Belmont Gallery of Art

A community gallery showcasing regional visual arts

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Fairytales, Folktales and Fables

FFF-Postcard-front

This eclectic vibrant exhibit features work by over 30 artists who interpreted fairytales, folktales and fables from around the world through a variety of 2 and 3 D media, including paper sculpture, assemblage, painting, printmaking, textiles and photography.

NEW DATE! Opening Reception April 6, 6:30-8:30 pm

Wine, and light refreshments.

April 21 and 22: Special Events/Art Salons for the Fairytales exhibit include a Gallery Talk with Exhibit Artists and a Collage-Making Workshop led by artist Carol Wintle.
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Animal Art

Wonderfully diverse, thought-provoking, fun exhibit

We’re Kicking off our Tenth Season with a Roar

Please join us in celebration of:

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10% of sales will be donated to the MSPCA
to rescue abandoned and abused pets.

Sharon Whitman, Water Dance
Sharon Whitman, Water Dance

Animals — from beasts of prey to household pets — have been a staple of artistic expression since cave painting at the very dawn of humanity. Whether as totems, allegory, decoration, or simply for their “fearsome symmetry,” animals have been a presence in the works of history’s greatest masters from DaVinci’s horse studies, through Rousseau’s primitive wildlife, to Picasso’s bull fetish. Yet, the role of animals in art is often overlooked. We have terms for ‘portraits,’ ‘landscapes.’ and ’‘still lives’, but none for art with animal subjects. ‘Animal Art’ gets no respect.

Belmont Gallery of Art opens its tenth anniversary season with a long overdue appreciation of Animals in Art, featuring animal artworks in a variety of media — painting, sculpture, photography collage, fabric art — selected by jurors and veterinarians, Dr. Suzanne Kay and Dr. Dawn Binder, from Belmont’s Cushing Square Veterinary Clinic.

The menagerie is a ‘must-see” for art lovers and animal lovers of all ages. And visitors can help homeless and abused pets at the same time. Ten percent of all sales of artwork will be donated to the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals-Angell to support its mission to find loving families for abandoned and mistreated pets.

Thank you to everyone who attended our opening reception (Sept. 19) and CONGRATS TO ALL of the artists displaying work!

Prizes were awarded for the following categories

 

Honorable Mentions

 

Exhibiting artists include many established local and regional talents and several newcomers
Terri AckermanKen HarveyIris Osterman
Eric AlmquistElaine HawkesDari Paquette
Neri AvrahamRichard HillRich Perry
Carol BerneyJanel HoutonSara Reilly
Nicole BernsteinJanet Clingerman HsiaoMarcia Schloss
Iris ChandlerKu-chan HsiaoTony Schwartz
Christine ChangKay HudginsRuth Segaloff
Lisa CohentSOfi InbarMarian Stanton
Warren CroceKwan Kew LaiLee Strasburger
Jennifer DubostWei LiDick Stroud
Norma DumontMiranda LoudDiana Tsomides
John DykesArch MacInnesGeoff Wadsworth
Eleanor ElkinCaitlyn MarshNadine Wallack
Irene FairleyJamie MaxfieldBev White
Cara FitzGibbonCarolyn MaySharon Whitman
Ottavio ForteJudy LoveJohn Williams
Terry GipsFrances McCormickTimothy Wilson
Joan GlinertAnastasia O’MelvenyJohn Wood
Virginia GreenblattJoan Onofrey
 More Artwork in the Show
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Afghan Stories: Giving Women a Voice

Photos by Paula Lerner

Seamstresses-W0605-5786M1-lr

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – 4/29/2006: Bakhtnazira (center) works and chats with the seamstresses in her workroom. Her business employs many women, some of whom are widows, who otherwise would have no means to support themselves or their families. (Photo by Paula Lerner/Aurora)

In the 23 years I have been a working photographer, women’s issues have been a recurring theme in my projects. My magazine stories have been populated with women from all walks of life: from survivors of domestic abuse to business leaders and celebrated performing artists. I have produced a body of work on a welfare mom and a book about breast cancer walks. But when I had the opportunity to document the lives of women in Afghanistan, my interest was especially piqued. Knowing Afghan women have faced some of the harshest circumstances of women anywhere in the world, I knew their stories would be some of the most compelling I could cover.

1PLerner-W0655-5294m1-lrIn February of 2005 I took the first of multiple trips to Afghanistan as a volunteer with the Business Council for Peace (www.bpeace.org). Bpeace is a non-profit organization that works to help women in post-conflict countries establish and grow self-sustaining businesses. The women whose stories I documented for Bpeace profoundly moved me: here were women who had survived unimaginable hardships and decades of war, and yet they had the optimism and bravery to help rebuild their country by building their own fledgling businesses. Last year I began gathering audio in addition to taking still images, and recording the women telling their stories in their own voices. This work, “The Women of Kabul,” was published as a multimedia feature on the Washington Post web site in November of 2006. Many news outlets cover Afghanistan’s ongoing insurgency and the misery of war, but few are interested in telling how people are rebuilding their lives in war’s aftermath. I give the washingtonpost.com a great deal of credit for having the courage to be one of a handful of venues in the latter category.

