IN THE ANNEX: OCTOBER 2021

Bill Cohn

Bill Cohn is drawn to the earth where he finds peace when digging soil and breathing forest air. Similarly, touching and manipulating clay, rock, and wood grounds him and unleashes his creative spirit. His sculptural work emphasizes texture and movement. The mundane and common artifacts of daily life, such as bath mats, mesh bags, bubble wrap, as examples, become beautiful textures when impressed in clay. The patterns take on new life. The larger pieces explore variations on the idea of the cairn. On a mountaintop, cairns reassure by communicating that "others have passed this way". They invite reflection and pause, and prompt the instinct to touch. Cohn’s cairns often play with the improbability of balance, which can leave viewers a bit unsettled.

Bill Cohn has been a ceramic artist for 30 years. His work has been featured in solo, two-person, and juried group shows, with gallery pieces as well as outside sculpture. Cohn works from his studio at Artspace Maynard, where he was an original member. During his business career he launched dozens of products in corporate life and holds three patents. This past June (2020) Cohn retired and is now pursuing his artistic career full time.

Alison Judd

Alison Judd is a painter and printmaker whose abstract works explore the relationships between the human mind, nature and the perception of memory. Central is the notion that marks may hold traces of memories within them. Handmade leaf stencils represent the platonic ideal of a moment: sun-dappled leaves, the imprint of wet leaves on a sidewalk. The forms that emerge represent the ephemeral: the actual leaves may be gone, but their impression remains, permanently enshrined in a painting. Judd’s process often involves scraping and wiping away newer layers of paint to expose the layers underneath, revealing older paintings with their own memories, creating something entirely new.

Alison Judd is a Boston-based painter, printmaker and curator. She received a B.A. in Painting and Art History from Brandeis University, and a M.A. in Painting and Printmaking from Massachusetts College of Art. In 2019, she founded Gallery Tempo, showcasing local artists through pop-up gallery shows in Greater Boston. Judd is a board member of JArts, and serves on the art committee for the Gallery at Mayyim Hayyim. She is a director on MassArt’s Foundation Board.

Joan Ryan

Joan Ryan uses painting and drawing as a critical language to explore contemporary society, politics and concepts of identity in our modern world. In her most recent works she incorporates a wide variety of images into active layers of color, intensity, and value. These visual elements are combined with historical imagery, cartoons, childhood fairy tales and political iconography. This use of visual iconography along with images of everyday life confronts the viewer at an intersection with a broad range of cultural moments. The intersection of imagery creates a dynamic interplay and odd juxtaposition with past and present.

Joan Ryan is a Boston based artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Schultz Gallery, Berlin, A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, and the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury CT. Her residencies include Mass Moca, Santa Fe Museum of Contemporary Art, Byrdcilff, Woodstock, NY, DADA Post, Berlin Germany, and most recently Arts, Letters and Numbers, Averill Park, NY. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Provincetown Art Association, the Puffin Foundation, the George Sugarman Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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