301 Frame Gallery
301 Cabot Street
Beverly, MA 01915
Gallery Hours
24/7
Dates
Through August 6, 2021
Beverly-based artists WILL WEYGINT and CHLOE WILWERDING interrogate the artificiality of the urban and natural landscape in their mixed-media artworks. The Landscapes Between Us brings together these two artists who engage with different yet intersecting ideas around nature and culture.
Weygint creates large-scale and densely layered paintings that incorporate images gleaned from pop culture, ready-made objects, and fictional characters that examine the complexities of the American urban landscape in the 21st century. Iconography denoting modern progress, such as high-rises, apartment buildings, toxic clouds, and analog and digital technologies, populate Weygint’s dramatic and surreal compositions, conveying a sense of alienation, uncertainty, and loss. Wilwerding’s digital prints on canvas similarly express a sense of detachment, viewing the natural landscape and its representation as a human contrivance. She uses stock photos commonly used for commercial purposes as her base images, which she then overlays with small, digitally embroidered discs that serve both to magnify the image and reference a kind of ocular lens. The embroidered discs also cheekily allude to merit badges, some with cliched sayings and like the types earned for completing different organized outdoor activities. Through these visual strategies, Wilwerding proposes that the concept of nature is a cultural construct that we perform and surmount through regulated and structured interactions and activities.