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| Current Exhibitions |
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Tool Aesthetics: Selections from the Permanent Col |
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Exhibition |
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Apr 04, 2008 - Jun 01, 2008
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Presented in conjunction with "Reimagining the Distaff Toolkit" this show will look at the tool collection of the Bennington Museum in an art historical manner. |
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Reimagining The Distaff Toolkit |
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Exhibition |
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Apr 04, 2008 - Jun 01, 2008
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"Reimagining the Distaff Toolkit" is an exhibition of contemporary art, each of which has, at its visible core, a tool that was important for women's domestic labor in the past (the 18th century through World War II). The old tool becomes the fulcrum for a work of art. Each work and the exhibit as a whole have the power to speak to viewers independently,
Artists are placing objects such as a dressmaker’s figure, diapers, graters, grinders, needles, pins, pots, pans, baskets, garden-seed-packets, rakes, hoes, dress patterns, dish-rags, rolling pins, brooms, buckets, darning eggs, knives, rug-beaters, and other tools at the center of their work. One piece will have an early 19th century distaff at its visible core.
Part of the point of this exhibition project is to explore the idea of "seeing as context." As I imagine the process here, I look at a tool that facilitated very hard and repetitive labor and that evokes women's degradation as domestic drudges. I look again, through my early 21st century eyes, at a moment when "old tools" have become commodified and expensive, and I see costly beauty.
Reimagining the distaff toolkit for the purposes of this exhibition might include (overlapping) gestures in any of the following directions – or other directions – history / memory / gender / labor / material culture / household objects / family relations / power and powerlessness / drudgery / craft and beauty.
Reimagining the Distaff Toolkit puts utility in conversation with art, the past in conversation with the present. |
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Local Artist Program: Leslie Parke |
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Local Artist Gallery |
May 10, 2008 - Jun 21, 2008
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Artist Statement:
Ever since I returned from my stay as an artist-in-residence at the Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, France, I have been on a relentless pursuit of painting light effects: light reflections, transparencies, translucencies, glitter, sparkle, shimmer. How light affects natural surfaces, such as flowers, shells and water; and artificial surfaces, such as patent leather, foil, Mylar, transparent ribbons, glass, crystal, and silver. For a while the more elusive and impossible the image was to paint the more it interested me.
Once I became accustomed to looking at the world through this filter it affected how I saw everything. An ideal landscape for me became one where one could see through water to what was underneath; at the same time see the surface of the water because of the light reflections on that water, and then the changes to the surface from shadows being cast on the water. My landscapes, while slavishly depicting these effects, compositionally became more abstract, often having an all-over composition.
In these paintings I like to think of my subject matter as being “nothing”. It is the “space between”, what you look at when you are not looking at anything; it is the air not the tree; the light not the landscape; the background not the subject A painting succeeds for me when it seems as though the light is emanating from the canvas. |
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