NEW LONDON — Every couple years, Colby-Sawyer College stages a group exhibition with work made by its art and design faculty.
The most recent iteration opened a couple of weeks ago in the school’s gallery.
There’s no overarching theme for the show, beyond that it’s all faculty-made work, which presents a particular challenge for its organizer, art professor and ceramicist Jon Keenan.
“I’m trying to draw relationships” among the work, Keenan said at the gallery.
Though it’s an eclectic group of work, with art ranging from collage to photography to monotype prints to ceramics to jewelry, there’s a sense of harmony in how the pieces play off each other.
On one wall, adjunct photography professor Alicia Bergeron’s botanical cyanotypes, images of leaves and ferns in blue and white, are arranged next to Rachel Gross’ prints of calm outdoor scenes.
The blue skies in Gross’ work mirror the blue of Bergeron’s cyanotypes, but Gross’ prints also have a bright spot of color from the quadrilaterals that float in the middle of the scenes.
“I’m always interested in giving a sense of space and different levels of space,” Gross, who teaches painting at Colby-Sawyer and works out of a studio in Hartland, said at the gallery.
In “Vaulted Murmur,” a monotype from 2024, a slender green triangle sits in a pale blue sky dotted with small clouds.
The peachy accents and soft shape of the clouds is mirrored in Keenan’s “Slender Vessel,” a wood-fired porcelain vase with a rounded shape and orange-tinged glaze positioned directly below the print.
The geometric shapes make the serene outdoor scenes in Gross’ work feel a little uncanny. How did they get there? What are their intentions? What kind of world is this?
That fantastical atmosphere comes up again on the opposite wall in Scott Horsley’s “The Royal You” series.
Three monochromatic paintings show the interior of various rooms: an opulent dining hall rendered in cyan; an interior with a hospital bed and a set of machines in magenta; a bathroom overlooking a cityscape in yellow.
In a fourth painting, a Tudor-style home goes up in gray flames. While Gross has her mysterious shapes, Horsley has put a folding chair in each of the scenes, sitting atop the hospital bed, or watching the house burn from a safe distance.
The more surreal works in the show are grounded by a range of pottery in the center of the gallery, including tea ware by adjunct ceramics professor Terita Heath-Wlaz. The bulging bodies of the pots are contrasted with spouts so dainty and precise it’s hard to imagine someone could really craft them by hand.
A couple of Heath-Wlaz’s and Keenan’s pots are set up at the back of the room, in front of a wall of windows facing Mount Kearsarge. To the left of the window is the school’s wood-fired kiln used by students and faculty.
Sometimes, the show’s pairings highlight parallels in the work, other times they create humorous contrasts. Such is the case with Douglas Harp’s “Self-portrait of a Hypocrite:” a piece of an Amazon box with a pair of glasses drawn above the upside down swoosh and a square of tape for a nose. The work is crudely tacked above one of Keenan’s large stoneware bowls, a piece that no doubt took hours to complete.
“Is it a piece of art, worthy of including in the art + design faculty show if it took me approximately six seconds to create? And did I, in fact, create something? I think so,” Harp writes in his artist statement.
He describes the piece as a critique of Jeff Bezos, and of himself for supporting the billionaire by shopping on Amazon. “I don’t like him; in this context, I don’t like myself. Let’s turn this rage and guilt into a self-portrait,” he writes.
Colby-Sawyer College’s “W. Dale and JoAnn Franke Overfield ’69 Art and Design Faculty Exhibition” is on view through March 25. The show is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday through Friday. To learn more go to colby-sawyer.edu/community/gallery.
More to see
New York City artist Dan Waller has a show up at Kishka Gallery and Library in White River Junction through Feb. 28. Titled “Mary Magdalene’s Treasures,” the show comprises an array of small talismanic boxes made using mixed media like plain fabric and pieces of wire. Learn more about the show on the gallery’s Instagram: @kishka.vt.
My colleague Alex Hanson was in Newport to report a story Tuesday and had enough time to duck into the Library Arts Center’s annual “Selections” show, which features work by the artists chosen from the annual Juried Regional show. He didn’t have time to take notes, but said this: “The ‘Selections’ show features some of the best recent work I’ve seen in the Upper Valley vein of personal examination of the wider world.” The show is up through March 20.
