A new exhibition has docked at 100 Lagoon Pond. “Your Face Is a Clock: New Portraiture” is a group show of different contemporary artists featuring a wide variety of media, including watercolor, photography, oil painting, and sculpture and video work.
The show features work from the owner and director of the gallery, Marion Wilson, alongside James Esber, Sam Harmon, Aubrey Longley-Cooke, Abby Carter, Lyle Ashton Harris, John O’Connor, Sarah McCoubrey, and Pamela Sneed.
The Gallery held an opening reception on June 13 featuring conversations with several artists, snacks, a cash bar, and live flute music that drifted through the open gallery.
“The first show is always the show that I really love,” said Wilson, “I wanted to look at portraiture through a slightly different lens, like who we actually are today. There is the nod to traditional portraiture that is a representation of class and prestige, but I wanted to talk about people that play with portraiture.”
Moored off Lagoon Pond, the Floating Gallery is an art gallery on the water that interacts with the environment around it like no other gallery on the Island can. Wilson purchased the houseboat in 2021 from Rick Brown, a retired master boatbuilder, and converted it into a gallery that opened to the public in August 2022.
Artist Sam Harmon, a former student of Wilson’s at Syracuse University, has work featured in the show, and was present at the opening reception. Harmon is inspired by classical art archetypes, surrealism, and feminism in all its forms.
“This is a reclaiming of the traditional portrait lens,” said Harmon. “Historically speaking, the origins of portrait art are of wealthy upper-class people with commissions. What these works have in common is that they are records of marginalized people from marginalized communities.”
Harmon’s work showcases lipsticks delicately carved into classical female nudes, a project she began for a series in 2007. Her recent sculptures continue to reference iconic sculptures from art history while honoring women whose lives were cut short by violence.
Harmon included a sculpture paying homage to Clara Smith, a 72-year-old who was robbed, raped, and murdered on-Island in 1940. The crime remains unsolved.
“I wanted to pay tribute to murdered women, and also have a more direct relation to historical figure sculpture,” said Harmon. “That’s a common theme in this show, some kind of tension between beauty and annihilation, beauty and violence, beauty and grotesqueness, there’s something off-putting about them, while also beautiful.”
Wilson echoed this sentiment: “It has a political edge to it; it shows pain and pleasure, and makes no assumptions.”
“Your Face Is a Clock: New Portraiture” will run until August 10. The Gallery is located off a dock to the left of Safe Harbor, with limited parking available at the dock. Additional parking is available up the street at Veterans Memorial Park. The gallery is open from Thursday to Sunday from 12 to 5 pm. Check out the Floating Gallery’s Instagram, instagram.com/100lagoonpond.
