Island curator Tanya Augoustinos has put together another vibrant group show at Featherstone Center for the Arts in Oak Bluffs, with more than two dozen artists —working in paint, photography, ceramics, collage and other media — sharing their takes on her exhibition theme: The Fall.
It’s a title that encompasses not only the current season but other kinds of falls as well, from literal to allegorical, Ms. Augoustinos told the Gazette during a walk through the gallery Wednesday afternoon.
Painter Carol Brown Goldberg, for instance, suffered a fall in 2020 that injured her wrist, leaving her unable to wield a brush for the first time in some 40 years. Undeterred, Ms. Brown Goldberg began squeezing pigments directly from their tubes, creating a series of colorful works in stackable wooden frames. There are three in the Featherstone show.
“I wish I had 20 more. I’d make a tower,” Ms. Augoustinos said. “They’re objects, as well as wall pieces.”
Ceramic sculptor Heather Sommers had a political plunge in mind when she designed her circus-like collection of porcelain figures, also available as archival photo prints, with titles like Making America Great and Drain the Swamp.
Ms. Augoustinos said she had scoured her contacts for an Island artist who might take an opposing view to Ms. Sommers’s anti-Trump satires, but had no luck finding one.
Other artists in the show weighed in on current issues including war and opiate addiction, the latter compellingly in James Langlois’s Pushing Pharma I & II.
Mr. Langlois set off his diptych of masked men in medical scrubs — each pushing a cart loaded with money and human skulls — with strings of open pill bottles from his struggle, several years ago, against a prescription opiate dependency.
Island architect Bruce MacNelly, who has several paintings in the show, likes to frame his contemporary viewpoint inside classical forms. In his City of Pain, smaller paintings of a grieving woman, frightened children and a weary man with a rifle are placed inside an architectural framework Mr. MacNelly lifted directly from a 15th century Italian painting that showed scenes from the life of St. Thomas Aquinas.
“I’ve used that armature to join together the different, very private dramas playing out in each location,” the artist wrote in a statement accompanying the piece.
Mr. MacNelly’s One (Big George) inflates the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington from dollar-bill miniature to Roy Lichtenstein-painting size, and gives the founding father a distinctly skeptical scowl.
“He’s kind of disapproving,” Ms. Augoustinos said, as she regarded the larger-than-life-size Washington.
The Featherstone show also has many moments of quiet autumn beauty, in Whitney Cleary’s hushed, crepuscular views, Michael Johnson’s Island photographs, Elizabeth Taft’s beach and pond vistas, Valerie Reese’s contemplative pastels and Leslie Baker’s oils, among other works.
Painter Marjorie Mason, well known for her Island shore scenes such as Philbin October Dunes — also part of the current show — has forayed into abstraction, with six smaller works that use her seascape palette in a new way.
Drawings by Irvin Petlin, mixed-media works by Nancy Shaw Cramer, landscapes by Marsha Winsryg and a cartoon by Paul Karasik are among other good reasons to visit the show, which is open daily from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Nov. 4.
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