Past Exhibitions and Events 2021
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2021-2022 Flat File Program
December 6 - 18 Reception on Friday, December 10, Arts Night Out The Flat File Program celebrates the potential of flat media: drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, and collage. The collection of small works represents a variety of approaches to flat media either as finished works or momentary components of a creative process. A.P.E.’s Flat File Program features 50 artists, bringing work together to highlight and provide exposure to emerging artists and experimental work that is less likely to be shown in a traditional exhibition setting. Curated by Jil Crary-Ross and Aidan Wright After the Flat File Program exhibition in the A.P.E. gallery in December it will be part of an online catalogue through December 2022. |
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WAVE / SURGE / SPIKE
November 10 – December 4, 2021 Panel Discussion: Thursday, Nov. 18, 7:30PM Zoom discussion with the artists and moderator Amy Brady. Join HERE A.P.E. Ltd. Gallery presents WAVE/ SURGE / SPIKE, curated and exhibited by Amanda Maciuba, Jen Morris, and Jessica Tam. The extreme isolation of the past year provoked feelings of helplessness about COVID-19, natural disasters, and racial violence. In an attempt to contain what they perceive as uncontrollable, they use ecological language to create an embodied response for invisible phenomena like political currents or viruses. Politicians, the media – even everyday conversations – use these metaphors to create visceral reactions like fear, anxiety, or vindication in an audience. In WAVE / SURGE / SPIKE, Maciuba, Morris, and Tam question how these reactions are normalized through the use of language, and experiment with the metaphors that shape our public and private lives. For 365 days, Amanda Maciuba responded to collected data from news and weather headlines. The resulting installation and video work is a daily, in-the-moment response to the intersection of the political and natural environments reflected in the media. More images of work can be found here: amandamaciuba.com The word “bittersweet” evokes loss but also hope – however small – for what’s next. Jen Morris’s photographs depict the plant that shares the word “bittersweet” as its common name. Impenetrable walls of the invasive vine fill the frames of the images, beautiful yet awful at the same time. More images of work can be found here: jenmorris.com Jessica Tam’s paintings use the Chinese phrase “ren shan ren hai,” or a “human mountain” and “sea of humanity” to imagine the crowd as a torrential force that is potentially powerful in both threatening and uplifting ways. More images of work can be found here: jessicaJtam.com Amy Brady is the Executive Director of Orion magazine. She is also the author of Ice: An American Obsession (Putnam), co-editor of House on Fire: Dispatches from a Climate-Changed World (Catapult), and the former Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Review of Books. Her monthly newsletter, "Burning Worlds," discusses how writers and artists are thinking about climate change. The exhibition is made possible with the generous support of the Massachusetts Cultural Council. |
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Positions and Props: a loosening line
Roberley Bell and Sandy Litchfield October 6 - November 6 Artist Reception: Friday, October 8: 5-8 pm Friday, October 22 at 5:30: Informal gallery talk with Artists Roberley Bell and Sandy Litchfield and Loretta Yarlow, Director of the University Museum of Contemporary Art. This event is free. Positions and Props brings together the sculpture of Roberley Bell with paintings of Sandy Litchfield. Recognizing a shared formal language, these two artists have engaged an ongoing conversation about landscape. This exhibition pairs unexpected colors and distinctive compositions in both painting and sculpture, suggesting the ordinary (and extraordinary) nature of being in place. See Art New England's piece on this exhibition: https://artnewengland.com/positions-and-props-a-loosening-line/ ARTISTS’ STATEMENT When we first met four years ago, we were excited to discover our overlapping interests in creative placemaking, walking and mapping. As artists working in academia, we’ve both taught courses that bridge art, architecture, design and writing. And although we work in different media, we also saw a clear connection in our sensibility to form, color, and visual expression. Our conversations, which often took place walking along local trails, extended beyond our own studio practice, drawing broad connections between literature, travel, bookmaking, local ecology and other artists. The ideas for this exhibition simmered slowly during these pandemic outdoor walks. Afterwards we’d follow up with haiku texts, snapshots of landscape drawings and other studio experiments. This became a way to distill the unpredictable world around us in our separate studio practice. Over time, it was as if the logic just appeared by itself– a painting and a sculpture in proximate space, each recognizing a part of itself in the other. |
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New Paradigm Tool Company Work by Peter Dellert September 8 - October 2, 2021 Artist Reception: Friday, September 10: 5-8 pm Peter Dellert is a sculptor and mixed media artist living and working in Holyoke MA. Historically a furniture maker and cabinetmaker, he has been exhibiting his sculptures in galleries, museums and outdoor sculpture shows in the U.S. and Japan since 2005. He creates sculptures using diverse materials including wood, steel, concrete, grape vines, recycled automotive catalytic converter covers, Tyvek, recycled plastic and others. His most recent works comprise an ongoing collection entitled New Paradigm Tool Company. These works utilize legacy tools for manual labor. These tools are refitted with new, surprising, and elaborate wood handles, often laboriously laminated and bent into curves; additional modifications to the tools are also employed. These changes render the tools seemingly non-functional, absurd and surrealistic. The work focuses on an examination of hand tools. The work seeks to address the place of the worker, especially the hand worker and manual laborer in contemporary Western culture. The relation of labor and capital is embodied in the technology of tools. Tools are the means of production in society, and such means of production create our social relationships. These modified tools ask what kind of social relations would emerge from such absurd means of production? This absurdity is a critique on the un-reflected deployment of technology without the consideration of the resulting change in social relations. What at first might appear as a nostalgic look at a past era is in fact a bold statement on the future of labor in the age of digital transformation born of artificial intelligence and increasing automation of manual work in our future. https://peterdellert.com/ |
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2021 NHS Honors Art Alumni Exhibition: Homecoming
July 21- August 28, 2021 A.P.E. Gallery is pleased to present the 4th iteration of the NHS Honors Art Alumni Exhibition, honoring NHS Honors Art teacher, Lisa Leary. It will be curated by ‘07 alumna, Zoe Sasson, running from July 21- August 28, 2021. This is a particularly exciting exhibition, as it will celebrate 25 Northampton High School alumni from over 10 different generations of art students. The artists all come together with one essential commonality: an admiration for the teaching of Lisa Leary, who stresses a lifelong relationship with fine arts practice and an appreciation for contemporary art. Originally scheduled for summer 2020, the exhibition celebrates Leary’s long career as an art teacher, since she is retiring this spring. This exhibition hosts a diverse range of talent, including alumni who have left the Pioneer Valley to live elsewhere, trained in art schools around the country, and those who have built fruitful careers in the arts. A.P.E. will also be selling exhibition catalogues, featuring artwork by alumni and designed by summer intern Sarah Müllejans, to help with the costs of the exhibition. The NHS Honors Art Alumni Exhibition could not be possible without the generous support of the Northampton Arts Council, The Art Angels, our exhibiting artists and their families, and of course, Lisa Leary. Take the Virtual Tour HERE |
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Art Post Projects is a collaboration between Art Post and the J.F.K. Middle School in Northampton, MA. The show contains the artwork of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders and the artists Jessica Maffia, Mandy Messina, Zoe Sasson, and Lena Schmid.
