Gallery RAG - 2023 Season

Tracy Hayes

Obliteration: Asserting Pleasure

Month of July

In conversation with artists; Deborah Read (July 6th), Jay Merrill (July 13) and Kelsey Patanaude (July 20th)

The scrolls are personal. Initially, unlimited access to paper and indulging in a work preference of drawing in intimate settings morphed into an interest in the fickle nature of language and story. Considering poetry as “accepted” text-based subversion to dominant social structures which set rules/norms, I sought clues of what was unsettling, destabilizing and... potentially threatening to mature the syntax within personal visual language. The nature of obscuring while proceeding into the next section led to imagining that this exploration of freedom might be a version of a book, though not literally.

How "obliteration” might manifest visually is a recent concern. Operating from the initial framework of: “is it everything? Or… nothing?” and using limited palette water based media, I work on a length of paper; firstly, as an exploration of dark media, then I reverse and rework in light, going back and forth. Timed photos sequence into stop motion video. The working process becomes a performance, the resultant video potentially the work and the actual 2d object assumes less importance.

IN CONVERSATION WITH DEBORAH READ

Thursday July 6th Deborah Read welcomes July artist Tracy Hayes into Gallery RAG, located in Gloucester’s Rocky Neck Artist Colony. Hayes and Read will talk about wordless knowledge while surrounded by Read’s ‘Power Objects’ on this final day of her solo show. Hayes will begin installing her Obliteration Scrolls, with an informal artist talk and reception from 5-7pm to appreciate the reciprocity between Read’s Objects and Hayes’ Scrolls. We welcome all to this closing event as Read hands off the space to Hayes, in the spirit that all endings signal new beginnings …

IN CONVERSATION WITH JAY MERRILL

Thursday July 13th from 5-7pm Tracy ad artist Jay Merrill will be talking about their respective practices and how they spent their day working on dock rubbings in the shipyard down the street. "Wood planks, as rooted in nature and then transformed, shaping, then arranged and secured in sequential functional order, have the potential to absorb and reflect both the the utilitarian functions of load-bearing, footpath and footprint and the ongoing exposure of the natural world. Site seems optimal to pick up on resonances to jay's ideas of connections and patterns within nature, and pathways that narrow the distance between the sentient and insentient.

IN CONVERSATION WITH KELSY PATNAUDE

Thursday July 20th 5-7pm visual artist guest Kelsy Patnaude will attend a collaborative installation with Tracy. Kelsy and Tracy will consider resonances within their works: shared interests in poetry, mark-making that appears as if linked to internal somatic rhythms and a material working preference of unstretched paper and canvas.

Marianna Paz and Deborah Read

"The RED THREAD"

August 3, 2023

Songyun asked, "Why can't the clear-eyed Bodhisattva sever the red thread?" Zen Koan

The red thread is all about desire, passion, the erotic; the connections that are made through having an embodied form, the power of following one's passions, pleasures, and joys. It is a type of entanglement with self and other. Artist Mariana Paz and Deborah Read collaborate on a performative, interactive installation that pulls all who enter the space into a rich entanglement with each other.

Deborah Read

"Endarkenment"

August 7, 2023

"The objects that I create emerge from my dialogue with darkness and the unknown. Working with what you don't know, or cna't conceive of, is in opposition to what might be called an enlightenment project. The Zen teacher, Joan Southerland, uses the term "endarkenment" for this type of work. I am often attracted to old and discarded materials; saws, old wooden forms, tools, rusty metal bits and discarded textiles. I think of these objects as ancestors or guides n the making process. I then inscribe words, repetitive marks, obsessive layering of gestures, sewn patches, until the object transforms itself. I think of this process as activating the object, creating a type of talisman or object of power.

Amanda Chianelli

"Mother: Process & Processing"

August 17, 2023

Immersive installation that delves into the unique challenges and rich opportunities that being a mother and an artist provides.

Carolyn Sirois

August 24, 2023

"REMAINDERS & REMINDERS"

Carolyn Sirois discuses her art practice, work informed by an aesthetics of ruins that considers sediments of time and sediments of thinking. She asks what we hold onto amidst the fragments and complexities of contemporary life and our collective history.

Gordon Massman

"The Wild Unborn"

Massman's large scale, abstract paintins are a riot of color, movement and energy. They appear to vibrate off the wall and ceiling. The poet as well as a painter, Massman's thickly layered oil paintings seem to provide the visual link to the inner expression and workings of the poet. Massman uses his paintings as a way to work with the unconscious and often troubling terrain of the mind.

August 30th, 2023

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