November - December, 2022: Karen Moss

 

Karen Moss: Which Way Out

This body of work is an expression of some of the challenges faced while living under the restrictions of Covid. I wanted to express the notion of limitations and boundaries in my artistic process as well as in the visual format and the process I chose.

The series called “Breaking Out” employs a cast of characters inspired by my stuffed animal and toy collection. The danger of contagion triggered an open-ended time of people being confined, which led to the format of this series. I experimented with color, texture and various permutations of these shapes crowded and layered into a rectangular format. The rigid boundaries were broken by the characters’ desire to escape a claustrophobic environment.

This group of small collages, as well as another set of individually titled large framed works, all derive from a collection of toys that I found in a thrift shop five years ago. They have continued to provide me with metaphors and source material which keeps evolving. In my last exhibition called “Abandoned” the toys were depicted without color but in detail, whereas now both groups are abstracted to become flat colorful shapes and quirky silhouettes. In the framed work, pop culture figures such as Lisa Simpson, Woody, the cowboy from Toy Story, and Micky Mouse, appear trapped within a dense fragmented world of layered cut paper.

Three wood wall reliefs evolved directly from the black and white drawings. One of them titled “No Elbow Room” echoes the theme of living in close quarters with no room to move. Another one called “Flight” depicts those who escaped from densely packed areas in search of a safe place to hide from contagion. The third work, a vertical piece called “Support System,” is more optimistic, relieving the tensions and anxiety expressed in the other works by showing the interdependent relationships that help people get through challenging times.

Learn more about the exhibition here

November - December 2022: Judy Haberl

 

Judy Haberl: Black & Blue

I have been smitten with the color black for decades, with its inky depths and visual punch, and now blue, especially shades of cyan are new fascinations. I acknowledge the deep roots in history, music, literature and art of the meanings and importance of color. I am adding my own interpretations here.

My exhibition, Black & Blue is a love song and a lament, a suite of ideas - rendered through intaglio prints, photographs, and sculptures (Dusk, Floating World & Reveries) that are embedded with layers of black flowers, blue atmosphere and intertwining black branches. The images for me, attempt to convey moments - from the translucent allure of dusk to the mysteries of human nature. 

Hinting at man’s hand in creating global events in the name of progress and peace, Trinity Elegy (hanging fabric sculpture) takes the form of the first nuclear test (July 16th, 1945, in Socorro, New Mexico) as part of the Manhattan project. Formed of “innocent” materials, Trinity Elegy hovers like a mad chandelier, having created a momentary and blinding light and decades of aftermath.

Learn more about the exhibition here

October 20 - 29, 2022: Women to Watch: New Worlds

 

Women to Watch: New Worlds 

The Women to Watch (W2W) exhibition series was conceived by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and is designed to increase the visibility of, and critical response to, women artists. W2W was created specifically for the Museums’ 29 U.S. Regional and international affiliated committees. Each exhibition focuses on a specific medium or theme chosen by the National Museum’s curators; for 2024, that theme is New Worlds. When women artists envision a different world, how does that look? This exhibition invites a close exploration of this question.

Lisa Tung, Artistic and Executive Director of the MassArt Art Museum, has nominated five artists whose work fits this year’s theme. One of these artists will be selected by the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ curators to participate in the group show in Washington D.C. in the Spring of 2024.

The Massachusetts State Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts gratefully acknowledges Gallery Kayafas for its generous support of Women to Watch.

Learn more about the individual artists below:

Candice Smith Corby
Woomin Kim
Ceci Méndez-Ortiz
Chandra Méndez-Ortiz
Daniela Rivera

August 2022: Our Choice, Our Voice Pop-Up

 

Our Choice, Our Voice: A Pop-Up Fundraiser for Planned Parenthood

Who is allowed to attend?

Anyone! While this cause is aimed at people with uteruses, we welcome all allies in the fight for reproductive rights.


What is the event?

This is a pop-up event comprised of protest posters tacked to our gallery walls. In response to the overturning of Roe, director Arlette Kayafas wanted to bring our community together to make our voices heard and raise money for Planned Parenthood. 


Where will it be held?

The event will take place at Gallery Kayafas at
450 Harrison Avenue, Suite 37, Boston, MA 02118.


When will it be?

The pop-up has two parts: the poster drop-off on 8/3 from 5:30-7:30pm where we will tack our signs to the gallery walls and First Friday on 8/5 from 5:30-8pm. Come to one or both if you can!


When will you be open?

During the pop-up exhibition, we will be open from 11am - 5:30pm each day between 8/3 and 8/13. Come by and say hi!

How does the fundraiser work?

The fundraiser from August 3rd to the 13th will be a combination of poster sales and donations. All money raised will be donated to Planned Parenthood on behalf of Gallery Kayafas and the artists. 


Are there any poster limitations?