3PLerner-W0655-6379m1-lrThrough my work with Bpeace I came to know Rangina Hamidi, an Afghan-American woman who lives and works in Kandahar, the former Taliban capital city that is still a Taliban stronghold. Her program empowers women by giving them paid employment producing unique Kandahari embroidery, something they can do at home and without breaking cultural norms. Through her work she has come to know well and be trusted by these women. She and I have embarked on a long-term project to tell these women’s stories via a book, print pieces and multimedia features, which are now in progress. By collaborating with Rangina I am in the fortunate position of having access to women who are largely invisible in their own culture, and have the privilege of bringing their stories to the West where they are all but unknown.

2PLerner-W0605-2544M1-lrThe photographs in this exhibition are selected from the above projects, and show the daily life behind the headlines in Afghanistan. As a photojournalist and storyteller I try to convey these stories with integrity and honesty, and in the process I also hope to make art. The images in this collection are those that I feel have come the closest to succeeding at this.

For more information, see Paula Lerner’s website at www.lernerphoto.com.

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The Veil

Rania Matar

“The Veil: Modesty, Fashion, Religious Devotion or Political Statement?” a discussion of the show by Rania Matar…

Rene Matar
Rene Matar

The veil has many meanings and symbols in the Middle East. While often perceived in the West as a symbol of female oppression and submission to male authority, it takes on a very different meaning in the Arab world. In this photo essay, I will focus on the spread of the veil amongst women in Lebanon and the different interpretations the veil takes on.

Lebanon is a small Middle Eastern country wedged between the West and the Muslim world, where Christians and Muslims have lived together for centuries, where one would witness a blend of the West and the Arab world, of Christianity and Islam, in addition to ostentatious display of wealth and extreme poverty. After fifteen years of a brutal civil war that ended with no clear winner and no real solution, life in Lebanon goes on in a surreal way with a mosaic of co-existing religions.

A Passage from the Koran
A Passage from the Koran
The Muslim population is growing larger due to a higher birth rate. It is highly politicized and seething with anger at the news coming from Iraq and Israel/Palestine. In addition, since September 11, it feels threatened in a world looking at any Islamic piety with suspicion, with a resulting retreat into more religious consciousness. While many Muslims, especially the upper class, look westward in their dress and lifestyle, and are not antagonistic to the Christian presence, many feel the need of belonging to the larger Muslim community. The female veil which was almost non-existent a decade ago in Lebanon is making a comeback, even among the younger generation, and is taking on different symbols ranging from religious devotion, to self-assertion vis-à-vis the West, to a new item of fashion, all leading to the increased social pressure of wearing it among Muslim women of all ages.

Broken Mirror
Broken Mirror
While wearing the veil among Muslim women is becoming more common in Lebanon, the different ways of wearing it is often misunderstood by the West. Women who are wearing the veil are mostly doing it by choice, even though their motives and the extent to which they are covered vary. Older traditional Muslim women wear the headscarf because of religious devotion and modesty. They only take it off inside the home and only in the presence of other women or close male relatives. Upper class Muslim women who often dress in a western style now wear the headscarf as an instrument of fashion and an added accessory, whereby the scarf has to match the clothes, the sunglasses and the handbag. Some women wear it as a political statement of resistance to the West and a symbol of solidarity with Muslim countries at odds with the West. Pubescent girls are now succumbing to social expectations and are wearing the veil by choice as a symbol of growing up. Some would spend hours fixing their headscarf in front of the mirror. They wear it layered, braided or plain but always color coordinated with their clothes.

Hanging Laundry
Hanging Laundry
What makes this project interesting to me is that it provides a microcosm of what is going on in the world today in terms of the growing differences but at the same time the existing inter-dependencies between the West and the Arab world, or Christianity and Islam. Lebanon is a westernized country, home to a growing Muslim society but also to a very western Christian population, hence providing different interpretations of female fashion, and a juxtaposition of the veil with a very western dress code and life style. The veil as a result takes on different meanings and can be seen worn in very different ways ranging from a chador to a fashionable headscarf. It is not uncommon in Beirut to see veiled women walking next to women in mini skirts or tank tops, or under posters of beautiful supermodels, eating at McDonalds or having coffee at Starbucks.”

More info about Rania Matar can be found at www.raniamatar.com.

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New Work: Loutrell, Revett, Wunsch

Lara Loutrell, Dawn Revett, A. David Wunsch

Lara Loutrel
Etching by Lara Loutrel
Etching by Lara Loutrel

Abstractions of a mental state. The logic of factory-grey & desolation — a girl & her printing press, isolation. The mechanized clicking of thinking — these are objects & landscapes that exist, but no one has seen them. My logic — logic in general — crumbles & twists, formulates itself in black etching ink. My etchings are the outcome of my perception of existence — bleak & strange.

