Gallery Update: Take20 Talks this December
Wish You Were There? Take 20 talk:
on Mary Ann Davis and Amy Wilson
Thu., Dec. 5, 12 – 12:20 pm
with Chris Klepaldo
Since the early writings of Plato, ‘utopia’ has been commonly recognized as a concept that presents the ideal. A place void of the current social struggles and so perfect that it seems only possible through a dream. Simultaneously, the opposite or ‘dystopic’, presents adverse representations of this alternate reality. Curator Bradbury proposes that within each utopic vision the dystopic is already present.
Amy Wilson paints a rainbow of characters living in harmony in, A Utopian Vision (After Bosch). The five-panel work based on her communal living experience during Occupy NY in Zuccotti Park makes us believe that if we open our eyes a little wider utopia can be presently found in the togetherness of others. Similarly ceramicist and sculptor Mary Anne Davis believes a reconnection with community and our relationship with nature threads the definition of utopia around the dinner table. The Dining Room is a metaphorical “island” of utopia in which the audience is encouraged to sit and embrace utopia as a condition of life rather than set locale.
Mary Anne Davis, Through The Mirror: Utopia Reconsidered, 2013 ->
David Wells: Foreclosed Dreams Take 20 talk:
On View: Nov. 20 – Dec. 21, 2013
Tue., Dec. 10, 12 – 12:20 pm
with Stephanie Visciglia
Since 2009, David H. Wells has been recording the human cost of our Great Recession that began the year before by photographing the things people left behind when they abandoned foreclosed homes.
In the Providence photographer’s heartbreaking exhibit Foreclosed Dreams he documents toys, credit reports, martial arts trophies and family heirlooms jettisoned in homes from Massachusetts to California to Florida. Wells’s subject—this terrible sense of emptiness, of abandonment, of exodus—lasers into your soul.
Walls and ceilings are ripped open. The saying “I’m ruined” here becomes physical and emotional ruins. The departed often don’t seem to give a damn how they leave the place. Or they’re too harried and broken to get it together.
Wells purposely doesn’t photograph the people. By focusing on their things, by leaving it anonymous, he aims to draw us in personally, to get us thinking: “That could be my house, that could be my grandfather’s photo, that could be my child’s toy.”
There’s plenty of blame to go around in this massive tragedy, from the rapacious banking and real estate industries to the individuals who failed to repay their loans. But regardless of the reasons, the results are a diaspora of devastated families.
– Greg Cook, Montserrat College of Art
David Wells, Foreclosure, Los Angeles, California, 2009, Photograph