There are no size restrictions or limits on the number of posters you can hang. They can also be free-standing or on the wall. If you wish to sell your poster, all proceeds will go to Planned Parenthood (none to the artist or gallery).


What happens when the show closes?

On 8/13 we will give back any remaining posters to their owners (please come by the gallery for pickup).


Any remaining questions?

Please call us at (617) 482-0411 for further questions.

June - July 2022: Caleb Charlan, Michael Hintlian, Ross Kiah, Maxwell LaBelle, Michael lafleur, cheryl st. onge, & Lee wormald

Caleb Charland: Sundial

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." -Albert Einstein

In 2018 I began experimenting with the photographic process called color separation. I was inspired by the work of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, an early practitioner of color photography. As if by magic, color photographs can be created with black and white film. When three negatives are exposed with red, green and blue filters the grayscale exposures function as records of the separated colors within a scene, somewhat similar to using separate screens in printmaking. When the three negatives are assigned to the corresponding color channels in photoshop a full color image appears. Color Channels determine the color of the pixels on the screen. Red pixels correspond to the information contained in the negative that was filtered for red light.

It soon occurred to me that I could record the separated colors across time and space. As the Sun appears to travel through the sky over the course of a day the movement of the sundial’s shadows mark the passage of time. In the morning the face of a rock may be in shadow but upon the arrival of noon it basks in full sunlight. This movement of light across time captured through the color separation process reveals unusual variations in the colors of the world. Sundial with Compass displays a sequence of shadows cast by the object one afternoon. The presence of green in the image, for example, is the absence of red and blue light. This means that green appears in the shadow areas of the red and blue filtered negatives.

In 2020 I was curious if I could apply the experimental nature of the color separation process to the final print. I began pondering how to merge two analog photographic processes with digital inkjet technology to create unique works of color. The process starts by printing the black information on a traditional black and white gelatin silver print. A liquid cyanotype solution is then brushed on the print by hand. A negative of the cyan information is registered over the silver print and exposed to ultraviolet light. Finally, the print is carefully run through an inkjet printer to apply the yellow and magenta ink resulting in a full color image.

For me, wonder is a state of mind somewhere between knowledge and uncertainty. It is the basis of my practice and results in images that are simultaneously familiar yet strange. Each piece begins as a question of visual possibilities and develops in tandem with the natural laws of the world. This process often yields unexpected results measurable only through photographic processes.

Michael Hintlian | Something to Live For

Michael Hintlian is an American photographer based in Boston. Educated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. Winner of Traveling Scholarship from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Hintlian’s work has appeared in major U.S. dailies and international periodicals, and has been widely exhibited and collected. His photo-documentary Digging: The Workers of Boston’s Big Dig was published in 2004. Hintlian has served on the faculties of The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The New School for Social Research, and Parsons School of Design, New York. He is an adjunct instructor in photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Currently he is at work on major projects in the United States and travels extensively.

Ross Kiah | A Quiet Corner

A series of murders were committed in the 1980s in Windham County, CT, colloquially dubbed ‘The Quiet Corner’. The victims were all young women and girls aged 14-26. The assailant was a white man in his mid-twenties. As a child he was physically and emotionally abused by family members on the farm where he grew up in the seemingly serene and quaint town of Brooklyn.

Recognizing my place within this demographic, I began exploring the origins of masculine violence, especially against women. These images explore cycles of abuse, illusions of power and control, and the ubiquitous threat of danger that exists as a result.

Maxwell LaBelle | An Immense Motionless Pause

The photographs in “An Immense Motionless Pause” were taken in Lynn on a stretch of road lined with new and used car dealerships. Between the businesses are anonymous parking lots where trucks piled high with crushed cars are left on weekends before departing for their final dismantling and destruction. The terrifying contrast of destroyed and new cars living next to each other inspired me to begin working. In this intermediary place between collision and scrap, normally not displayed, the devastation of the crash is paused, the effects of force and speed are made visible.

Michael LaFleur | Main South ETC

Eastbound
Wandering down
Main Street
Dreaming of Dostoyevsky, 
and how I might manage to weave this into a story.
I travel by sun soaked spiritual shoppes on the edge of the evening
and find sidewalk memorials where Paola Alba once passed.
Curiously searching for the idea that had placed me here – 
Polar Park, and how it might alter the neighborhood, but
I am caught off guard by a man in his garden who offers me a rose
for my sweetheart. I say, “Thank you, but I believe we’re beyond what 
a flower may mend.”

