Sarah Alexander + Jim Banks

September 29–October 24, 2021

SoWa First Friday Art Walk: Friday, October 1, 5–8PM
Event: Saturday, October 16, 3–4PM

Beginning September 29th, Fountain Street Gallery will exhibit Uncultivated, featuring the work of Sarah Alexander and Jim Banks. The term uncultivated often suggests a lack of something, be it in plants or people, as in lacking refinement or manners. It characterizes what doesn’t fit the norm or “grow in rows.” But it fundamentally points to that which is alive and growing, uncontained and unconstrained. In other words, wild. It is this that Alexander and Banks find themselves drawn to—the wild and unpredictable. Their vibrant show, which starts with drawing and branches into painting and sculpture, highlights weeds and other unruly botanicals in novel and unanticipated ways. Follow the rhizomes and you’ll be rewarded with Alexander’s flourish and symbolism and Banks’ precision and vitalism.

PRESS RELEASE ➢

PRICE LIST ➢

Sarah Alexander

Sarah Alexander created a series of drawings that are decorative shrines of longing for people she loves and missed seeing during the pandemic. Passionflowers for her mother, blueberries for her daughter, asters, morning glories, and spiky seed pods are all captured on paper with watercolor, ink and 22k gold leaf. Alexander’s paintings on large canvases barely contain her crowded, tangled, busy, twisting, turning, fantastical gardens. Irrepressible too is her steel sculpture, in which she explores feelings of living in an enchanted limbo, as if turning into one of the wild, overgrown plants in her garden.

Alexander is a self-taught, multi-disciplinary artist working on paper and canvas, and sculpting with steel. She is Director of Visual Arts at Hopkinton Center for the Arts in Hopkinton, MA, where she teaches classes for children and adults. Her work is in private collections and has been shown throughout New England and abroad. Alexander’s work is published by North Light Books in Incite: The Best of Mixed Media (book series 1, 2 & 3). She is a Core Member of Fountain Street.

Show Statement

Jim Banks

Jim Banks has taken thousands of photos of weeds in his pursuit of identifying every one he has seen. These compositions—basically what is in front of your feet—reminded him of the relatively flat, all-over approach of mid-20th century American painting, and seemed a novel approach to landscape. By attending to increasingly more detail in his paintings, he strives to find the “soul” of a patch of ground as it reveals aspects of itself that one could not have anticipated. Banks’ sculptures are 3D drawings using rope and yarn with objects suspended, caught or trapped within them. Tangles, patterns and lines are drawn in space in a seemingly haphazard, “uncultivated” fashion, yet with regard to the details of the knots and other means of connection.

When Banks found art in his junior year at Bard College, he exclaimed, “You mean people actually go to college for this?” As a sculptor, he is fascinated by materials of every kind. He works in wood, plastic, and things he can tie and knot—often all in the same piece. As a painter, his heart is in the weeds. Banks lives in Cambridge, MA and works from his studio in Medford, MA. He is a Core Member of Fountain Street.

Show Statement