Invitational Group Exhibition

November 28–December 20, 2020

Virtual Artist Reception + Tour: Saturday, December 19, 3–4PM

UPDATE SoWa First Friday Art Walk: Due to the recent increase in Coronavirus transmission numbers in Boston and throughout the region, we will be closed for the SOWA First Friday Art Walk on Friday, December 4th.

“Encounter” features twenty-one artists, each personally invited to participate by a Fountain Street Core Member. The array of artwork serves as a poignant reminder of our interdependence and the fragility of the natural world.

Exhibiting Artists: Leika Akiyama, Eleanor Arbor, Aurora Brush, Debra Claffey, Jacquelin Grace Corti, Fernando Fula, Ania Gilmore, Joan Green, Olga Hunyadi, Steve Imrich, Luiny Juliao, John Mahoney, David Meyers, James Morningstar, Barbara Nachmias-Kedesdy, Chen Peng, Jim Peters, Marlene Rye, Andy Schirmer, Jed Sutter, Jhona Xaviera

POSTCARD ➢

PRESS RELEASE ➢

PRICE LIST ➢

* artworks selected for in-gallery exhibit

Leika Akiyama

These artworks examine the culture of domesticity and feminine identity in my bilingual/multicultural upbringing. I work with materials ranging from American 1960s vintage textiles and dollhouse furnitures to encaustic wax, enamel, resin and Flashe vinyl paint. In choosing vintage American 1960s paraphernalia, I am paying homage to my Japanese mother who adored Frank Sinatra and dreamt of owning a Sears-inspired, avocado-hued kitchen. By assembling, layering, juxtaposing and replicating these materials, I am exploring my identity as a Japanese woman living in the United States.

I am a Japanese native, born and raised in Tokyo. As a result of my bilingual and multicultural upbringing in a homogenous society I learned to look inward to make sense of the very contradicting cultures, Eastern and Western. Making art was one way for me to find meaning and integrate the two conflicting worlds.

Eleanor Arbor

My work upends the archaic model of male sculptors constructing shrines to their muse; instead of abasing the femme form as a target of the male gaze, the work seeks to minimize the viewer, empowering the otherwise inanimate. Echoes of classicism can be heard reverberating from the pieces, but with an exaggeration that at times thrusts the work into an uncanny valley.

Through my work, I hint at the painted sculptures of antiquity, yet the works’ glossy, honeyed coating is unequivocally of the moment. The sculptures’ haunting eyes and patrician smiles, like siren songs, beckon the viewer to come closer despite their undeniable warning to stay back.

I was introduced to pottery in middle-school and was instantly hooked on the sensation of clay between my hands, this love led me to study ceramics at MassArt. After graduation I searched for a way to create without a kiln and stumbled upon plaster; it is a medium with deep pleasures and challenges alike yet I've grown quite fond of it. I sculpt the female form because I yearn to tell the story of the female experience through the eyes of someone who is living it. I create strong representations of women that are far from the muse our eyes are so trained to see.

Aurora Brush

My etchings are a depiction of my emotional state in relation to my experiences and the landscapes I occupy. Through my line work I fuse my outer world with my inner so I may create a visualization of an otherwise invisible interior world. My images are an extension of my deepest truths and fears, my spirit, and a reflection of my human body.

I'm a printmaker and book artist with an interest in nature, pictorial storytelling, spirituality, and psychology. I received my BFA from Lesley University and have gone on to work as an apprentice at the Women's Studio Workshop in New York. I create my art out of necessity, as a means of communicating with different aspects of myself and providing voice when words fail me.

Debra Claffey

These are multimedia two-dimensional stories of my preoccupation with the other living beings on our beautiful planet, especially with plants. They include painting, drawing, and collage in a way I have not seen elsewhere. The marks of my own hand, in combination with multimedia technique make them unique.

We finally have corroborating evidence of vast intelligences in the plant world that indigenous and historical cultures were and are aware of. I want to make works with beauty and intensity that entice us to think about biota as intelligent and worthy of respect and not as disposable commodities.

I'm a "late bloomer." I chose to quit my "life" as it was, and enroll in art school in my late 20s. I chose art as the hardest thing I could think of to do, that would not exhaust my curiosity. Forty years later, I am still intensely curious and can't think of anything more worthwhile to spend my time on.

Jacquelin Grace Corti

I have always had an interest in religion and spirituality. Raised in a Roman Catholic home I wanted to create my own idols and my own interpretations of these 15th century styles. These Idols are my post-modern ideas of what I spiritually believe. A lot of my artistic roots come from admiration of Catholic imagery I grew up around in my Roman Catholic home. As I aged I gained my own sense of spirituality, but still have that same artistic admiration for religious art.

