Dear Memories post-screening discussion with Lisa Kessler and Larry Volk

 
 
 

13FOREST Gallery is pleased to invite you to a special event hosted in partnership with the Arlington International Film Festival. Following the New England premiere of the film Dear Memories at the Capitol Theater on Saturday, November 4 at 2:45 pm, the public will be invited to a post-screening discussion at the gallery from 4:30-6:30 pm with two nationally recognized photographers and educators, Lisa Kessler and Larry Volk.

Written and directed by Nahuel Lopez, Dear Memories is a journey with the legendary German Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker. One of the most important living photographers worldwide, Hoepker's pictures became icons of photojournalism. After a 2017 diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, he embarks on his last big dream - a road trip through the USA with his wife Christine. Hoepker, the man whose art has become part of the collective memory, is now losing his own memories; all the while he continues to see life through his unique eyes and captures his visions on film for us to see.

Be sure to check the Arlington International Film Festival website for more great films being shown at the Capitol from November 2-5!

 
 

Featured Speakers

 

Lisa Kessler is a nationally recognized photographer and educator based in Boston. She is known for long-term projects on culture, education, health, and faith, including “the idea of the color pink in America;” the scourge of sexual abuse; young people in our public schools; and portraits of families coping with homicide.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Teaching Museum of Lehigh University. She teaches at Endicott College and the Griffin Museum of Photography.

Larry Volk is an artist, educator, lecturer and author. His visual work explores family history, identity through biographical narratives. He has lectured nationally on imaging, portfolio production and art practice. He is a member-artist of the Bromfield Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts.

A Professor of photography in the School of Visual and Performing Arts at Endicott College, he holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design.

 
 

Dear Memories will screen at 2:45 pm on Saturday, 11/4 at the Capitol Theater, located at 204 Massachusetts Avenue, Arlington MA 02474.

Dear Memories post-screening reception will take place from 4:30-6:30 pm across the street at 13FOREST Gallery, located at 167A Massachusetts Avenue, Arlington, MA 02474.

 
 
 

As Luck Would Have It Artist Feature - R. Galvan

 

As part of our exhibition As Luck Would Have It, R. Galvan created an interactive piece that culminated with a performance titled Cashing Out at the closing reception for As Luck Would Have It on Friday, September 22. Read more about the project and Galvan below, and watch the full performance here.

 

When You See Unusual Misfortune installed in As Luck Would Have It

Galvan’s project, titled When You See Unusual Misfortune, is an extension of another project that Galvan is currently conducting in their studio: 

When You See Unusual Misfortune is an ongoing performance initiated by collecting discarded coins in my studio space. Inspired by the saying, “find a penny, pick it up, and all day you'll have good luck,” I began with those abandoned pennies, near valueless objects, on my studio windowsill. The performance unfolds as an exploration of a compulsion to accumulate objects of little material worth. With each newly encountered penny on the streets and in other places, I humbly gather and meticulously document them through color pencil rubbings. These coins are then added to a ceramic piggy bank, becoming tangible encounters with seemingly insignificant things. The core of this performance lies in drawing attention to how a routine act of accumulating trivial objects challenges the expectation that misfortune is an inherent and recurring aspect of our lives. This "misfortune," characterized by repetition and routine, animates the concept of diminishing returns and questions the significance we attach to everyday objects and to reflect on how small, repetitive actions can reshape our perceptions of luck and misfortune. The project includes drawings, photo-documentation, video, and an artist book (in development). This project will conclude when my studio lease ends, and I cash out the piggy bank, using its contents to purchase a lottery scratch card - an act that underscores perspectives on fortune and luck.

We were intrigued by this project and its unique take on the ideas of luck and fortune, and asked Galvan to adapt it to our exhibition. For As Luck Would Have It, the project consists of a ceramic piggy bank with text written on it by Galvan: “Inspired by Dante's descent into hell, the revised inscription, ‘Relinquish petty fortunes, all who come forth,’ urges one to release expectations and control over outcomes. Win or lose, the piggy bank present[s] fortune in waiting, turning luck into an anticipating factor, thereby provoking the pondering of uncertainties inherent in suspense.”