The prints are Abstractions of imagined landscapes, sometimes objects or cities, conveying some sort of resonance, or connection. They are usually bleak & lonely, yet heroic. I don’t consider my work to fall under one style. The look of the prints from 2002 to the present is very much a product of, & ongoing dialogue with, the techniques that I use. These arose from the technical limitations of creating a studio with non-traditional & non toxic methods. I am constantly experimenting & discovering new ways to put ink on paper.”

More information on this artist can be found at www.laraloutrel.com.

Dawn Revett

Cargo. Weighty, anonymous, masses of consumable goods. A voluminous presence that fails to fill the absence in which it is placed.

Shipping lanes. Highways. Storage yards. Gateways through which material goods in their anonymous phase leave or enter our lives; portals through space and time for Things. Solidity. Gravity. “Needs”.

Painting by Dawn Revett
Painting by Dawn Revett

I see in these portals stillborn opportunities. I see what was here, before the cargo and the promises. I see a mirage of material goods preening with seductive poise. I see what cargo cannot replace. I see the potential for change.

These sites speak to me of how anonymous consumption fragments our society within itself and divides us from the environment. Stained wood reveals an absence of nature that this ingestion of goods creates. To me it is an absence that screams. Yet these goods pass as unbranded cargo through quiet ports, sleepy highways, and placid storage fields. These places stand as silent memorials to what we have sacrificed in order to achieve the cargo we so fanatically pursue. For me these are peaceful places. Like cemeteries, or morgues. Tranquil, beautiful, and tragic.

I paint the images because for me paint best conveys the beauty that I feel in the anxious desolation of these locations. With paint I can better recreate the subtle fusion of fascination and pain that I experience when standing there. I can freeze the highway’s silent roar, and touch the solitude.”

More information on this artist can be found at www.dawnrevett.com.

David Wunsch
Photograph by A. David Wunsch
Photograph by A. David Wunsch

The work that I am showing here is the product of the 40 year period 1966-2006. I have always been a photographer in black and white, and I have primarily used a view camera with which I expose 4 by 5 inch sheet film. I have printed the more recent images digitally, after scanning the negatives into my computer, while photographs that precede 2004 I have printed in my darkroom.

My favorite places to work are mill towns, the edges of cities, railroad yards, and occasionally the downtown portions of cities early in the morning when the streets are clear. I sometimes photograph pieces of machinery, and I feel that many of my photographs reflect interests I have in mathematics and engineering.”

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Summer’s Waning & Botanical Regenerations

Meg Birnbaum

So High
So High

Meg Birnbaum has won a wide range of awards for her photographs. Works have been shown at The Somerville Museum, Willoughby & Baltic Gallery, The Newton Free Library, Holyoke Center at Harvard University and included in the fall 2005 issue of The Harvard Review. Birnbaum was the first place winner of a national juried all-media show at Fitton Center for Creative Arts, Hamilton OH. All of the photographs appearing in the Belmont Gallery show were hand printed using a traditional wet darkroom. Images of Birnbaum’s work can be found here.

This show at the Belmont Gallery incorporates two different bodies of work. Summer’s Waning is the newest series. Says Birnbaum: “In these photographs I hope to revive summer memories, the mysteries, the magic and wonder. July holds such promise and possibility but August brings the growing anxiety of summer half over, of goodbyes and endings. August is a state of mind warmly intertwined with nature’s essential elements.”

What Remains
What Remains

Of the other series Botanical Regenerations, Birnbaum says “It is about the biological process – a curious beauty won by stamina, resiliency and endurance in the service of a reproductive imperative. By removing these objects from their natural environments and presenting them center stage, I hope to grant even the most humble of subjects the quiet grandure it deserves. The scale of the prints provides the viewer a larger-than life intimate view of these commonly overlooked natural objects.”

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A Bee’s View

Jane Wentzell

Hydrangea Tea
Hydrangea Tea

The sun is the primary architect of my images: plants will not bloom without sun, and in my photographs the sun reveals the forms of the flowers. Their geometric curves and planes are defined as their surfaces bear witness to the strength of the summer sun. Presenting these flowers in natural light is a testament to their origins.

So are china and glass formed by high heat, and only light coming from the extreme temperature of the sun can reveal their true colors and the reflection and sparkle that make them gorgeous to see.

These fragile artifacts – both the flowers and the antique vases – gain a reprieve from decay, being captured on film together, in their combined opulence. If flowers were not ephemeral, there would be no point to my pictures, which are a means to express admiration for their ineffable beauty, postponing inevitable loss.

Hydrangeas, peonies, roses, lilies, all carry a generative secret and this is their human aspect, rendered in experimental compositions of stability and optimism, just as all living-dying things of the earth are together under the sun.”

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