Jacquelin Grace Corti is a BFA graduate from the formerly known as the New Hampshire Institute of Art. With an additional artistic background from Blue Hills Regional, Grace Corti has explored conceptual portrait photography for several years. Traveling throughout New England, she continuously seeks internal and emotional inspiration from various subjects and herself. She has traveled and exhibited her work in various states as well as in Florence, Italy. Jacquelin Grace Corti is currently working as a freelance photographer, retoucher and graphic designer.

Fernando Fula

I'm the model in all three. They have different meanings from mental health, historic superstitious beliefs, and social-cultural systems designed to control gender behaviors of the mass population throughout history.

I grew up in an end of days household which restricted any thoughts outside the norm of life is meaningless and death is within moments. I think I gravitated toward art as a way to preserve my sense of imagination to see beyond a life of fear. Whenever life becomes difficult art pulls me back to life's possibilities.

Ania Gilmore

I love paper! The secret of paper making migrated in the third century from China, to Vietnam, Tibet and by the fourth century to Korea and Japan. Joomchi is a traditional Korean technique of papermaking that creates textural papers by layering and agitating Mulberry fibers (Hanji) with water. The process is quite meditative and joyful, even though it requires lot of energy and strength. Joomchi enables me to play with the structure, to alter the properties of the fibers from smooth leather-like to strong textural paper. I am interested in creating pieces that can be changed or adjusted in the process while the basic fiber content remains present. Since nothing in life is permanent, the idea of deliberately working with impermanence of paper seems very natural.

Born in Warsaw, Poland Ania Gilmore received her BFA with honors in Graphic Design from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, studied printmaking, book arts and fibers at the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine. Her portfolio includes works on paper, artist books, fiber art and mixed-media. Ania worked as an independent curator in the US and internationally. Her works are in public and private collections in Australia, Hungry, Iraq, Japan, Korea, Poland, Romania, UK, and USA.

Joan Green

Species is a commentary on life in 2019. In Jamaica last winter, I was conducting explorations dropping ink into water, then amplifying the images that emerged. This is one of many images that came of that process. Strong Woman with Parasol -- she simply appeared on the page and slightly resembles Haile Selasie's wife, Empress Menen. They all come from my memory and my imagination.

While my first artistic career was as a dancer, I have been an artist since I could hold a crayon. My family was filled with artists and I was given art materials, a table and chair and great encouragement. Now, catching up for lost time at age 79, I haven't got time to ask if I'm doing the right thing in the right way. I just have to get out of the way, let my art explode out of me and hope it has some merit. It's actually quite a wonderful place to be in.

Olga Hunyadi

In my recent art works, which were created in 2018-2020 I was inspired of American environment. Everything is new for my eyes here. Every day I see never-seen-before images and feel unusual feelings. As an artist I transform everything that I see in my own reality. My art depends much on the place where I live and paintings changed since I moved to US.

I work as a painter for over 14 years after graduating with honors at Kazan Art College, Russia. I studied at High School of Arts Dresden, Germany, joined the Union of Artists of Russia, received a scholarship of Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation in support of young artists. Since 2018 live and work in Lowell, MA, USA. Works are in private collections in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, Estonia, China, Israel, Canada and the USA.

Steve Imrich

The work investigates interactions between nature and design with a sub-theme about community and distance. Overhead vantage is a product of personal aviation experiences, and naturally provides a wider interactive context for what could be traditionally considered ‘landscape’. The interconnection of air, water and land related to a particular geography are of special interest to me. I’m also grappling with how ‘scenic’ formats camouflage unsavory aspects of environments, where the abstraction caused by distance hints at, but does not completely reveal underpinning reality. The titles include 3-letter nearby airport designators like ‘BOS’ for Boston, 2B2-Plumb Island and ‘ORD’ for Chicago.

Steve holds a Master of Architecture from MIT and a BA from Goddard College with a concentration in Studio Arts and History. He studied painting, drawing and sculpture before focusing on architecture and design studies in graduate school. After practicing as a senior designer and Principal at CambridgeSeven Associates he switched to painting full time. Steve also has a background as a pilot which has been influential in observing nature and design. Many of his paintings experiment with interactions between weather, specific locales and how the time of day or season change our perceptions of a place or experience.