The bank sits on a pedestal in the gallery next to a pile of small prints of a photographic image of the piggy bank with the text. Visitors are invited to “leave a penny, take a print.” The piggy bank is also accompanied by an incomplete document that includes a photograph of the piggy bank and a balance sheet that will be completed by Galvan at the end of the Cashing Out performance. Throughout the duration of As Luck Would Have It, visitors to the gallery have been leaving change in the piggy bank and receiving a print in exchange. At the closing reception, Galvan will wear an outfit that indicates they are an ‘artist at work.’ Galvan will shake out the piggy bank, smash it, and count the money collected. Galvan will then take the money to a convenience store across the street from the gallery and buy a lottery ticket, which they will return to the gallery to scratch off to document any winnings.

When You See Unusual Misfortune (1/10), archival print, work-in-process

R. Galvan - Artist at Work

Cashing Out - Full Performance

 
 
 
 

R. Galvan is an artist based in Medford, Massachusetts. Their practice focuses on vanity and on the role systems play in shaping an understanding of memory and the self. With a special focus on queerness and Latinx subjectivity, their work manifests as image making, drawing, and critical research and writing. They have completed residencies with Brashnar Creative Project, Staccion Center for Contemporary Art, the School of Machines, Making and Make Believe, and the Kolaj Institute. Galvan received a Bachelor’s degree from Brown University, a Masters of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a postdoctoral fellowship with Duke University’s program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South. Galvan has exhibited work at the National Humanities Center, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, and internationally at the University of Coimbra (Portugal). They are a studio resident at the Boston Center for the Arts, an incubator for new creative projects.

 

As Luck Would Have It Artist Feature - Ted Ollier

 

One of the reasons we chose the very broad theme of ‘luck’ for our open call show As Luck Would Have It was to encourage a diverse range of responses and interpretations. Printmaker Ted Ollier took ‘luck’ to mean ‘randomness,’ and created a visual representation of a small bit of random data that we interact with in our daily lives. His Random Chroma Bands Type C series turns Two-Factor Authentication codes he received into a colorful pattern; read his full statement about the project below.

 

Random Chroma Bands Type C/p: 521964, archival inkjet print

Random Chroma Bands Type C/p: Grid of 361, archival inkjet print

 

Random Chroma Bands Type C illuminate and abstract a very commercial form of randomness now encountered on a daily basis. Whenever you sign in to your bank, shop on Amazon, or book something on Airbnb, you’re likely to be using 2FA, or Two-Factor Authentication. Once your login is entered at the relevant site, a code is sent to your phone or email address, and you use that to confirm the login. However, you only have ten minutes to act, before that code expires.

Well, these codes are little six-digit snippets of on-demand randomness. They are supposed to be inimitable, unpredictable, and evancescent. They provide the seed for generating the Random Chroma Bands. In these pieces, I have taken the resulting digits and encoded them further using my alphanumeric synaesthesia — the colors I associate with each of the ten ordinal digits. The six numbers become six identical bands of color that still retain that numerical information, just not as numbers. 

This renders the random number string into an aesthetic design, which can be appreciated by itself, or in groups with other Random Chroma Bands. In the grid piece displayed, 361 of these codes, specifically drawn from my personal PayPal account, have been turned into a 19x19 grid of bands that interplay and weave with each other in a way perhaps not quite envisioned by the developers who programmed this process.

 
 

Ted Ollier was born in the Midwest, lived in the South, and now resides in the Northeast. He has been a photographer, graphic designer, bass player, typographer, web pioneer, informational leafblower and armchair philosopher. He has also worked a variety of day-jobs, the details of which are not terribly important.

He holds degrees from the University of Texas, Texas State University and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. At present, he is a printmaker and conceptual artist working in the Boston community of Medford. He teaches letterpress and design through the Harvard Extension School at the Bow & Arrow Press in Cambridge. Ollier is the Pressmaster of Reflex Letterpress in Charlestown.

