Where I Come From, Where I Am: A curator's thoughts
Clare Asch, Round Dance #30, Watercolor on Arches, 22x22 inches.
By Lior Neiger, exhibition curator
The title of this show was inspired by Paul Gauguin’s famous painting “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (On display at MFA Boston). The painting’s main theme concerns the passage of time and the cycle of life. Many artists in this show responded directly to the question of time and chose to show work that represents it.
Clare Asch, Invention of the Stars, Ink on Paper over Canvas, 12 x12 inches.
Clare Asch's works, for example, relate to time as being continuous with her circle series, as she explains: “Circles for me, relate to the passage of time and the seasons and how both time and the seasons revolve.” But in “Invention of the Stars”, she goes back to a more specific time in her life: “My other series deals with my own personal history. I was born in Hungary during the Soviet era. I distinctly remember seeing a giant red star on the Parliament Building, which we could see from our apartment in Budapest. With the crumbling of the Soviet Union and Hungary’s independence in 1989, these Soviet era sculptures and monuments were joyously dismantled. This series of drawings are loosely based on photographs of these events.”
Catherine Picard-Gibbs, Tempest, Oil on Copper 50 x82 inches.
But time can also have an accumulative property, when experiences and experience over many years bring forth a new work, like in Catherine Picard-Gibbs’s, “Tempest”, triptych. She writes: “My recent waterscapes incorporate techniques I’ve developed over the years. I love painting water because this subject matter lends itself to portraying emotional states such as the anxiety of an impending storm or the calmness of a still pool.”
Meghan Mirasolo, 4th Street, San Francisco, Archival Digital Print 24 x 16 inches.
For Megan Mirasolo time is also continuous, but her position is more of an observer. She writes: “Nothing feels particularly permanent. I am meandering my way through time and place, and it’s forever changing. The world I observed yesterday differs from the world I see today. And tomorrow will undoubtedly bring new transformations. While this inevitable continuum unfolds, I'm most comfortable behind the camera, watching as I pass through.”
Time is different for every person. We can experience it in a chronological way, or a simultaneous one, we can feel the time is not moving at all or, at other times, moving too fast. Either way, we better pay attention to the other (same) dimension that Einstein tied to time, space, and more specifically, the space around us.
Anne Sargent Walker, Red Forest, Oil, acrylic, collage, 40”x30"
Otherwise, we will be surrounded, sooner than we expect, by the same eerie feeling resonating from Anne Sargent Walker’s paintings. She explains: “My images of forests- its fragmentation, loss of its carbon capture, loss of species and habitat -represent where I, and all of us come from, and where we are going.
Curator Lior Neiger is a graduate of the fine arts department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. He moved to Boston in 2002, where he completed his MFA studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. In 2003, he received a grant for his studies from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. Neiger’s works include paintings, drawings and video. His work has been exhibited both locally at Boston Center for the Arts and AREA CODE Art Fair and internationally at The Jewish Museum in Budapest and The Drawing Biennale in Jerusalem. Neiger is a Core Member of Fountain Street.