Culture

April 2015, Brattleboro, Vermont —  Thursday, April 30 an opening reception for an exhibit of acclaimed photographer, Amy Arbus, will be held from from 5 – 8pm at Mitchell • GIddings FIne Arts at 183 Main Street, Brattleboro. 

The exhibit, After Images, will run from April 30 to May 24 and is a series Arbus made in 2011 and 2012 to payhomage to her favorite painters such as Balthus, Cezanne, David, Ingres, Modigliani and Picasso. The images will seem familiar to most viewers. They are photographs of live scenes staged to replicate the powerful effects of original paintings from the early 20th century, Arbus’s team painted costumes, props, and the models themselves. What has materialized is a series of hybrid images that challenges the thin line between painting and art photography.

Sharon Myers is known as a caterer in Brattleboro. She is also an artist who is about to receive her MFA in Fine Arts from Heartwood College of Art in Biddeford, Maine. She works with fabric, mixed media and sculpture. She has drawn on her multiple talents to create a moving installation called “The Wedding Gown Project.” For those who are beyond first (or second or…) marriages there is much in this exhibit that will resonate. Everyone will be drawn in by both the artistry and the execution.

The “Wedding Gown Project” is up for only two days, Saturday, April 11 and Sunday, April 12 at the seventh entrance in the C. F. Church Building at 80 Flat Street. Hours on Saturday are 3:00 – 7:00 PM and on Sunday from 3:00 to 5:00 PM.

C.X. Silver Gallery (http://cxsilvergallery.com/) is pleased to present ‘In The Box’, a recent series of mixed media abstract paintings by Cai Xi. Please join us for conversation with Cai on the Art-Food Connection and hands-on demonstration. Cai will demo how to make 盒子 (hezi) – or ‘boxes’ – a wheat flour mini-dumpling-based dish. Audience participation will be welcome.

Cai: “I look at my life the way I look at a blank canvas.  In front of the blank canvas, there are millions of opportunities. Putting brush to canvas zeroes in on one opportunity to savor. Each opportunity creates and adds to what I call the whole of the art experience. Each instance of this arrival at one-among-many is a part of my art creation process – eating, working, playing.”

Scale and Presence is an exhibit of masterly crafted large scale ceramics on display at Mitchell•Giddings Fine Arts, 183 Main Street, Brattleboro Vermont. The show will run through April 26, 2015 highlighting a new body of work by Brattleboro artist, Stephen Procter.

Known for the disciplined lines and unglazed surfaces of his historically-inspired monumental vessels, Procter’s more recent work revels in the sensuality of curves and the painterly effects of layered glazes. Whether austere or exuberant, these vessels transcend the usual experience of pottery and broach the realm of sculpture. Alongside human-sized vessels, Scale and Presence will introduce a series of smaller pieces and non-traditional shapes including colorful wall pieces, called “orphan lids.”

The Artist’s Loft has overlooked Main Street for almost 25 years and this will be the last Gallery Walk for William Hays’ studio and gallery.

Hays opened The Artist’s Loft Gallery and studio in June of 1990. It has been in continuous operation since that time. Although initially the gallery showed the works of a variety of artists, in 1995 the gallery began presenting only Hays’ work. He says, “After a few years of being an artist and operating a gallery with rotating shows , I became exhausted by organizing the exhibitions each month. Besides, I had enough of my own paintings to fill both rooms of the gallery.”