His concerns are with data and its interaction with the consensus reality, and how that reality is affected and changed by that data. Oftentimes the simplest visual representation of a dataset is enough to engage the viewer in ways far beyond the naïve reading of that information. Although the didactic element of information transfer is always present in his work, his true focus is on revelation and enlightenment, and the joy of finding a previously-unnoticed detail in the landscape of life.

He lives with a patent attorney, a small human, a chow mix and a red tabby.

 

As Luck Would Have It Artist Feature - Jaina Cipriano

 

For our summer 2023 exhibition As Luck Would Have It, we put out an open call for artists to submit work that addressed the theme of luck and its numerous iterations. Some artists submitted proposals for new work to be completed specifically for the show; one such artist was Jaina Cipriano, a photographer and filmmaker who stages her photographs in elaborate built environments. Cipriano’s three photographs in As Luck Would Have It address the role that luck and ritual play in the experience of obsessive compulsive disorder. Read more from her proposal and see the images she created for our exhibition below.

 

Jaina Cipriano, You Get to Make the Choice, photograph in built environment

Luck and ritual play an unfortunate part in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder - these photos explore playful motifs of luck mixed with the shame and isolation that comes from OCD rituals. OCD, for me, stems from the inability to let go of control. I often feel that nothing I do will ever be enough to save me - unless I do just the right things, in just the right order then I will not have to face whatever it is I am afraid of.

[You Get to Make the Choice is a] self portrait in a wall of stuffed animals - hidden amongst the carnival prizes that folks are trying to win. Bright, colorful with bold, dramatic lighting - reminiscent of childhood fears and wants.

Jaina Cipriano, It Is Out of My Control, photograph in built environment

Jaina Cipriano, How Much Is Real, photograph in built environment

 

Jaina Cipriano is a Lowell-based artist communicating with the world through photography, film and installation. Her works explore the emotional toll of religious and romantic entrapment. Cipriano creates her photographs in built sets, forgoing digital manipulation because she believes creating something truly immersive starts with the smallest details. A self-taught carpenter, she loves a challenge and her larger than life sets draw inspiration from the picture books and cartoons of her childhood.

Cipiano writes and directs short films that wrestle with the complicated path of healing. In 2020 she released You Don’t Have to Take Orders from the Moon, a surrealist horror film wrestling with the gravity of deep codependency. Her second short, Trauma Bond, is a dreamy coming-of-age thriller currently in the festival circuit.

Working with many local organizations to support and strengthen the community, Cipriano was a judge for The Arlington International Film Festival, dispersed funds for the inter-media portion of the Somerville Arts Council Grant Board, built sets for Arlington Friends of the Drama and served on the board of the New England Sculptors Association. Cipriano is also the founder of Finding Bright Studios - a design service company that translates ideas into visuals, working in set design for film, music videos and immersive spaces.

Cipriano studied at The New England School of Photography and has been exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions around New England. She is currently a Boston Fellow at Mass Art’s Creative Economy Business Incubator and Merrimack Valley’s E for All Accelerator program.

 

Call for Art - As Luck Would Have It

13FOREST Gallery’s mission is to introduce the work of established and emerging artists to a public audience. As a way of connecting with new artists, we occasionally sponsor open calls for thematic exhibitions. We are glad to announce that this summer we will host one of those shows, titled As Luck Would Have It, from July 22 through September 22, 2023. The show’s submission period is from now through May 6 and is open to artists whose work we have already shown as well as representatives from the broader community of artists in New England. From the submissions we receive, we will choose a group of about 15 to 20 artists to exhibit in the show.

As Luck Would Have It will focus on the theme of ‘luck’ and all its iterations. Whether we believe good (or bad) fortune is pure happenstance or a force that can be conjured, it is often a potent part of the stories we tell about ourselves and the world. From lucky charms and black cats crossing our paths to beginner’s luck or making one’s own luck, we have a myriad of ways of expressing how unseen influences affect our lives. 13FOREST Gallery invites you to reflect on this broad theme and to submit a work of art, or a proposal for a work you would like to make, that presents your own unique perspective on the concept of luck. Good luck!