Luiny Juliao

These selected artworks are a part of my collection called “Abandonment”. It was my first attempt at pen and ink, and it started my passion for the medium. I started this project in 2019, and I developed it over the course of about five months. Every drawing emphasizes the commonality of abandonment while also representing it not as a pitiful incident, but as a natural event in people’s lives. Themes involving faith, loneliness, and the unknown are recurrent, and these ideas are often portrayed through symbolism in surreal scenarios, or also being represented through specific emotions people deal with in their daily lives, such as the feeling of being alone even when surrounded by people.

My brother was the one who introduced me to art, and art became an activity that would connect the two of us. Overtime I started realizing that drawing was something I not only liked to do, but that I had a talent for. Now, it is something I can’t see myself without. I want art to be my career because I have always believed that to have a successful life is to have a career that you are passionate about. The reason why I draw and why I write is because I have many stories to tell, and I want people to know about them.

John Mahoney

These works are part of a series produced in reaction to a personally turbulent time during the Pandemic of 2020. The work depicts arrangements of natural objects, invented relics, broken halos and fragmented encounters. Stylized characters are searching and collecting in visionary spaces. My approach was intuitive with a desire to have unexpected results. With an emphasis on production, each of the painted and photographic collage components were made individually and at different times and then assembled. Each of the components has a particular meaning for me. This work became a personal snapshot, a connection to this period of time, and a construct of conflicting elements and unsettled thoughts.

Art making was an early interest of mine; a personal identity and a way to make meaning. I studied at UMass-Dartmouth where I received a BFA in painting, and later, at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, an MFA in painting. After graduating, I became an art educator/artist. I have shown my work in commercial and college galleries, public spaces and museums. My work is an evolutionary process that pursues the development of creative ideas and original personal content.

David Meyers

In my artwork I am interested in the boundary between lowbrow and highbrow culture and the semiotics of the conveying visual language. Emerging from a sardonic mire of humor, I look toward finding wonder in the mundane surroundings, a created narrative and a hair-brained idea somewhere between smart, silly and stupid. Looking for inspiration, I found it through what is closest to me, a dialogue on skilled labor, and historic craft (my day job as an antique restorer.) This has culminated (recently) in simply making goofy paintings about woodworking and such trades.

Maybe I've always been an artist, but formally I never created beyond doodling in the margins till I took a painting class on a whim in college. Ten years later, I couldn't imagine life beyond making art. I love the visual language, the history and conversation that art creates, silly jokes, overthinking, under thinking and the dialogue in-between. I make the work that I want to see in the world. Art isn't always about high notions of beauty and what ails the world, it can be about the screws in your pocket, about drinking a beer, about sitting in your underwear, about a piece of trash at the beach. Arts power is its endurance, and I find it best fitting next to a joke.

James Morningstar

My works play with the transformation of familiar materials into different ones, and memories. Surface, scale and substance are my guidelines while I work in the studio, as I change the material while still telling its story.

I have been playing with artistic mediums since I was a child, starting out with making instruments in ceramics, and illustrations of characters. As my work stands now, the label of fiber artist fits best. The work I make now is meant to make people question what they see, and to invoke conversation behind why they see they way that they do.

Barbara Nachmias-Kedesdy

These artworks are monotypes and monotype collages. I'm drawn to the spontaneity of this one-of-a-kind 'painterly print' as well as the invitation to incorporate drawing into the composition. Gardening and a fascination with the history of botanical art give me ongoing inspiration. Printmaking has been a vehicle to express the immediacy and emotional energy of my connection to plants and gardens.I am drawn to the perennial challenge of capturing the beauty of plants in bloom and intrigued by the complexity of the life cycle.

Art has always been part of my life - making, sharing, learning. Early years included making books and puppets and exploring printmaking. I have always loved drawing. For many years I worked with figure drawing and colored pencil, focusing on botanical and landscape subjects. Currently I'm a member of the Monotype Guild of New England, American Society of Botanical Artists, New England Society of Botanical Artists, as well as local art associations in Marblehead and Newburyport. I am a retired elementary school art teacher.

Chen Peng

All three paintings: "I'm a tree" (diptych), "Touch" (diptych) and "Asleep", belong to my on-going series of work, "On Hunting". I made them during my residency at Vermont Studio Center last year. I was thinking about the idea of hunting and our interdependence relationship with nature. Using different levels of depiction: from more abstract ideas of camouflaged hunters' outfit, to the more concrete depiction of human hand, I invite viewers to reflect on our domination over nature.

