a part-time staff member.
Events:
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 8 from 6-8pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, June 7 from 2-3pm.