Photo by Melvina Mak

 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

For work that already exists: please submit high quality images (JPG) of the finished piece and a brief description of the materials and intent/content of the work

To submit a proposal for new work: send a sketch, a description of how the finished piece will appear by the submission deadline, and an explanation of how it fits the theme

Artwork must have been created within the past five (5) years

Artwork cannot have been shown before at 13FOREST Gallery

Two-dimensional work preferred; some sculpture will be considered

Maximum of three (3) submissions per artist

Size requirement: 24” x 24” or smaller preferred; some larger work will be considered

Artist must reside in New England

No fee to apply

 
 

HOW TO SUBMIT

Please include a short biography, website links, resume/CV, and contact email address with your submission

Send submissions via email to info@13forest.com

Please get in touch if you have any questions

 
 

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION

Sat May 6, 2023

EXHIBITION DATES

July 22 – September 22, 2023

LOCATION

13FOREST Gallery, 167A Massachusetts Ave, Arlington MA 02474

IMPORTANT DATES

Sat 5/6: Submission deadline
Sat 5/13: 13FOREST will notify artists if their submission has been chosen
Sat 7/1: Submit images (if you want to be included in press release)
Sat 7/8: Submit images of finished work
Sat 7/15 (or earlier): Drop off work at gallery - framed, wired, ready to hang
Sat 7/22, 4-6 pm: Opening Reception
TBD: Artist talk and reception

 
 

ABOUT 13FOREST GALLERY

13FOREST Gallery searches New England for outstanding artists - established and emerging - to offer the very best in original art and contemporary craft. We are a dynamic gallery space that features rotating exhibitions every 6 to 8 weeks, as well as numerous public programs designed to inform and inspire creative minds.

 

Winter Open Mic - Meet Amanda Shea

Amanda Shea welcomes everyone to the open mic night

Inviting poets and spoken-word artists to perform in the gallery is just one of the ways in which 13FOREST celebrates the breadth of the Boston arts community. For the first time since the pandemic began, on Friday, February 10, we held a poetry open-mic night, which was organized by our friend Amanda Accardi of Around the Corner Framing. This reinauguration was made particularly special by acclaimed artist, activist and educator Amanda Shea. Serving as the evening’s host, Shea performed her own poems, and then invited guest performers - including some of her students - to perform their own work.

We are grateful to the artists who brought incredible energy to the gallery and to everyone present through their performances. Many thanks go to Shea, whose talent, warmth and generosity created a space that made everyone feel free to share their art. The poets, the youngest of whom was 14, spoke powerfully and beautifully about the devastation of police brutality and racism, the strength of the Black community, the costs of social media, and the power of love. The event was truly galvanizing, and we look forward to sponsoring more events like this at 13FOREST.

To share a portion of the evening with you, below we are posting photos from the event as well as the names and social-media handles of the performers so you can follow or connect with them. We are also highlighting some of the arts organizations with which Amanda Shea works. Please take some time to learn about them and how they work to empower artists, especially young artists. Stay tuned for more events with Amanda Shea in the future!

Josie @josiehannaa

Antonio Miles @captainnappybeard

Korde @nlighten_me

Beats Rhymes and Life is a community-based organization that grew in response to a critical need for therapeutic programs designed specifically to serve boys and young men of color who as a group demonstrate some of the greatest health and social disparities.

617Peak seeks to encourage youth in Boston to find their voices by sharing their stories through written and spoken forms. This platform provides members of the community with an outlet to voice their concerns, thoughts and feelings in a safe and comfortable environment. They aim to promote literacy and creativity amongst peers, with a comprehensive goal to create more avenues and resources for people in inner-cities, empowering them to be autonomous in their future successes.

Sofar Sounds is a global music community that connects artists and audiences through live music. They bring people together to create space where music matters in 400 cities around the world.

Guest writer Tom Nealon shares his perspective on Exquisite Entanglement

Tom Nealon, friend of artist Yuko Oda, stopped by 13FOREST to see her work in our current exhibition Exquisite Entanglement, which also features Allison Maria Rodriguez. He wrote up his experience of the exhibition and the thoughts it provoked in an essay we have included below.

Tom Nealon is the owner of Pazzo Books, a rare bookshop in Roslindale, and the author of Food Fights and Culture Wars: A Secret History of Taste (British Library and Overlook Press). He writes about food and pop culture at HiLobrow.com.

