Construction

May 04 - 27, 2023
Opening Reception / Thursday, May 04, 5–8pm

Spring Gallery Hours:
Friday–Sunday, 12–5pm

Kelly Clare
Lee Davignon
Dorian Dean
Hilary Nelson

CONSTRUCTION turns the Main Gallery Space into a constructed zone, with each artist creating site-specific installations within the gallery space. Thematically, the work explores all manner of constructions—material, linguistic, and structural—and embraces the open and potential energy of a metaphorical building in progress

CONSTRUCTION is a half-built structure, an abstract entity, a matter of syntax. As artists, we use variable materials and methods. Nothing we make is static or stable. Through language, salvage, and fluctuating systems, we create both sight and site, a lean-too of neon vision. This is the state of continuous construction we find ourselves in.

ARTIST STATEMENTS AND BIOS //

Kelly Clare is an artist and poet based in Western Massachusetts. She works in large-scale installation, video, collage, drawing, poetry, and performance. Her artwork, scholarship, and poetics question organized time, the boundaries between the digital and the material, and the environmental consequences of hidden infrastructure.

Lee Davignon is a mixed media artist working in the Cascade foothills of Washington State. Through a combination of traditional textile techniques, sculptural experiments, and material play, their work explores themes of waste, value, and craft processes. 

 Interested in the material minutia of the objects and materials we encounter in our environments, Davignon processes cast offs in material led investigations. The resulting works take the ghost forms of a once useful object, clustering together and layering their stories. Davignon’s aim with their work is to seek connection, provoke curiosity, and encourage discourse on our role as consumers within systems of commodification and waste.

Dorian Dean’s interdisciplinary works are not always what they seem, but exactly what they are. Using regular objects, text, drawing, time, and the body to create work that feels like storytelling. The archive of objects and images are arranged with ritual-like complexity and specification within spaces. 

There is tenderness for obsolete objects, with the insistence that they perform their original role but transform into propositions that are poems and a little funny at times. Straddling the old and new contexts of the objects, Dean's work embodies curiosity through process. 

Hilary Nelson’s work is built from stuff that probably used to be other stuff. Now it looks like it could be something you think you know, but you just aren’t sure. Nelson thinks about the pieces like b-roll, or like a score to a movie - you listen and all the wonder and melodrama are halfway there. They are objects, but they gain from the presence of something else; they are whole by bringing in outside noise. They hold you in the place between knowing and known. 

Nelson’s process begins with collecting discarded or used materials as a way to enter the piece. This involves compulsively sourcing scraps and leftovers from industry and day to day consumption, or recycling parts of her own work (giving each of the pieces many lives). 

This working method underscores the transitory nature of the pieces, and substantiates a desire to question her inherent role as an artist in capitalism, consumption, and waste. The work explores the paradox implicit in the idea of something being “finished”. When does “usefulness” end? Consumption is an illusion: there is only continuum.