It has been an exciting spring. Note events on 5/27, 6/3, 6/4 & 6/5
On View only through 6/6 at Boston Sculptors Gallery:
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Distilling Essence of Stone, 2021, 10’ x 7’ x 14,’. mixed media. Photo by Brian Wilson.
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Featured Guest Artist Wen-hao Tien and Andy Moerlein discuss their fascination with the collection and display of stones and how contemporary artists engage ancient traditions to create work that addresses today's world.
Wen-hao Tien is a visual artist, speaker, and educator. Her studio practice focuses on language and translation, and explores culture and identity through a cross-cultural lens.
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Special event:
Interpretive Musical Compositions
(ongoing during gallery hours)
In a unique collaboration between Boston Sculptors Gallery artist Andy Moerlein and Berklee College of Music faculty Joo Park PhD, student music compositions will be paired with sculptures by Mr. Moerlein and be played in accompaniment with the exhibition.
Dr. Park proposed that her students study Moerlein’s art and write a composition that suited a particular piece. These original compositions can be privately enjoyed in the gallery. Park noted: “Creating our musical interpretations around the imagery in Andy Moerlein’s artworks has been an inspiring and profound experience for all of us.”
The Myth Makers have been WORKING AGAIN! Follow us to the Alaska Botanic Garden for a two week artists residency. We are producing two monumental new works from native Anchorage saplings.
For the Atlanta Botanic Garden in Gainesville Georgia, The Myth Makers: Donna Dodson & Andy Moerlein created a new sculpture, Flannery’s Peacock, and loaned a pair of existing cardinals, “Love Long Last” for the Myth Maker’s debut in Georgia.
The Phoenix Festival was commissioned by the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge for A New View Camden.
The Caterpillar Crawl and the Butterfly Frolic were commissioned by Tower Hill Botanic Garden's summer sculpture event, Wild Hideaways: Designed for Adventure (see invitation above to meet and greet!)ART REVIEW
Artists call upon the ancients at Boston Sculptors Gallery
Donna Dodson and Andy Moerlein’s sculptures kindle an ancient reverence for nature. Dodson’s work echoes the sacred totems of societies attuned to the earth’s cycles, threats, and gifts. Moerlein approaches the sublime through sticks and stones. The artists, who are married, collaborate on public art projects as the Myth Makers. They also work individually, and now each has a show at Boston Sculptors Gallery.
The four wooden icons in Dodson’s “Amazons Among Us” nod to Albrecht Dürer’s engraving “The Four Horsemen” from “The Apocalypse” series. She bases these female figures on mythological women warriors in Africa, India, ancient Greece and Rome, and on her own great-aunt Alice, a soldier in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II. They have the heads of beasts and the bodies of sturdy women, inscribed with tattoos with mythic meaning.
Unlike Dürer’s threatening quartet, who hurtle toward societal destruction, these figures are rock steady and proud. They hold the space for work about women warriors by other artists Dodson has invited. It’s like a chapel dedicated to ferocious protection and love.
Moerlein also welcomes other artists into dialogue with the works in his show — poems, art, and bonsai that reflect his questions about how to partner with the earth. His pieces, large and small, say so much on their own.
He was inspired by the ancient Chinese practice of placing a stone on a pedestal for contemplation. In addition to rocky shapes he fashions himself, he showcases wood, calling to mind the strict yet wild formality of a bonsai garden. In “Elegy for the Earth” a stone form painted audacious peach flies cloudlike above a trio of blue-painted branches that rise and arc as if wind-whipped.
Moerlein sets a gorgeous chunk of spalted rock maple on a painted plywood base, creating tension in “Seeking Vein — Finding Heart.” Deliciously twisty and rutted, both read like mountain landscapes. The maple is natural and unpainted; the plywood is engineered and covered in red, green, and yellow. Yet one mirrors the other. As all Moerlein’s works do, it reminds viewers that we are one with and reflect the natural world. Whether we like it or not.
DONNA DODSON: AMAZONS AMONG US
ANDY MOERLEIN: WOOD STONE POEM
At Boston Sculptors Gallery, 486 Harrison Ave., through June 6. 617-482-7781, www.
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