Yuko Oda’s installation Əvolution in the window at 13FOREST

Beside the main display of the gallery exhibition Exquisite Entanglement of the work of Yuko Oda and Allison Maria Rodriguez at 13FOREST Gallery in Arlington, is Əvolution, Oda’s installation of dead leaves being replicated by drops of resin and transmogrified into the floating simulacrum of leaves. It is a useful template of this exhibition, which as a whole struggles to identify whether art imitates life (the classic Aristotelian conception), life imitates art (as Oscar Wilde once famously claimed) or something in between. Exquisite Entanglement deals centrally with what to do about humanity’s impact on the environment and, ultimately, what is to be done with humanity. It is a vital question: does art just reflect that world back to us, trusting us to do something with that reflection, or is it a model itself, a path out of this mess? 3D printed leaves hang there, translucent but uncannily real, above the brown flecked leaves from last autumn, the clear resin dripped between, mutely asking not just what is real, but how and why?

Yuko Oda, Full Bloom, Japanese mineral pigment on paper

Oda’s work — done in an ostensibly classical Japanese style with traditional pigments — depicts birds and flowers engaged in a symbiotic battle against crystalline elements that, in one series, sees beams of light blowing hummingbirds into picturesque clouds of bird parts. Elsewhere, hummingbirds, flowers and butterflies interact in visually appealing but psychologically troubling fashion: butterflies drink nectar from hummingbird-flower hybrids, with their proboscises stuck down the bird’s throats as they stare, blank eyed at the sky (Full Bloom, Japanese mineral pigment on paper). Is it the interconnectedness of all things that we are seeing played out, or something more nefarious? Despeciation? There is a cybernetic quality to the birds (their eyes seem like digital screens full of static) that also complicates direct sense making. Are they products of a dangerous brush with technology/humanity that left some blown to bits, some merged with flowers (Survival of the Fittest, Japanese mineral pigment on paper; where the “fittest” birds dodge the rays of light)? This ambiguity is one of the elements that makes Oda’s work resonate. While the style, medium and subject seem to suggest a familiar sort of symbolic painting, the images themselves are resistant to being turned directly into symbols, so they linger in our consciousness as we try to situate them. They are at once comfortingly familiar and confoundingly unknowable. The bolts of alien but seemingly still-natural light, the seemingly natural but somehow alien birds, flowers and butterflies together make a dialectic that is fiendishly difficult to resolve.

It is tempting - and I’ve clearly not resisted this temptation — to put a chronology to the paintings, turn it into a sort of Bayeux tapestry of bird-flower-crystal interaction. For example, birds fly around and get blown up by beams of crystalline energy. Some of the birds dodge the beams and live on to grow multiple heads (to better see exploding light beams, possibly), butterflies grow multiple wings, birds merge with flowers rather than fly around them and risk getting destroyed. Butterflies evolve a symbiotic (or parasitic?) relationship with the bird flowers, possibly leading them to new evolutionary frontiers. Birds and flowers form a sort of natural-aesthetic singularity and drift off into space either escaping or surviving the Anthropocene.

 

Yuko Oda, Survival of the Fittest, Japanese mineral pigment, sumi and plastic on paper

 

Allison Maria Rodriguez’s installation Once in a Lifetime

In the middle of Oda’s paintings, set off as a discrete room, Allison Maria Rodriguez’s Once in a Lifetime, runs a video of a remarkable scene of a stranded juvenile blue whale on a beach in Costa Rica. The title comes from scientists at the site who repeatedly stated that viewing the whale was a “once in a lifetime opportunity.” Of course, the title has a somewhat different tenor from the whale’s point of view. My initial reaction to the installation was that it was a powerful way to engage viewers’ feelings. I’ve been thinking a lot of the reason/feeling dichotomy, especially with our Balkanized political situation, Covid, and climate change humming along, and how resistant to both reason and feeling we’ve become, how impoverished in both imagination and empathy. The Scottish philosopher David Hume believed that human reason and feeling had to work together, that reason never does anything by itself and feeling is a sort of directionless, inchoate cloud – powerful, but without a vector. We know and have known all sorts of things about climate change, but without the necessary feeling. All of that information is like junk mail piling up below a mail slot. The enduring question, of course, is how do you get reason and feeling to work together when so much energy has gone into separating them?

