Recent catastrophic flooding in Vermont has cast water as something of a menace, but at Mad River Valley Arts in Waitsfield, a water-themed group exhibition reminds viewers of the element’s inspirational side. Sam Talbot-Kelly, who curates the nonprofit gallery, said the theme for “Elemental” came to her during her daily commute from Montpelier along the Winooski River.
“I flow with the river,” Talbot-Kelly said of her drive, adding that a Winooski tributary, the Mad River, defines the gallery’s own community.
“Elemental” brings together 21 artists from around the U.S., including eight Vermonters. As with recent exhibitions Talbot-Kelly curated with themes of trees and flight, she used an online call-to-artists platform to source work. The result, which garnered artists from Louisiana to New Mexico, is equally wide-ranging in experience and media, from emerging to seasoned artists and paint to video installation.
Three large-format color photographs of crashing waves, by Waitsfield resident Tesla Hausman, greet visitors from the gallery’s exterior window displays. For “Bonaire Waves” 1, 2 and 3, Hausman captured the Caribbean island’s translucent crests from beach level, excising any visual information that might put them in perspective. They could be surfing height or ankle dusters; either way, they look dramatically kinetic.
Inside the gallery, Charlotte artist Cameron Davis‘ work dominates the first of two rooms. A longtime senior lecturer in studio art at the University of Vermont who also teaches in environmental studies, Davis contributed several works from her 2017 series “Airs, Waters, Soils (Places)”: four 48-by-60-inch oil paintings and two installations of apothecary jars, etched and filled with water, sand, soil, stones and plants from Lake Champlain and its tributaries. The earth-toned paintings are dreamlike miasmas of plant life; Davis hints at water through dappling or threading. The luminous white apple blossoms of “Champlain Tonglen II (white)” reference invasive plants in Lake Champlain, according to Davis’ artist statement, compiled in an exhibition pamphlet of writings by all the artists.
Water quality is also a concern of Michale Glennon, an upstate New York fiber artist who works with scientific research organizations in the Adirondack Park. Her “Wool and Water” project, which integrates scientific data and fiber arts, is currently on view at North Branch Nature Center in Montpelier. Glennon’s crocheted and knitted works, draped over pedestals, are visual representations of scientific water-quality measurements and conditions. While the artist has found that her fiber works are “more powerful than graphs, charts and lectures” for informing viewers, a legend showing how to interpret her ridged and cell-like fiber patterns would have been helpful.
Bonnie Barnes of Fayston, a board member at Mad River Valley Arts, contributed a minimalist black-and-white photograph titled “The Water Runs Free.” In her statement, Barnes describes the steam and melted streams created by a hot magma chamber located beneath a frozen caldera, or cratered volcano. In the photo’s calligraphic zigzag on a featureless white plain, it’s unclear if water or a formation caused by its absence is pictured, but the inundation reads as natural and even mystical.
A video installation titled “Puddle Music,” by Waitsfield resident Julie Parker, projects intersecting ripples of blue light into a corner of the gallery, imitating disturbances on a pond’s surface. Parker is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab graduate and cofounder of Creative Micro in Waitsfield, which develops augmented-reality electronics and other technologies. Her training emerges in the mechanism by which the ripples are produced: a large, rotating music-box cylinder whose pins dip into a tray of water. Blue lights trained on the water cause the reflection. “There is something intrinsically soothing about the natural movement of light,” Parker writes.
As might be expected, watery blue hues recur in “Elemental.” The oil pigments in Milford, Conn., artist Day Moore‘s “Surfacing Series: Kaya Deep Water” progress from cerulean to turquoise to a light, dusty blue at the top of the unstretched canvas. The work’s sheer size, at 86 by 72 inches, creates the illusion of submersion, aided by the painting’s perspective from underwater looking up. Moore bases his paintings on photographs he takes while diving. He aims to “evoke a sense of peace and contemplation” while reminding viewers of “the beauty and fragility of the ecosystems that lie just below the surface,” he writes.
A variegated cobalt blue threaded with black characterizes Nancy McCormack’s monotype “Cultivation no. 4.” The printmaker from Raynham, Mass., used pochoir, a stenciling process, to print thin, wavy lines over the abstract work’s upper block of swirling color while a smaller, lower block balances the composition with calming striations.
M. Leuschel‘s blue-dominated mixed-media work, “Ethereal Ocean,” approaches that body of water metaphorically, aligning its “vast mystery” with the unseen depths of consciousness. Water exists for the artist mainly in childhood memories of oceans and lakes; Leuschel lives in Santa Fe, N.M.
It is impossible not to think of climate change while viewing “Elemental,” though few of the artists represented explore the topic directly. Water was integral to Dave King’s process in creating his soft sculpture “Raging River.” The Oak Park, Ill., artist soaked both the abaca paper to shape its crushed-funnel forms and the rattan strips that hold those forms in place. King doesn’t talk about climate change as an influence, but both his dramatic choice of title and the source of his interest in disparate materials — his family’s HVAC business — seem connected to a cycle of environmental destruction.
Vermont winters are warming, and we don’t know how many more will be cold enough to produce the wondrous ice formations in Moretown resident Tina Valentinetti‘s digital photograph “The Infinite Shapes of Water,” printed on metal. The image’s dense forest of stalactite-like ice cones were formed by “water splashed up from a dam, nearly freezing in mid-air,” the artist writes.
While “Elemental” may not address existential issues, it does inspire appreciation of water itself — a necessary first step.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Water, Water Everywhere | “Elemental” makes waves at Mad River Valley Arts”
This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2024.
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