Our second season at Gallery RAG was amazingly rich in collaboration, community, and innovation! In just three months we hosted 9 collaborative art installations at our small space on Rocky Neck, the home of one of America's oldest art colonies in Gloucester MA. Below are images and write-ups of all of the events during the summer of 2024. Enjoy!
Video Montage of Events from Summer 2024
Closing Event, August 29th 2024
The term “remix” is most associated with music production, where collaborators extend, augment, and/or re-arrange a recording artist’s original piece of music, often for the purpose of making it dance-ready for the discotheque. However “remix” also relates to literature and visual art. Novelist William Burroughs cut-up print media and rearranged words and phrases by chance, remixing the original texts to create new phrases, meanings, and stories. Likewise collage techniques remix original works into new forms, and any visual art that involves adding to or altering an existing work can be seen as a remix.
Anne Barnes’ paintings on paper in her series All the Words I Do Not Know take shape in a process of addition and reduction as she remixes each work into its final form. In her mixed media paintings, the cut-up text of deconstructed book pages is strewn like confetti, disassociated alphabets float, and collaged dictionary pages offer up randomly placed words. The result is a secret language of bold hues, gestural brushstrokes, scrapes, and incisions, creating a potent mix of word, line, texture, and color.
Nova Darkstar’s curious objects are constructed from mundane and craft materials such as brown paper, tin cans, and pipe cleaners. Taken together, the works hold space and evoke interiority through their use of line, color, and form. By highlighting inner space over outer surface and low art over high art, these material objects gently resist our materialistic culture. Following the title of a series of objects by Nova included in Re/Mix, the work seems to say, “it’s what’s inside that counts.”
For RE/MIX, Barnes and Darkstar will improvise the curation and installation of their art works on site at the gallery, mixing and remixing the component works until a compelling conversation ignites between them. RE/MIX invites the viewer to mix with the exhibit and allow the featured works to remix their thoughts, feelings, and perceptions into new and generative forms.
RE/MIX also features a performance on August 29th at 6 PM by Nova Darkstar and their Invisible Band, an imaginative collaborative of queer and trans musicians that remixes musical genres into delicious new brews.
Nova Darkstar and Their Invisible Band performing live at the gallery
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora.
"I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities."
— Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I, lines 1–2.
•••
Change, as with the seasons and perhaps most glaringly obvious in August, can be
quite welcome.
Change is integral to the creative process– when ink spreads, forms emerge. This
morphogenesis is effected by mediated intentionality, a dance of physical laws and
chance. The process changes the creator as well: in making art, an artist is made.
Change is inevitable— no one can set foot in the same river twice. Even when a work is
complete, seemingly fixed, the context in which it is experienced continues to change,
imbuing it with new meaning that helps keep it alive and relevant.
•••
The apparent duality of poetry and painting is actually a secret unity: writers are artists
and artists are writers. Mara Jebsen is a writer (a poet, primarily) and an artist;
Christopher Varmus is a writer and an artist (a painter, primarily). In creative and
romantic partnership for the last decade and married for the last three years, together
they comprise Superbrain.
To find out just what exactly that means, join them at Gallery RAG (Rocky Neck,
Gloucester, MA) as part of Culture Splash on Thursday, August 22, 2024 at 6pm for
a poetry performance by Mara in conversation with Christopher’s multimedia paintings,
ceramic works, and playful sculptural installations, all of which will be on view through
Saturday, August 24.
Sharing Space An exhibition, a performance, a collaboration and a nascent collective. Creating spaces of generosity are like minded goals of both Gallery RAG and Art Lab Everett.* Germinating in Everett, MA and visiting Gallery RAG. Sharing Space brings together the work of sculptor Martha Chason-Sokol, performance artist Mariana Paz and the youth of Listening Works**. Chason-Sokol’s cyborgian sculptures embody fragmented and resilient figures of survival. During Culture Splash, Paz and the youth of Listening Works, will perform with and amongst the sculptures. We invite viewers to participate in the performance. *Arts for Everett, Inc., also known as Art Lab Everett is an artist-run nonprofit and community art space dedicated to making creative experiences available to everyone. **Listening Works, a project funded by Art + Everywhere, is a collaboration between Paz and Chason-Sokol. Working with eight young people, they are creating a public art project that gives voice to their concerns and creates an opportunity through performance to bring these concerns to the community.
Why the red chair?
Why a show about rags?
It was natural for us to think about rags for our show, after all, the Gallery’s name is Gallery R.A.G and stands for “radical act of generosity.” Rags are very generous in their own way. They silently clean up our unwanted human messes: blood, tears, spills, and grime. Without complaint they absorb the unwanted, offending material into their bodies and help transform a dirty space into something clean and clear. I like to think of them as friends, doing the invisible work that goes on behind the drama of everyday life in the human world. It is a type of unconditional love, a type of sharing of our messy affairs. This invisible mending, cleaning, and care is traditionally the abode of women, and the red chair conjures up images of a sunlit filled kitchen where two women sit down after a long day of cleaning and caretaking to enjoy a cup of tea together and share stories. The rags, neatly draped over the red chair, are also enjoying a moment of comradery and rest, luxuriating together after a hard day’s work. Maybe, when we notice it, what is going on behind everything is a great net of care and love, silently holding us all together.
Come join us on Thursday August 1, 2024 from 4-7pm to share in some tea, wine and nibblies, trade stories, laugh and just hang out together.
Julie Hamel, Elizabeth Lindy, Booke Toczylowski, Susan Wolf
"CARE"
JULY 18, 2024
Attending to the utility of the discarded and overlooked, and the grounding potential within care rituals.
Heather Baumbach, Liz Rennie, Deborah Read
"ASCEND"
JULY 11, 2024
ASCEND is the 3rd installation of a traveling show conceived by Lesley MFA peers @heatherbaumbachart @elizabeth.rennie.art . This series invites guest artists to participate in an evolving dialogue between Liz & Heather, each subsequent seeking to elevate interwoven conversations and examine perception and reality, circling the shared thematic interests of: the everyday, otherness, and exposure. In this installation, fellow artist, Deborah Read, has been asked to enter the dialogue and space with a shared interest in the power of the erotic and living in an embodied form.