At first my eyes didn’t want to leave the whale in the video. For the whole of the first viewing, I contemplated its vast grayness (the beach and whale are desaturated to a bland gray contrasting with a brilliant blue sky) and I stared into its nearly closed eye trying to see…something. It’s a powerful thing even when experienced as surface without any interpretation. But it’s not an ecology commercial, and after watching a second time I started to see past the whale and the full weight of the scene began to mount. I could pick out from the image a rush, at some point in the near past, to save the whale: the construction equipment, the caution tape, the people milling around. I entered the scene after everyone had sped to an emergency and found…nothing happening. The whale lay on the beach as the focus of my attention but no longer theirs. They mill around the earth-moving vehicles parked and caution tape fluttering in the wind. Only dogs someone has brought to the scene — for a walk, or to pay their respects, or because they happened by, we can only guess — move on either side of the taped-off whale, appropriately, I’d add, since they are animals but bound to humanity — not wild but not really implicated. At one point one of the dogs walks past the tape and seems suddenly surprised by the whale, tenses as if ready to fight or play, but then recovers and wanders off. I watched that moment a few times — we are so used to applying our anthropomorphic sensibilities to dogs and nowhere is this more appropriate. We all are this dog, fleetingly aware of some huge and surprising event and then, almost immediately, returning to our daytime somnambulance. 

 

Allison Maria Rodriguez, detail from Once In a Lifetime, video installation

 

Once in a Lifetime is the story of this whale - beached, dead, allegory of climate change — a seemingly unavoidably large problem that has become, quite quickly, something to edge around and ignore. Is humanity the whale on the beach, our rotting corpse a cause for alarm until it fades away? We’ve all heard the attempted parallels to aid our understanding of climate change: slow-motion apocalypses and imagined asteroid impacts, hundred-year storms that arrive monthly, frogs in pots of boiling water, and ants on a log. Somehow we’ve digested all of it without taking much action. I mean, the rich folks are all planning their terraforming of Mars, but what are we actually doing?

Allison Maria Rodriguez, detail from Once In a Lifetime, video installation

Another panel that is part of Rodriguez’s video shows baby turtles struggling through the surf to reach the ocean. Unlike the video of the beach and the whale, this one is in Caribbean tones and shows nothing else on the beach except for water, the turtles and some washed-up coral. Alone it’s a nice rendering of a nature vs nature moment, but in context it enfolds a similar and similarly ambiguous message to Oda’s space flowers. Nature will struggle onward and it is up to humanity to decide on how the Anthropocene ends. Will it be the end of the human race, or the end of our dominion over Earth? The planet, Oda and Rodriguez tell us, does not wait for our answer.

We are, more so than ever, plagued by our limitations. Limitations to our imaginations, to our empathy, limitations to the figures of speech we deploy to explain our situations; our metaphors are lousy, our synecdoches, oblique. Limitations to our reasons and limitations to reason itself — what is the point of understanding something if the answer just sits unnoticed? Limitations to our feelings: vast and pointless, focused and too limited, lead us off in quixotic crusades against phantoms. Is art some sort of magic to escape these inadequacies? No. Yes. Sure it is. We all know about climate change, we all feel things about climate change, but compared to the size and universality of the problem, the reaction to it has been deliriously small. Oscar Wilde,around the same time as he told us that life imitates art, also said that art is quite useless. This seemed like a hedge when I first read it as a teenager, but now seems more like an invocation, an attempt to separate art from the world of the merely useful and place it somewhere else. It might seem strange to wonder whether birds and flowers and beached whales can change the world, might even seem a little desperate, but there is no shame in acting desperate during desperate times. 

Exquisite Entanglement featured in the Boston Globe

Our twice-postponed exhibition (first due to the pandemic, second due to last summer’s fire) Exquisite Entanglement is now finally on view. We are so proud of this moving two-person exhibition featuring the work of Yuko Oda and Allison Maria Rodriguez, which includes a window installation by Oda and the first four-channel video installation shown at 13FOREST by Rodriguez.

