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Come celebrate the re-emergence of life with Defrost, an exhibition of new and recent work by Deborah Davidson, Scott Francoeur, Maryalice Johnston and Heather Pilchard. Focusing on color and abstraction, the exhibition presents the joys, mysteries and continuous cycles of nature and our interaction with it.
4/8 Friday, 7-9 pm - Opening Reception
4/21 Third Thursday, 7-9 pm, talk at 8 - Artist Talk and Reception
Maryalice Johnston is a Provincetown artist whose fascination with recycled materials, color and surfaces is evident in her current series of paintings and prints. In her works on plaster, she uses gouache and thin layers of dispersed pigment to build worlds suspended between reality and a dream. The technique, when used in the work Defrost, gives form to a joyous grouping of flowers that stand straight as trees and seemingly emit a yellow life force against the deep-blue night. In The Bevy Scroll Johnston used the element of chance to create a 40-foot-long print on discarded wallpaper. What began as nothing more than a surface on which to clean used silkscreen stencils eventually evolved into an orderly procession of human, plant and celestial forms. Suspended between two rollers, the work in its entirety can be set into motion with the turn of a knob.
Scott Francoeur traveled to New Orleans to help with rebuilding efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. While working with two friends in the city's Lower Ninth Ward, he became familiar with the glyphs rescue teams had left on ruined homes to denote, for instance, inspection dates and numbers of dead. Against this backdrop, vegetation sprung from mud and children continued to be born. When Francoeur returned to New England, he created a series of paintings infused with these primal dichotomies. In Quintessence, he presents an abstract landscape beneath gently rolling clouds, but also imbues it with symbolic meaning. Images of unfurling plants are those Francoeur had seen in the wreckage of the Lower Ninth Ward; the clouds above them represent him and his two companions. They were but three men who stood witness to death and emergence, a cycle of which we all are a part.
Heather Pilchard brings to her work the sense of peace and mystery she finds outdoors in Nova Scotia, Cape Cod and the North Shore of Massachusetts. Done primarily in oil, her paintings present the illusion of space through color and a bare minimum of detail, which prevents them from being read as representing specific places or events. They are, according to Pilchard, an intersection of "the natural world and inner vision." In her painting Underground the intersection could well be the appearance of dusk and the feelings dusk evokes. In it fading light seems to envelop a field of soft maroon and blues that quietly enfold a center patch of green. Here Pilchard succeeds in leading people back to their own memories and stirrings of beauty.
Deborah Davidson has been experiencing what she refers to as an "insinuation of language" in her work for the past ten years. In Defrost she presents a number of acrylic on panel paintings in which irregular shapes emerge from color depths and form a demi-language of odd "letters" and characters. The artist arrives at this aesthetic by building layers of paint on top of cut vellum, sanding the surface and repeating the process until she achieves a balance of color and form, stillness and movement. This is particularly evident in Catalyst where, in an atmosphere of delicate yellows, a suggestion of words appears either to be pasted to a wall, or to dangle midair like bundles of wisteria. In other of Davidson's works shapes seem to travel toward each other to form a new biomorphic language.
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