Showing posts with label Mary Spencer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mary Spencer. Show all posts

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Mary Spencer and Sara Fine-Wilson Gaze and Extension


October 2 – November 2
Reception October18, 5 – 7 PM 

Spencer’s drawings investigate gaze as an extension of the heart and a porthole to the past; Fine-Wilson’s sculptures explore visual history and expand a sense of reach.

Sara Fine-Wilson, From the Core,
mixed media Sculpture
Sara Fine-Wilson’s current body of work explores the idea and process of breaking things down and rebuilding them multiple times, as way to create history in visual form. Evidence of where things may have been connected through smudges, smears and stains indicate the passing of time. Material like wax, plaster, epoxy and construction adhesive are raw, oozy, chalky and refer to what lies under the surface of constructed forms. Part of the process of making this work was to crack, drop, and deconstruct various elements and use the resulting detritus as raw material which the artist then reassembled, combining materials in a visual and directional flow.  In this work she is particularly interested in sculpturally mapping time and creating a sense of reach.

Mary Spencer, Jack Singing in the Wind,
charcoal on paper
Mary Spencer’s drawings provide what the glance of an eye cannot….a porthole into the past, a means of more fully understanding the present, and an inspiration for meditations, fantasies. Drawing conveys an emotional quality, a feel beyond the capture of a camera lens; the hand charges an image with energy, beauty or ugliness. The human gaze is the extension of the heart and mind. The face can gape, glare, and gloat. Emotions filter through a face. For this series Spencer has chosen to limit her subject to eye-engaging men from various occupations, as a way to have a conversation with them. What are they silently saying?


About the Artists
Sara Fine-Wilson is an artist and teacher who works primarily in sculpture and also in photography and painting. She earned a  BFA fromThe Maryland Institute college of Art with a Major in Ceramics, a Master of Science in Art Education from Massachusetts College of Art and a MFA in Ceramics at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia.PA.  She was a resident artist at The Worcester Center for Crafts. She Her work has been shown at The Concord Art Association, Fitchburg Art Museum, Danforth Museum of Art, Gallery 540 at Urban Outfitters World Headquarters. She is an associate member of the Fountain Street Fine Art Gallery in Framingham Ma where her work is represented regularly. She currently teaches Ceramics and painting. She works from her studio in Millbury, Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband Bruce and her dog Arlo.

A Natick, Massachusetts resident, Mary Spencer received her BS from Nazareth College of Rochester, New York and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. She taught at Sheridan College of Applied Arts and Technology in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. Spencer has received an ART Grant, a Natick Cultural Council Grant, and a Massachusetts Artists Fellowship in Drawing, the Blanche E. Coleman Award and Fellowships to Yaddo, The Millay Colony for the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  Her work has been shown throughout New England, New York, the Mid-West, Cuba and South Africa. Her work is in the collections of the Boston Athenaeum, the Decordova Museum, the Boston Public Library, and numerous corporate and private collections.



Saturday, March 2, 2013

Artist Mary Spencer talks about Magritte


This is the second in a series of occasional blog posts, where we've asked a member artist to talk briefly about an artist who's profoundly influenced their work

Magritte has entranced me for much of my life. I first saw his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, when I attended the Art Students League during a summer college break.

Rene Magritte, Le Double Secret,  1927; Musee National d’art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
This painting, Le Double Secret, seen much later at the Pompidou Museum in Paris is an example of what I love. There are two female images, a wooden ‘balcony’ edge and the sea/sky behind them. The primary female face has split open to reveal a vocal chord of bells, the shifted cover face is to the left. Somehow secret music has cracked open a twin, a double. It is a very mysterious, haunting, edge oriented painting of inner space and facades.

Since I have a twin, this resonates! We have a secret: we present it differently. We are both very introspective lovers of the sea and sky. Life’s horizon always shifts to produce far off sounds.                 

-Mary Spencer

and now, a bit about Mary....

Mary Spencer, Kimberley Woman,
mixed media on panel.
Mary Spencer's recent series of paintings combine mixed media with oils on panel, bringing together fragments from cave drawing, news photos, architectural views, landscapes, folding the elements over themselves and one another to achieve intriguing and enigmatic visions, a unified world of disparate parts. Prehistoric cave drawings traced in dark winding lines untainted by steel edge or digital concept blend into stone mountains or fragments left by wind, water, fire. Her paintings refernece Bernard Rudofsky’s The Prodigious Builders. All life is a building contest that  can astonish and remain. MORE info...