Art Post is a grant funded project, run by the artists Zoe Sasson and Lena Schmid. In its inaugural year, Art Post was conceived of as a way to provide Northampton public school students with world-expanding and hands-on contemporary arts enrichment during a time when they are largely learning from behind a screen. In 2021, Art Post partnered four teaching artists with the art teachers Michelle Mallory and Emma Mendoker to facilitate remote visiting artists workshops. Students had the opportunity to learn about the visiting artists’ work and practice, and were guided through the creation of an artwork of their own. Art Post and Art Post Projects are made possible through generous funding from the Northampton Education Fund, the Northampton Arts Council, and the J.F.K. Middle School’s Parent/Teacher Organization. Find out more about Art Post at artpostprojects.com, which features studio visits with the participating artists and easy to follow directions for students ages 10 and up to make their own artwork inspired by the participating artists. |
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Out - Takes
In - Sights Carl Caivano - Nancy Campbell May 5 - 29, 2021 Artist Statement Carl Caivano Manipulating meaning through juxtaposing varied references intrigues me. A single element can look either magmatic or cellular depending on where it is positioned within the composition. My aim is to combine various macro- and micro-scaled elements that range from galaxies to subatomic particles into a single unified expression. I want the final result to function as a three-dimensional painting. https://carlcaivano.com/ Artist Statement Nancy Campbell I strive to evoke an Eastern sense of balance between fragility and strength by using a system of highly structured intricate abstraction. Despite exacting and often tedious methods I work for a spontaneous result that inhabits an ambiguous realm between the visible and the invisible, the logical and the intuitive, the representational and the abstract. https://www.nancycampbellprintmaker.com/ |
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April 3 - 27, 2021
Weekend Woodblock Printing Workshop: April 9-11 BIG INK will be exhibiting woodblock prints and hosting a weekend of monumental woodblock printing in April, 2021. BIG INK will transform A.P.E. Gallery into a print studio featuring The Big Tuna: our custom-designed giant mobile printing press. We'll invite the general public to witness the spectacle of you and other participants printing together. BIG INK blends elements of a formal class and a maker fair. See the Virtual Tour HERE More Info: http://www.bigink.org/ |
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Five Who Paint Outside:
Frank Gregory, David Brewster, Ray Larrow, Dave Gloman, & Christine Labich March 4-28, 2021 See the Virtual Tour HERE This group exhibition features five artists from the Pioneer Valley, each of whom find their subject matter working outside. Frank Gregory is one of the artists and the curator of the exhibition. When the idea for this show began, he looked closely at the work of many painters, trying to put together a cohesive, yet diverse group of artists that all work outside in the Pioneer Valley with the same urgency and commitment. Several he considered only occasionally paint outside, preferring to work from photographs. Others often paint outside, but not in the valley. The four artists Frank chose, plus himself, all work plein air, under the same conditions of light and weather, yet they all have their own specific formal concerns and unique visual vocabularies. This is an exhibition that compares and contrasts these elements and amplifies their particular ways of looking at a familiar landscape. As we all continue to endure the length and challenge of the pandemic, it is refreshing to be opening the gallery this Spring with a group of painters who have been able to continue their practice of painting outside. https://www.davidbrewsterfineart.com/ https://www.davidglomanart.com/ http://www.frankgregory.com https://www.christinelabich.com/ www.raylarrow.com |
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In Residence at A.P.E. on Main Street
February 6 - 16 The public may view from the window in the evenings: 4:30 - 8:00 pm Mary Beth Brooker Title: THE SET-UP The Set-Up is a theater setting; a workshop; a campsite; a story book; a song. These are some of the metaphors for yet another metaphor: the five skandhas described in Buddhist philosophy as five layers of existence that constitute human experience. As an organizing principle, the skandhas suggest a simple, five part structure as well as contemplative, physical practices for focused study. To turn this esoteric idea into concrete material for a generative art practice, over the course of several days, each day would be dedicated to one of the five skandhas, exploring a specific material that is somehow analogous. |