I have a degree in philosophy, but I always like to paint. Painting, for me, is a daily practice rooted in tangible, physical actions. I enjoy the physical labor and time spent on constructing a painting from the very beginning. Other than making paintings, I've been engaging in animal rights activism, which have been informing current body of work in a subtle way.

Jim Peters

My route to becoming an artist was rather circuitous. I graduated US Naval Academy, Annapolis, (BS Atomic Physics), then to MIT (MS Nuclear Engineering), regularly going to MFA and Fenway Park('67!). Started painting but assigned to aircraft carrier CVA 67, USS John F. Kennedy; first studio here in bowels of ship. Out of Navy, used GI Bill at MICA, Baltimore (MFA, painting), then Carter's CETA program, murals in Norwich CT. Thence to Fellowship at Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, where I later became Chair of Visual Arts Committee. For past 14 years teaching Drawing at Rhode Island School of Design.   

I have always been passionate about the figure and interior space. Lately I have been combining painting and photography, allowing each medium its independent presence. I enjoy construction, the building of a work from its stretcher to its compound surfaces, and iteration, the constant altering, cutting into, reassembling and repainting. I think of my pieces as films which keep rolling, changing, until I “freeze frame” (a la Truffaut) the projection/constructions at the image I want. 

Marlene Rye

My exploration of skies began when an artist friend of mine, shared her passion for its complexity, emotion, and variety. In the past I had shied away form the subject, over a concern that the work would be predictable and trite. As is often the case in life I learned that my assumption was uninformed. These works symbolize the connection I hold with my remarkable friend who is the bravest woman I have ever known and the beating heart of these pieces is to seek the joy of being alive.

Freshman year, I introduced myself to my new roommate. “Hi, I’m Marlene, and I’m an artist. My earliest memories involve making, creating, and appreciating art. It is not that I came to “be an artist” but more that I am an artist. Making art for me is a compulsion, a need, not unlike breathing. Like others that chose this path, I have failed, faced rejection, and grappled with the subjective nature of my chosen profession. Regardless of these challenges my identity is so wrapped up in the capturing and relaying of beauty that I could not imagine doing anything else.

Andy Schirmer

The face is from a project titled, “Disorder,” which explores the effects of external perception on internal cognition. The mask is from a project titled “Anthropic Principle,” a brief history of the universe that combines images with scientific eras, biblical quotations, and poetry. Despite a resonance with struggles of the inner self in the time of COVID-19, both projects predate the pandemic and came about due to my deep interest in human evolution and its impact on perception and aesthetics. The color image is part of a new and evolving project looking at processes of artistic creation.

Both of my parents were makers who gave me the time and encouragement to explore creative activities in the graphic and performing arts. They taught me to ask questions, recognize problems, and invent solutions. The world is a fascinatingly complex place, and it give me great joy to engage people with questions about how it works and what our place is in it.

Jed Sutter

I love reflections, especially in water. I grew up in a small fishing village in Maine. This group of paintings is my story of the interaction between light and water. The way that light moves and plays and changes when reflected in water is particularly compelling to me and I try to represent that in a variety of mediums.

Four years ago I discovered almost by accident that I had a talent for - and love of - painting. My mother was an artist and my sister is a pastellist. One day when looking at my mom's art on her walls I wondered if her legacy would be the art she had painted or if I should carry the torch (presumptuous but true). I sold my first painting. I fell in love immediately and I have now painted almost daily since then. I started with urban architecture from the neighborhoods I travel, but have started exploring water and the harbors of my childhood.

Jhona Xaviera

I am a multimedia chimæra who weaves together visual and performing arts into stories that embody the multiplicities of my Afro-Latinx trans experience. I tell stories that honor the revolutionary spirit of healing that is embodied within the trans experience. Video and photography come together as installations to form altars that are brought to life by music, poetry, and dance. These rituals call forth the realms that were built out of the yearnings, skepticisms, and frustrations of my ancestors. As my muse, guide, and highest self, I channel Asyra: the many-faced goddess of light you may only wish to worship.

My music, poetry, and visual art serves as a love letter to myself that I then extend to others. I create art to heal generational traumas, call forth my highest self, and manifest personal and collective healing through grief, rage, and joy. As I continued to embody the truth of my trans experience, I saw how deeply trans people were continuously left out of political, spiritual, and social movements even though my research has shown how central trans-ness was within American and African indigenous cosmologies. I retell these stories to honor my ancestral roots and envision a future of liberation and justice for all. Sharing my healing journey is a way for me to remind others of themselves and to invite them to be in community with me.