BRATTLEBORO — Five new exhibits will open at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) on Saturday, Oct. 22, including solo exhibits by Renate Aller, Madge Evers, Judith Klausner, Alison Moritsugu, and a group exhibition curated by Michael Jevon Demps.
“The Space Between Memory and Expectation” is an immersive, site-specific installation by Aller of large-format landscape photographs of mountains, glaciers, trees, the ocean, and other natural landscapes, complemented by an assemblage of lichen-covered rocks from the West Brattleboro home of artists Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason. Fittingly, the installation will occupy the museum's Wolf Kahn & Emily Mason Gallery.
For “The New Herbarium,” Madge Evers uses mushroom spores and plant matter as her artistic media.
“For traditional herbaria, botanical specimens are pressed and arranged on paper,” Evers explained. “My technique departs from tradition when I place a foraged mushroom, gill-side down, on top of plants, which then serve as stencils. After the billions of spores contained in the gills or pores of the mushroom are released, they fall and mark the paper.”
In the exhibit “(de)composed,” Judith Klausner presents versions of items commonly thought of as ruined or spoiled, working primarily with a type of clay often regarded as a children's craft product.
“The work was made with a self-imposed rule that every element had to be created,” Klausner noted. “Every rock, popsicle stick, and sweaty slice of cheese is painstakingly sculpted and detailed by hand.”
The work reflects Klausner's journey to reframe her life as a person with disabilities. “I spent a decade only seeing the ways my life hadn't turned out how I had expected, and seeing those discrepancies as failures,” Klausner writes in a statement accompanying the exhibit. “It has only been by readjusting my lens that I have learned to appreciate the life I do have.”
In “Moons and Internment Stones,” Alison Moritsugu uses watercolor paintings of rocks gathered by her grandfather while he was imprisoned at the Santa Fe Internment Camp during World War II, paired with oil paintings of the moon, which the artist explained are based on “sketches and color notes taken at random times in my life when the moon has evoked a poignant beauty, inspired curiosity, or provided solace.”
The group exhibition features works by Mariel Capanna, Oscar Rene Cornejo, Cheeny Celebrado-Royer, Vessna Scheff, Gerald Euhon Sheffield II, and Lachell Workman. Guest curator Demps notes in a statement that he selected works that address themes of “community, memory, dissonance, displacement, intimacy, and loss.
“With environmental collapse, sociopolitical upheaval, and the effects of global health crises ever-present in our daily life, what opportunities do we create to slow down, feel, reflect, reimagine, and recuperate together?” Demps writes. “This exhibition is motivated by that question, with the understanding that one constant of the human experience is change.”
BMAC will present numerous in-person and virtual events while the new exhibits are on view, including conversations with Demps and the six artists featured in the group exhibition (Nov. 3), Aller and Arezoo Moseni (Dec. 3), Klausner (Dec. 9), Aller and Makeda Djata Best (Jan. 13), and Moritsugu (Feb. 2). Evers will lead a mushroom journaling workshop (Oct. 29), and Klausner will offer a workshop on using needle-felted patches to repair moth holes in sweaters (Dec. 10).
Southern Vermont-based performance artist Megan Buchanan and collaborators will present a series of public work sessions and two performances (Jan. 27 and 28) of Regenerations: Reckoning with Radioactivity, an interdisciplinary project that explores the issue of spent radioactive fuel and draws inspiration from “The Space Between Memory and Expectation.”
The new exhibits will be on view from Oct. 22, 2022, through Feb. 12, 2023, with the exception of Klausner's exhibit, which will remain on view through March 4.
An opening celebration and brunch with many of the exhibiting artists and curators will take place on Saturday, October 22, at 11 a.m. Admission is free, and all are welcome. Complimentary coffee and tea from The Works and baked goods from Fire Arts Café will be served. Whetstone Beer Co. will host a cash bar with a selection of beers, mimosas, and mocktails. Jazz guitarist Draa Hobbs will perform in the galleries.
For a complete schedule of in-person, virtual, and hybrid events, visit brattleboromuseum.org.