We were also grateful to have this exhibition recognized in a recent article in the Boston Globe. Correspondent Katie Mogg spoke to Rodriguez and Oda about their work as artists and activists. Rodriguez’ installation Once in a Lifetime began as a chance encounter with a beached blue whale in Costa Rica. “Rodriguez wants her work in ‘Exquisite Entanglement’ to serve as a memorial to the whale, but also to the piece of humanity that is lost when we live a lifestyle that kills fellow creatures on Earth. ‘The idea of this exquisite entanglement sort of plays on the tension that there is between everything being interconnected and how beautiful that is, but also how detrimental that has been to our planet,’ Rodriguez said. ‘We’ve been destroying and marching toward our own destruction.’”

While Rodriguez’ work is grounded in actual experience, Oda’s work is based on an imagined alternate future: “Oda’s contribution to ‘Exquisite Entanglement’ includes a series of images depicting the end of nature as we know it, as well as a surreal interpretation of nature’s resilience. ‘The work that I’m showing, it ends up being about the calamities of what’s happening to nature and then its resilience and ability to heal itself,’ Oda said. ‘It is about awakening our senses and perception.’”

You can read the full text of the article here, and please join us for the opening reception for Exquisite Entanglement on Saturday, August 6, from 4-6 pm.

United We Stand

Celebrating Fourth of July this year is especially fraught after the recent Supreme Court rulings on abortion rights, gun control and environmental regulation. These decisions will have a dire impact on the lives of millions of Americans, leaving many in this country feeling scared and angry. Facing this new affront to our civil rights, coupled with the shocking revelations about the prior administration being uncovered on a daily basis, we turn once again to art to help us understand and think critically about the state of our country. To this end, we thought it important to showcase the work of Adrienne Sloane, who has been working on a new series incorporating puzzle pieces that reflects the uncertainty and absurdity of our current political climate. Culture Wars and United We Stand will be on view at 13FOREST through July 16.

 

Adrienne Sloane, Culture Wars, painted wood, cardboard, plastic, tin box

 

Culture Wars is a natural outgrowth of my custom puzzle series coupled with the political commentary of much of my work. Unfortunately, our increasingly polarized national political landscape seems less concerned with the good of the country and the rule of law, instead becoming an extremist strategic game dominated by false claims of a stolen 2020 election. Recent decisions by a right wing Supreme Court only add to the erosion of civic and civil responsibilities we have as citizens of these United States.

 

Adrienne Sloane, United We Stand, knit fiber, puzzle pieces, cardboard, plastic, magnets

 

United We Stand The country is riven in ways not seen since the Civil War. Two years of pandemic coupled with the increasing disastrous effects of climate change, make it hard to understand how the country will resolve these differences without dissolving into a river of blood. Working in puzzles along with fiber, my original medium, this piece is a natural evolution of my interest in challenging viewers by presenting interpretations of the current political landscape as I see it.

An open letter of thanks

At the end of August in 2021, a fire broke out in the café next to the gallery. We were lucky to sustain little damage to our building and to the artwork on display, but repairs were slow and would take several months to complete. The pandemic had already presented many challenges to our gallery and to the larger arts community. When it began, like many small businesses we were unsure of what the future would hold; however we quickly saw the collective need for art grow through difficult days of isolation and uncertainty. Thanks to our supportive community of art lovers, 13FOREST persevered and, with that support bolstering us, we knew we would be able to keep the gallery going through this latest challenge.

Though our space would be closed for months while awaiting repairs, we wanted to continue supporting our artists and bringing art to the community. Just a week after the fire, we held our annual pop-up in Provincetown. When we returned, we temporarily moved to the lower level of the headquarters of Food Link, an Arlington nonprofit that graciously welcomed us for what would become six months. Today, more than eight months after the fire, our home on Mass Ave is finally ready for our return. Thank you to everyone who stuck with us and continuously encouraged us. We cannot wait to celebrate our reopening with you!