A battered hat. A grimy pair of work gloves. Pants so infused with paint that they stand up on their own. These are some of the garments on view in “Love and Practice,” a show at Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury that celebrates how artists make their work.
Curated by Harlan Mack, a sculptor and the visual arts program director at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, the exhibition features artworks and studio clothes from studio center staff members. It’s aptly timed to usher in a new artist residency program at Catamount Arts, developed in partnership with the studio center.
While the garments alone don’t always offer insight into how these works were created, they do when paired with the artists’ statements. Rather than being front and center, those texts are in a binder near the show’s entrance. Viewers should stop to read them because they add a great deal of emotional and narrative heft to the objects on display.
Aidan Lodge’s work boots, whose soles gave out as she hauled two tons of soil for her BFA thesis exhibition last year, sit on “(that) writhing thing (at the center of it all),” a sculpture made of steel and soil. “They clung to my feet as I walked and biked to the studio, they cushioned my feet as I stood welding, making molds and working service jobs to support myself and my practice,” Lodge writes.
Painter Arista Alanis displays her gray Carhartt pants as part of a studio practice that includes routine and comfort: playing music, changing her shoes. The pants document the years she wore them, early in her career at the studio center. “When splattered with paint,” she writes, “they become marked with memory.”
Trevor Corp displays a work glove alongside a wood table and metal-and-glass lamp he created. “For the longest time,” he writes, “I was averse to the practice of wearing gloves.” He explains that although gloves can impair the tactile facility he needs to make his work, protecting his hands became so much more important that he now considers gloves indispensable.
The show’s foregrounding of artistic practice creates a thoughtful context for Catamount’s new residency program. Participants will spend three to six weeks living and working in an apartment and studio in the Northern Forest Center’s newly renovated building at 560 Railroad Street in St. Johnsbury, which started accepting tenants in April. The nearly $6 million project gutted the 1909 building and created nine light, airy, “middle-market” apartments and a commercial space occupied by Tunnel Books, in addition to the artist’s studio. Each artist will share the building with regular tenants.
Catamount has announced nine resident artists and writers in the 2025-26 cohort, selected from 73 applications by Vermont Studio Center alums. Unlike the program in Johnson, Catamount education director Anne Campbell said, “It’s not a residency where you just do your work and go home — a requirement is to have some sort of engagement in the community.” Forms of engagement could range from doing programs in local schools and prisons to offering film screenings at Catamount.
Jen Volansky of Stowe, the first artist-in-residence, who arrived last Friday, plans to hold a series of events called “Art Happens Here” that are “designed to bring creativity into everyday spaces,” such as laundromats, trailheads and waiting rooms. She aims to integrate artistic practice with people’s everyday lives. “It is a way to slow down, notice, and remember that creativity belongs to all of us,” Volansky writes in a project summary. Perhaps it goes without saying that participants can wear anything they like.
“Love and Practice,” on view through October 26 at the Fried Family Gallery at Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury. catamountarts.org
This article appears in Sep 10-16 2025.
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