Current Exhibits at Brattleboro Museum

 

Brattleboro Museum & Art Center

Current Exhibitions Summer/Fall 2024

Closing October 19, 2024

 

Leave it to the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) to launch exhibits that allow you to explore your politically correct soul without feeling like you’re being beaten over the head. I’ve recently criticized a few (overly) sanctimonious exhibits that merely draw attention to how obvious and dull the art is. That’s not in play at BMAC.

 

The In Between spotlights the work of Susan Brearey and Duane Slick some of it realistic and some abstract. Aspects of their work could be interpreted as echoes of the end of the Anthropocene ideology. Yet, one could just as easily see it as a celebration of the wild accentuated by placing woodland critters in places you wouldn’t anticipate. This is especially the case for animals that some cultures revere as totemic. Anybody who saw Peter Irvine and Tim Eriksen’s Pumpkintown musical/magic lantern show have seen some of Brearey’s paintings as backdrops for mythic town reminiscent of a New England version of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. 

 

 

 

Let’s turn to smaller exhibits. Ilana Manolson’s The River Between fills a cozy space with large landscape paintings that celebrate water. As she put it,  “it holds the power to heal and destroy.” Thus Manolson poignantly reminds us that water is necessary for life, yet can wash it away. I was mesmerized by her works on Yupo, an artificial paper. 

 

 

Jessica Straus makes a different watery statement with Stemming the Tide. Eastern Massachusetts has been whimsically dubbed “the home of the bean and the cod.” These days there are more beans than cod. Straus places a curling giant map behind a handtied net to spotlight the sprawling Gulf of Maine. Smaller watercolors behind nets adorn the sidewalls, but it’s the floor feature that most catches the eye: carved swimming cod. Instead of speckled brown and white, her cod are ghostly white. If that metaphor eludes you, let’s just say that there’s a reason why the United States, Canada, and Greenland (owned by Denmark) quarrel over where the oceanic boundaries lie. No one cares much when fish are plentiful, but sadly they are not.  

 

 

Lee Williams has larger pieces of The Wounding in the outdoor lawn, but his smaller pieces in a narrow inside space make the point much better. Williams takes pieces of wood–usually scavenged broken branches–drives colored pegs into them, and uses media such as wire to hold the assemblages together. At a glance they seem like a madcap Tinker toy, but The Wounding suggests something else. Let’s see, decaying or cut natural wood with human-made colored dowels piercing them… Gee, what could he be suggesting? 

 

 

 

Mishel Valenton and Benedict Scheuer’s Personal Nature is aptly named. It explores themes such as desire, frozen moments in time, gardens, and nature through gouache paperwork, silk panels, and paintings. I found it a mixed bag that was perhaps too personal at times. I confess being drawn to the brightly colored works far more than minimalist washes and abstractions. 

 

 

 

 

SpaceMosque by Saks Afridi grabs attention in the way that most things that turn familiar beliefs upside down can do. In the Western world we are inundated with Christian evangelists who speak of the Second Coming of Jesus and the Rapture, and religious Jews who await the coming of a savior. What if a message from on high did come, but it was Sufi/Islamic? SpaceMosque is part sculpture, part futuristic science fiction, part graphic novel freed from the page, and part Meow Wolf. Heavenly objects appear in the sky above Karachi, Pakistan, and prayer–not money–becomes the “ultimate currency,” one that can even power vessels. But Afridi likes to mess with our heads. There are strange past artifacts but, more puzzling, when the objects appear, not everyone sees the same thing! “News” stories report that the sightings cause many to become pious, but are also denounced as frauds (usually by those with money and/or power). Messages of peace, or of chaos? A lot to consider.

 

After all of that, you can cool down with a gallery of puppets from Putney’s creative Sandglass Theater. Many of them are small agitprop pieces, but others lampoon Vermont’s agricultural tradition and those who engage in ice fishing, an activity for the hardy, the foolhardy, and both.

 

 

 

Rob Weir