Category: Art

For its first shows of 2020, The Center for Arts and Learning will be presenting Cat McQ: United Signs of America in our second-floor gallery, and Paintings by Jeanne Thurston on the first floor. Join us for our rescheduled opening reception on Saturday, February 15 from 4-6pm. Both exhibitions run through March.

Cat McQ: United Signs of America takes the viewer on a road trip looking backwards. Intense skies are punctuated by vintage signage, some rusted, some vibrant, each signaling a larger road culture. Each engages the viewer in a different way; for some, the sign’s story or geography is the obvious focus, but for others, the image’s composition and color come to the fore. In a country we often think of as regionally divided, these photographs portray a common aesthetic of glitzy convenience. Many of them promise the exotic, with all the comforts of home. Removed from their locales and presented against the same skies, they become like formal portraits of forgotten sitters.

Jeanne Thurston’s paintings use intensely colored, dimensional bars of color to create reliefs. As you move around the space, the optics of each piece change, revealing new colors that combine to effect remarkable movement and volume. Thurston takes inspiration from her work keeping bees. Like beehives, her pieces use stable, simple geometric forms to build a base for a dynamic, ever-changing surface. Her colors buzz and flutter, dancing to communicate.

Join us on December 6, 2019 from 4-8 pm for Montpelier Alive’s Artwalk. We’ll have works in the first-floor gallery from How to Draw Everything, an observational drawing class taught this fall by Glen Coburn Hutcheson. How to Draw Everything features drawings by Daryl Burtnett, Hasso Ewing, Glen Coburn Hutcheson, Ned Richardson, and Nicole Wolfgang. These accomplished students show us individual ways of looking and seeing, detailing their world from objects to the human form.

Upstairs in the second-floor gallery, we’ll be presenting works by Burlington collage artist Lauren Hood. Lauren’s richly colored, surreal images combine retro advertising shots with landscapes to create a dreamlike, floating narrative full of strange nostalgia.

We’ll also be hosting the Secular Holiday Jam Session & Sing-Along from 7-8pm in room 207 at CAL, presented by Monteverdi Music School. Sheet music will be on hand for classic holiday songs – musicians and singers of all ages and abilities are welcome!

Don’t miss other events in the building as well – get your tickets for the River Rock Holiday Raffle, hear artist talks at 5pm and see exhibitions by Elliott Burg and Athena Petra Tasiopoulous at the T.W. Wood Gallery, and don’t miss the unveiling of the newly-restored painting Old Home by the Sea by Hudson River School painter Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910) at 6pm, also at the T.W. Wood Gallery.

See you at Art Walk!

Second Floor Gallery, Sept. 6 – November 30, 2019
Opening Reception Friday, Sept. 6th, 3-8pm

Laura Gans has an eye for structure. While her subjects range from architecture to the natural world, her compositions are unequivocally clean and graphic, focusing on details that articulate solid forms. Her stark, direct approach sheds new light on forms that are relatively ordinary – a flower or the side of a building. Many of Gans’ images, some taken years apart, have an uncanny compositional resonance with each other that brings out new meanings – whether it’s the rational, architectural quality of pine needles or the elegance and grace of a bird and a parachute in flight. The weight of spaces in her photographs draws in the air around them. Looking at them is almost an experience of sculpture.

First Floor Gallery, Sept 6 – November 30, 2019
Opening Reception September 6, 3-8 pm

Chris Jeffrey’s work will make your brain vibrate. He works primarily with perception – of light, line, color and form – to create instability between what you see and what you think you should be seeing. His mirror boxes create tiny and infinite alien worlds that you can peer into but not quite enter. The wall-based works use line – both painted and delineated – to create uncertainty in space. Precise and frenetic, Jeffrey’s pieces play with the quality of intensity, seeming to create pressure and relief depending on where you rest your eye. They are fascinating in the oldest sense of the word – you can’t really look away.

Second Floor Gallery, July 11 – August 30, 2019
Opening Reception July 11, 5-7 pm

Many of Marilyn Maddison’s abstract photographs originate with ice. Instead of viewing the landscape at a distance, she explores the spaces within it – spaces filled with light, fractures, and refractions. Recognizable crystalline structures or bubbles seem to place the viewer within these icy formations. And yet, many of Maddison’s images are not taken from nature, but made from expertly constructed and photographed still-lifes. She uses motion, lighting, and technique to create a sense of light falling through ice or water – tiny dioramas become vast caverns haunted by rainbows.