Cold, Tenderly: Shoe Bones Presents Three Exhibits

Cold, Tenderly is a series of three exhibitions curated by Frankie Symonds, artist and Founder/Director of Shoe Bones Gallery in Salem, MA.  Through a range of artistic approaches and media, including photography, painting, video, and drawing, each exhibition probes different psychological states of being—from love and vulnerability to guarded indifference and absurdity. Cold, Tenderly seeks to ultimately explore the intimate as well as distant spaces created between ourselves and others.

Pansies and Sissies: Jamieson Edson and Campbell McLean

July 17 – August 10
Exhibition Reception: Thursday, July 25. 6–8PM
Please note that the Schlosberg Gallery will be closed on Saturday, August 3 for a private event.

Pansies And Sissies, a two-person exhibition featuring Boston-based artists, Jamieson Edson and Campbell McLean, is a tender and at times flirtatious exercise in queer friendship, love, and creative inspiration. Edson and McLean are close friends and frequently depict the people who frequent their lives as their primary subjects. They also regularly appear in each other’s work, and their overlapping social lives mean that many of the same faces, mediated through lenses, brushes, and other processes, are mirrored in each of their works. Using oil paint, various printing processes, and a Polaroid camera respectively, McLean and Edson create intimate, affectionate moments that are dramatic, even cinematic. By filtering the modesty of daily life through their creative methods, Edson and McLean highlight the passion, beauty, and heightened sense of reality found in closeness, care, and interdependence.

Jamieson Edson is a visual artist based in Boston. They received their BFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2015. Working predominantly with Polaroid, Jamieson crafts evocative portraits of dear friends, lovers and captivating acquaintances.

Campbell McLean was born, raised, and educated in Boston, graduating from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2022. Since graduating, Campbell has delved in Boston’s queer nightlife, both as attendee and employee. From domestic bliss to sweaty leather-bars, her paintings document and canonize the local queer experience through dynamic and environmental portraits.

Ryan Hawk: Sweet Surrender

August 19 – September 7

Gallery talk with curator Frankie Symonds, Shoe Bones Gallery, Salem: Wednesday, September 4, 3 pm, Schlosberg Gallery

Sweet Surrender is an ongoing installation featuring moving images and sculpture that interrogates representations of masculinity, often through narratives of tragedy and humor. Hawk incorporates prosthetic objects, using it both metaphorically and literally to explore corporeal experience while also bringing to light the inherent awkwardness associated with penetrating social boundaries. The installation centers on a video of a lone man on stage that transforms into a karaoke set to the pop-rock song “Sweet Surrender” by Sarah McLachlan, which subsequently turns awkward. Despite the proverbial support of a third leg, the man struggles to perform.  Sweet Surrender is a continuation of Hawk’s artistic research into alternative forms of masculine embodiment within the dominant social and cultural imagination.

Ryan Hawk is a visual artist and scholar using film, sculpture, and critical theory to engage and often exploit the Western imaginary. Hawk holds a BFA in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and an MFA in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin.

Creighton Baxter: hiss the name

September 16 – October 12

As an iterative installation resulting from drawing, assemblage, and performance – hiss the name – is the true story of a fictionalized character seeking retribution and salvation in a world of vampiric avatars, vengeful sirens, and trans women running backward through time. Hinging a trilogy of durational performances with hundreds of drawings is the emergence of a phantasmatic villainess who haunts the series. Her presence is a proposal, an alternative to neoliberal representations of trans womanhood which sanitize or hystericize. The Montserrat Galleries will present the final iteration of hiss the name, including the last performance in the trilogy. In these narrative cinders of a fictional testimony, reflections on surveillance, and the sensorium emerge.

The interstices between Creighton Baxter’s modes of making embrace the challenges of remembrance, recording, and witnessing. By upending a singular aesthetic vantage, she lays bare a fractured world. This shattered and (in)coherent frequency turns her artworks into glimpses of a larger absent whole. A totality which never arrives, instead proof of life raises her hand. Baxter received her BFA at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and her MFA in Painting/Printmaking at Yale University.

Shoe Bones is an artist-run gallery in Salem, MA that specializes in exhibiting queer, self-taught, and marginalized artists’ work. For more information, visit https://shoebonesboston.info  or @shoe.bones.

Frankie Symonds is an artist and independent curator who’s lived in or around Boston her whole life. For the last 15 years, she’s made short and feature-length films and videos, produced and directed a 20-episode cable access show, performed live using various instruments such as a theremin and her rectum, programmed film screenings, and curated pop-up exhibits. Her work has been screened and exhibited across the United States and in Europe. She opened Shoe Bones in early 2023 and has been curating exhibits there since.