Walking into the Francine Kelly Gallery, the light and marvelous colors in Featherstone’s “30 x 30” exhibition immediately lift your spirit. The show, on view through April 26, is a glorious way to celebrate the center’s 30th anniversary, with 52 Vineyard artists sharing their visions on 30-inch by 30-inch canvases.
Looking about, you immediately notice how large this size of canvas truly is. Executive Director and CEO Ann Smith remarks that when many artists came to pick up their blank canvases, they said, “Wow, this is really big! It’s challenging me as an artist.” And Smith notes, “The 52 who have taken the challenge are truly fabulous. For many of them, these are the biggest pieces they’ve ever created.” Interestingly, the uniformity in size highlights the variety of subject matter, palette, and styles that reflect the diversity of Island artists. The exhibit is hung exceptionally well; each wall boasts colors, themes, and subject matter that complement each to either beautifully, from side-by-side oysters to paired technicolor abstracts.
Two quiet pieces with distant horizon lines beckon us into the gallery. Bob Avakian’s clouds rush out toward us in his moody black-and-white photograph, “Island.” They isolate the abandoned Oak Bluffs theater, illuminated with an intensity that draws our eye to every inch of its dilapidated state. In contrast, the warm colors created by the sun hovering on the ocean’s distant horizon line in Dakota LeBeau Maltese’s photograph, “Breeze,” evoke a peaceful sigh.
There are a few purely abstract works. Riotous colors zip in, out, and around Ellika Edelman’s abstract gouache painting, “Lost.” The hundreds of small, brightly hued geometric blocks are pieced together like a quilt. In Harriet Bernstein’s acrylic “Mist Air,” a cluster of unusual shapes floats in a mesmerizing purple haze whose hues seem to multiply the longer we look.
We move into botanical subjects with Mikey Rottman’s mixed-media piece, “Farmland,” which explodes with color. Abstract V shapes in various patterns hint at cultivated fields, with a green, cowlike image anchoring the composition just slightly to the right of center. Brad Permar’s small strokes of oil paint create the gorgeous, nearly impressionist image in “Flower Garden for Hens,” making us yearn for summer.
More floral subjects include Jean Mansfield’s handsome white milkweed, which bursts into bloom, sparkling with life against an opaque background of warm sienna, burnt umber, and the like. Deborah Black sets her flowers in “Joyful Transformation” in a garden, using various media that create fascinating textures on the canvas.
Additional mixed-media works include Scott Bliss’s delightful “Blowing,” in which all the branches in a tall tree lean perpendicular to the ground. He populates them with row upon row of birds formed with bits of seaglass, animatedly chirping away. Deb Edmunds applies a 30-inch-high wooden frame, reminiscent of a window or a door, fitting it snugly over a botanical-patterned fabric in which white flowers dance over a solid black backdrop. Vines winding in and around a frame and a small, perched, yellow-and-black bird accentuate the work’s three-dimensionality.
The title of Dom Scalpelli’s oil painting, “Schumann Resonance,” infuses meaning to his landscape, which “resonates” with the expressive Romantic music of the German composer. The arching strokes of purple, blue, red, black, and white fill the entire canvas, creating an exciting background for the few bare trees on the far left.
Michael Stimola creates a different aesthetic with his striking “Island Invader, Phragmites” using cyanotype and photography. Here, tall, white, feathery phragmites, perennial grasses, stand out against the surrounding lush, cyan blue. There is a similar simplicity in Mitch Gordon’s single, enormous pearl-white shell filling his canvas. The oil painting’s title, “Being and Nothingness,” leaves us to ponder its meaning. Samantha Folts’s title of her acrylic painting, “Portrait of a Local Fisherman,” makes us smile as it features an elegant blue heron with nary a human in sight.
There are many more water-related works. Mary Dombrowski gazes down from far above in “For the Love of the Earth,” created with alcohol and colored ink. It’s as though we are flying high over a gloriously colored scene in which land and water meet. Embossed, arching, and diving whales swim across Ann Meleney’s alluring mixed media seascape, “Golden Migration.” A rectangle of blue waves alludes to the ocean, while the gold-and-red lace-patterned sun above sets the surrounding sky afire.
Blue and white dominate two other seascapes, displayed side by side. In Laura Hearn’s impressive, felted work, an enormous cresting wave loops gracefully to the right, drawing our eye to Barbara Reynold’s “Split Rock,” which hangs next to it. The photograph captures a giant boulder that recalls a beached whale just offshore, with foamy waves rolling onto the beach.
Nature, in all its forms, isn’t the only subject matter. Patricia Floyd’s “Hazen’s Collar” is an intimate moment in her acrylic portrait of a young boy, looking slightly off to the left, cradling his beloved pup. Saundra LaBell pulls us in just inches away from her acrylic painting of a huge bowl filled with a mesmerizing array of buttons in various shapes.
So many more beguiling works fill the gallery, but not to be missed as well is Jennifer Langhammer’s show, “Significant Objects,” in the Schule Chapel. It is filled with ceramic, life-size replicas of everyday objects that might initially appear mundane but carry significant associations for their owners. For each one, she has fashioned small, sculpted related items as gifts for these people.
For Langhammer, everyday objects serve as touchstones and talismans in our lives. Friends and strangers submitted the reference objects and the stories about their personal meaning. Just a few include a little pat of melting butter as the gift for the person who inspired “Milly’s Loaf.” The replica depicts a Warburton’s medium-sliced bread, the only type Milly’s grandmother would eat. An unusually shaped, tiny bud vase is the gift that comes with “Liz’s Perfume Bottle,” an item from Liz’s childhood that she found mysterious and fascinating. Langhammer made a small ceramic battery to accompany “Emily’s RadioShack Battery Tester,” a gadget Emily fondly associates with her father.
Langhammer’s project is ultimately about connection — as she says, “Connection to the past, connection to the people and places we love, and, through sharing the pieces, connection to each other.”
Prices range from $1 to $5,360. Both exhibitions will lift your spirits and delight the eye, offering a welcome respite from worldly cares.
“30 x 30” and “Significant Objects” are on view at Featherstone Center for the Arts through April 26. For information, visit featherstoneart.org.