Linda Leslie Brown's Entangled

November at Kingston Gallery

By: KIngston - Sep 10, 2021

 

Kingston Gallery
450 Harrison Ave, No. 43
Boston, MA 02118
617-423-4113  

The Main Gallery
Entangled
Linda Leslie Brown

The Center Gallery
Alchemy and After
Christopher Volpe

The Project Space Gallery
Smaller
Brian Littlefield

November 3 to November 28, 2021
Opening Reception November 5, 2021, 5:00 - 8:00 pm

Transmutation is the common theme in the three exhibitions for the month of November at Kingston Gallery. Grappling with time, nature, and ontological quandaries, artists utilize their studio practices to challenge life’s most basic questions. In the Main Gallery, Linda Leslie Brown’s ceramic and found object sculptures blur the lines between alien and earthly in Entangled. Her work suggests the mutation of a species through time. In the Center Gallery, Alchemy and After in Christoper Volpe’s gold leaf and liquefied coal tar paintings blend historical interpretation of materials with the acknowledgment of humanity’s negative influence on the Earth. In the Project Space Gallery, Brian Littlefield captures internal and external geographies through the purity of abstraction in Smaller, where his graphite and charcoal drawings transcend spatiality. 

The public is welcome to visit the gallery from noon to 5 pm starting November 3rd, the opening day. Public Programming will be announced closer to the opening date.

Main Gallery

Connection, community, and mutation; humanity is interwoven with all living beings. In the Main Gallery, Linda Leslie Brown’s ceramic and found object sculptures marry the natural, corporeal world with technologically mutated life forms in her solo exhibition, Entangled. Drawing upon Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” Brown notes that sexual reproduction, by providing access to greater genetic variation, ensures a broader set of genetic capabilities for survival. Symbiotic relationships and biological communities have regulated life on Earth for over a billion years. Yet the advent of the human modification of Earth’s environments has resulted in the massive ecocide of many species. Conversely, these new possibilities for connecting, responding, and adapting have led to a proliferation of genetically modified organisms and technologically mutated life forms.

The arresting works in Entangled foreshadow a plastic, provisional, and uncertain world of a transgenic nature, where organic and manufactured entities combine into something new. Her works suggest relics of possible futures and the effect of humanity’s actions on Earth’s delicate systems and biomes. Brown incorporates castoff plastic parts and other found materials with handmade ceramic forms to create objects that exude an almost living presence while technologically altered in their genetic systems. The future is sculpted with the struggle for survival, with species adapting in the post-Anthropocene era. Poignantly, Brown posits, “I imagine that such adaptations may be occurring even now: in the depths of mother ocean, among our gut bacteria, or nested in mycelium tendrils wrapped around the roots of trees.

Linda Leslie Brown’s recent sculptural work draws upon the transformative exchanges between nature, objects, and viewers' creative perceptions. Her practice involves the assemblage of objects and fragments of plastic, metal, wood, fiber, glass, rubber, and foam, which have been scavenged from the streets of Boston and other castoff sources like dumps and thrift shops. She combines these with ceramic forms she has made and fired at various temperatures, paperclay, and cast pigmented plaster.

Brown has exhibited her work regionally and nationally. Recent exhibitions include Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA, Popop Studios Gallery, Nassau, Bahamas, Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA, AMP Gallery, Provincetown, MA, Wheelock College, Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College, and Salve Regina University. She is the recipient of grants from The Artists' Resource Trust / Berkshire Taconic Foundation, School of the Museum of Fine Arts Travelling Fellowship, St. Botolph Club Foundation, and FPAC, among others. Fellowship Residencies include Monson Arts, Haystack Mountain School, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Popop Studios International Artists' Residency, Women's Studio Center, Hambidge Center for the Arts, and I-Park, among others. She is represented by Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA, and AMP Gallery, Provincetown. Brown is a Professor in the Foundation Studies and Fine Arts Programs in Art & Design at Suffolk University, Boston.

Center Gallery

Guest artist Christopher Volpe asserts that painting’s secret ambition is “to conjure the immaterial from the material, to render non-visible worlds visible.” Artists have the power to create grand realities and puncture a hole into our current realm, revealing new worlds. In his first solo exhibition at Kingston Gallery, Alchemy and After, Volpe’s series of lavishly dark paintings dissolve the boundaries between beauty and decay. Using liquified coal tar (a by-product of petroleum refinement) combined with shredded gold leaf, Volpe juxtaposes the toxic materials of industrialization with gold, a material imbued with historical and spiritual overtones. The titles of his work are borrowed from historical alchemical and esoteric texts.  The result is work that both attracts and repels, like a kind of equilibrated beauty. 

Volpe states: “But today’s “alchemy” is mostly about technology. Science is no longer linked to magic or the spiritual significance that alchemists once found in nature and the elements. The natural world has long lost its enchantment and its meaning. Modern humanity, along with the chemistry of the planet itself, is beginning to register the damage of a purely materialistic worldview addicted to profit – fatally Western and supported by the global commodification of nature and people and vastly over-benefitting a privileged few at the very top of the chain.”

Christopher Volpe is an artist, teacher, and writer in New Hampshire. He holds a graduate degree in English from the University of New Hampshire and a combined degree in literature and philosophy from Stony Brook University. Volpe last showed work in Boston with a solo show at Matter & Light Gallery titled “LOOMINGS” in 2018. In addition to maintaining his artistic practice, he teaches painting and publishes scholarly articles, catalog essays, and reviews in regional and national print and online publications. Grants and awards include the St. Botolph Club Foundation, MassMoCA/Assets for Artists, and the NH State Council on the Arts. His work can be viewed online at www.christophervolpe.com.

Kingston Project Space

Associate artist Brian Littlefield devotes his practice to multifaceted ambiguities of abstraction. In his first solo exhibition at Kingston Gallery, Smaller seeks to foster a direct approach to drawing, using straightforward materials such as charcoal and graphite. His grayscale works suggest patchwork landscapes, which are born more from nature than from mathematical abstraction. Littlefield’s improvisational work can shift between form and space by compressing internal and external locations, recurring interests, and ruminating thoughts.

Visit here for a bio of Brian Littlefield.

For more information about Kingston Gallery, visit: www.kingstongallery.com