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- Courtesy Of Athena Petra Tasiopoulos
- "Jesus Loves Me" by Bill Ramage
There's no getting around it: "Beacon of Light" is dark. That's the title of a group exhibition in the main gallery at Studio Place Arts in Barre, and most of its 32 artworks address disturbing realities.
But no wonder: The 21 participating artists responded to a pointed theme conceived by SPA executive director Sue Higby. "The United States has often been described as a Beacon of Light. Are we?" her written description begins. "Lady Liberty bears a torch in her raised arm, symbolizing enlightenment and hope. However, our country has become increasingly darkened..."
Accordingly, artists delivered works in a wide variety of mediums that reflect hot-button concerns: political divisiveness, race discrimination, women's bodily autonomy, immigration, gun violence and cultural identities. Some of the entries underscore just how awful humans can be — to each other, to animals, to the planet.
Two large-scale installations by Bill Ramage dominate the gallery with sheer size and the freighted image of the American flag. But the Jasper Johns-adjacent works embed a subject even more triggering, literally and figuratively: school shootings. Specifically, Ramage pays homage to the 20 first graders murdered by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. (Six adult staffers were also killed.) Both pieces are deeply unsettling. Yet, like several other works in the exhibit with somber content, the craft is ingenious.
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- Courtesy Of Athena Petra Tasiopoulos
- "THE SIGNAL (A Film Noir)" by Robert Towne
Hanging across from the gallery's entrance, "Jesus Loves Me" at first appears to be a two-dimensional painting of the flag, albeit with only nine stars and with two successively smaller, bordered rectangles in the middle. Closer inspection reveals those shapes to be inset, like windows or shadow boxes.
The frame of the first inset is covered in photos, printed in red, of Sandy Hook victims. A tiny cutout image of Ramage himself, with his back to the viewer, stands in one corner of the frame looking inward. Perhaps the artist is suggesting we all do the same.
The curious title of this piece is explained in an accompanying notebook: The song "Jesus Loves Me" was based on an 1860 poem by Anna B. Warner originally titled "A Song for a Dying Child."
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- Courtesy Of Athena Petra Tasiopoulos
- "George Floyd, 2020" by Mary Tapogna
Mary Tapogna serves the excruciating present with an ancient art form: mosaic. Her wall-hung piece "George Floyd, 2020" is a paean to the African American man asphyxiated to death by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Floyd's face, expressively formed from small shards of ceramic, is at the center; within the white pieces surrounding him, Tapogna fitted his heartrending final words, "I can't breathe Mama." Even tinier pieces fill the "t" in "breathe" with stars and stripes.
In a Renaissance-inspired touch, Tapogna lined the arched top of this portrait with bits of mirror, which reflect a jagged halo against the wall.
Tapogna's other work patently represents the culture of gun worship. "U.S.A. Rosary With Gun" is just that: an oversize rosary whose beads and crosses — in emblematic red, white and blue — are painstakingly assembled in mosaic. A medallion at the crux of the chain features blue and white stripes and a red revolver.
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- Pamela Polston ©️ Seven Days
- "Heartache" by Jennifer McCandless
Not surprisingly, flag imagery recurs throughout the exhibit. Ceramic artist Jennifer McCandless made one of clay, but in her wall-hung piece "Heartache," the stripes and field of stars are cracked, misshapen and bulging with strands of multicolored clay. The latter might be seen as seeping out, as if from a wound, or as a kintsugi-like attempt to patch the flag — and a fractious nation.
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- Courtesy Of Athena Petra Tasiopoulos
- "Dialogue I" by Janet Van Fleet
Janet Van Fleet's assemblages of found and repurposed objects have often contained social commentary, but she eschewed obvious national symbols in her work "Dialogue I." It consists of a boxy wood base with two tall, human-esque figures on top. Little black boards affixed to the front of the figures read, respectively, "We are dying and going away forever" and "We want your house and ours, too."
The meanings of these ominous declarations become clearer in the photographic images tucked into 11 "drawers" in the box. Van Fleet has photocopied pages of historic sources that document, essentially, the human tendency to declare dominion over all other life forms — not to mention other humans considered inferior. One page, for example, pairs 19th-century photos of a livestock auction and a slave market.
Collectively, many pieces in "Beacon of Light" illustrate the intransigence of our reptilian brains. And yet the aim of the exhibition is not to paralyze viewers with despair but to encourage finding ways to move forward. Two of the artists do just that, reminding us of our capacity for humor and obstinate joy.
Rosalind Daniels' "The Debate Quilt" is subtly and subversively hilarious. At the center of the bed-size coverlet, two tall, skinny columns in navy represent Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Daniels does not give these shapes any human features except intimations of hair: The former's is orange and squiggly, the latter's white and sparser. The candidates at the 2020 presidential debate are further distinguished by an overlong red tie and a neatly tucked one in blue and white stripes. Daniels' starkly geometric design is imbued with comic relief.
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- Courtesy Of Athena Petra Tasiopoulos
- "Optimism" by Martha Elmes
In Martha Elmes' woodcut print, star-shaped blossoms reach up to a sky bursting not with bombs but more pointy stars and cosmic swirls. Even in graphic black and white, this piece crackles with energy. Its title: "Optimism."