WORCESTERMAGAZINE.COM | MARCH 18-19, 2021 | 5
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ArtsWorcester, museum offer ‘Inside Voices’ Richard Duckett Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK
As ArtsWorcester opens a new exhibition, “Inside Voices,” on March 18, the small but influential and popular nonprofit arts organization with galleries at 44 Portland St. has been quietly reopened for visits by the public since Feb. 4. Whether viewed in-person or online, “inside Voices” is “the 9th reiteration of our terrific partnership with the Fitchburg Art Museum, and a really vibrant and competitive members’ show,” said ArtsWorcester executive director Juliet Feibel. For this year’s “Call and Response” with ArtsWorcester and the Fitchburg Arts Museum, one hundred ArtsWorcester artists are exhibiting work in a wide range of media in response to a loan of 10 works from FAM’s permanent collection. In turn, the Fitchburg Art Museum’s curatorial staff will select 10 works from “Inside Voices” to be exhibited at FAM with the selected works from the museum’s collection. ArtsWorcester member artists were asked to consider a wide range of interiors, including domestic environments, psychological subjectivity, bodies, architecture and sculptural containment for “Call and Response.” “We invite you to turn inward and explore these interior spaces for their potential energy and revelatory power,” artists were told. Artists had to respond not only to the theme, but directly to one (or more) of 10 artworks on loan from the Fitchburg museum. These vary in form and style and include Will Barnet’s lithograph “The Reader” depicting a young woman on a bed reading a book with a black cat beside her; Fritz Gerliger’s black and white photograph of the interiors of a stack of pipes looking like telescopes, titled “Steel Pipes”; an Abelam artist’s “Mask”; and Irving R. Wiles’ oil on canvas “Reverie” from 1900 showing an elegantly dressed young woman apparently taking a nap in a chair.
Nastassia Hunt, “Pillow for Two,” oil on canvas, 14” x 11” ARTSWORCESTER
The 100 ArtsWorcester artists who submitted work “was about a quarter less than what we normally see for this collaboration, but we expected that, given that the artists were asked to engage specifically with the loaned works from FAM, instead of their general theme. It was a greater challenge,” Feibel said. It was also art created in a pandemic. Was there one particular FAM work that seemed to inspire artists or any sort of emerging common theme? “Every work in the loan had multiple artists cite it as their influence. There simply wasn’t a single work, or even three, that commanded the most attention, which tells us there was something for everyone, and that our colleague at FAM, Marjorie Rawle, made wonderful choices with her selection,” Feibel said. “As the works came in for installation, some commonalities made themselves clear,” Feibel said. “The prevalence of windows in the artwork was the first thing we noted, which makes perfect sense, really. What is more inside/
outside than a window? There are many bodies and faces in the exhibition, much more figurative work and more nudity than we normally see. Tim Johnson, who installed the exhibition, describes it as ‘moody,’ and I think that’s right. But there’s also much more humor and visual play than I would have expected, given the season and social darkness of the weeks in which these artworks were created.” John Gintoff ’s “Kosmonaut” inkjet collage photograph is inspired by Gerlinger’s “Steel Pipes.” “Soon after the pandemic lockdown began in March 2020, I decided to start making on my computer collaged images from my original photos as well as appropriated images,” Gintoff said. “Probably within a week after the total lockdown began last March I started to incorporate writing over the photos using different colors and densities for each letter. In this way I felt I was desecrating my images as well as enhancing the image with color as well as imposing
my will over my photographs much like the pandemic was imposing its will over me.” Random words eventually morphed into becoming the actual title of the photograph, Gintoff said, and he started to use Russian words for the titles using the Cyrillic alphabet. “So the title of my work in the ‘Inside Voices’ exhibit, ‘Cosmonaut,’ is actually the Russian word for ‘astronaut’ … “ In Gerlinger’s photo, “I was attracted to the concentric circles within the pipes as well as the fact that you looked through the pipes to see what was visible at the other end, much like what would happen in my photo where the letters ‘O’ (there are two cosmonaut) became concentric circles as well as allowing you to look through the letters to the images underneath,” Gintoff said. Claire Lima took Wiles’ “Reverie” as her inspiration for “The Place of Shifting Consciousness,” consisting of wire, wool, seed pods, roses, wild grass and acrylic paint. “I was initially drawn to the title, ‘Inside Voices,’ because this was something I had been exploring with my art in the previous year. Most of my work has to do with my relationship to place but as those places became more and more confined due to the pandemic, the interior places within came more to the forefront,” Lima said. “I fixated on ‘Reverie’ as my inspiration piece for those very reasons. The painting is all at once majestic and contemplative and its stillness draws you into the internal story as much as the external. When creating ‘The Place of Shifting Consciousness,’ my aim was to turn the painting inside out in a way, to expose internal landscape, specifically those moments of pure consciousness between thoughts, on the face of the figure rather than within. Then I stuck a white rose in it, like tucking it behind her ear,” Lima said. Edmy Ortiz’s “My Chromebook Reader,” oil on canvas, has a cat at the center as a girl reads from her Chromebook in a work inspired by Barnet’s “The Reader.” See VOICES, Page 7D