How else could I express
I love you on Lunelle Street

-m, 2022

Cheryle St. Onge | Calling the Birds Home

Calling the Birds Home is a photographic exchange of the energy of life—the give and take of the familial between mother and daughter who lived side by side on the same New Hampshire farm for decades. Our love was mutual and constant. In 2015 my mother developed vascular dementia, and with that began the loss of her emotions and her memory and the relationship of mother and daughter as we had known it for nearly 60 years. In my mother’s earlier life, she was a painter and then in more recent decades she began to carve birds. A carving would begin with her vast knowledge of birds, her research and then after whittling away at chunks of wood. My mother would eventually offer up an exquisite painted out chickadee or barred owl, life size and life like. I began to photograph her with any camera in reach—an iPhone or an 8x10 view camera as a distraction from watching her fade away, as a counterbalance to conversation with her about death, as a means to record the ephemeral nature of the moment, to find some happiness and light, and to share the images with others we loved.

Because of the dementia, my mother and I no longer had conversations. But we did still have a profound exchange through photography. She must have recalled our history and the process of picture making because she brightened up and was always eager and willing to be photographed. My mother did her best and I did mine. And then in turn, I offered up the pictures away to anyone who would look. It was an excruciating form of emotional currency.

My mother died at home On Oct 3. 2020. Time has been excruciatingly measured by that loss. A year to reflect on the passing of time, sans her, measured out within a snowy winter, over a family holiday in August, through a fall afternoon watching migrating birds pause at her feeder. The expanding and the contracting of 365 days with hope and longing for some semblance of her anywhere.

Cheryle St. Onge grew up in coastal New England, the daughter of a painter and physicist. Her proximity to the ocean and riding horses as a child shaped her curiosity of nature. She received her M.F.A. from Mass Art and has been on the faculty of Clark University, Maine College of Art and Univ. of New Hampshire. St. Onge is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Critical Mass Exhibition Award, New Hampshire Charitable Arts Grant, Polaroid Artist Support. Her work is widely collected, privately and publicly most notably, the Polaroid Corp, the Univ. of New Mexico Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, Fidelity Corp. and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Lee Wormald | Cows on Flores

These photographs are made on the Island of Flores, Azores (Açores). I have been photographing on the island since 2014, and while attempting to bring structure to the larger body of work, I noticed these cows looking back at me.

The dairy industry has a rich history on the island. In 1915 Father José Furtado Mota organized the Sindicato Agrícola da Ilha das Flores (Flores Farming Union), the first on the island and one of the first three in the dairy sector in the whole of Portugal. This year, the the Cooperativa Ocidental (Western Cooperative), the largest cheese factory on the island, closed - and with that, ending a hundred year old agricultural history.

Lee Wormald is a Stoughton Massachusetts based photographer. He received a BFA in Photography from Lesley University College of Art and Design in 2016.

April - May 2022: Kathy Bitetti, Tynan Byrne, & Ellen Rich

Kathy Bitetti | The Sea Hates A Coward

I have always lived near the ocean- so close that I could always see it when I walked out my front door. I don’t think I could ever live far from its shores. In 2020, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was lucky to be able to take daily walks by the Atlantic Ocean. I continue to be lucky to be able to take these walks as the global pandemic continues.

This body of collages, entitled The Sea Hates A Coward, was conceived and created during the pandemic. I started to create them in January 2021 and finished the series in early 2022. The series draws from my mapping projects, Crossings: Massachusetts- Malta (2009-2019), and Crossings: Emerson was Here (Boston).  Ralph Waldo Emerson on Dec 25, 1832 boarded the cargo ship Jasper in Boston Harbor and set sail for Europe. He landed in Malta on Feb 2, 1833. This was the trip that transformed Emerson into the “Emerson” the world knows. 

Emerson traveled from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Ocean. In the 1800’s there was no guarantee one would survive such a journey at sea. All of the collages either have a photographic image I took in January 2021 of the Atlantic Ocean in Boston or an image of the Mediterranean Ocean that I took in Valletta in February 2019 during my residency in Malta with Valletta Contemporary. The Mediterranean continues to claim the lives of countless migrants trying to make their way to Europe and historically many lives have been lost in the Atlantic Ocean. The photographic images in the collages are different sizes – sometimes it is clear it is an ocean image and in some of the works there is only a small sliver of a photographic image of the sea.

The white frames were all sourced during the pandemic and almost all are from local second hand stores. Each work is made for the specific frame it is in (they are frame-specific works). Each work is also made for a specific foreboding literary quote about the sea/ocean. I am working with 15 quotes in total and the quotes are from such writers as Shakespeare, Eugene O'Neill, Langston Hughes, and Samuel Beckett. The name of this series is a quote from Eugene O'Neill’s 1931 play, Mourning becomes Electra.

I was also thinking about William Turner’s paintings of sea storms when creating these collages. Those paintings are incredibly beautiful and full of energy, but they often mask the fear and horror of being caught in a storm while at sea on a ship. These works are small scale visual odes to the power and terror of the ocean.

Tynan Byrne | Opening Echoes

Tynan Byrne (b.1992) is a photographer and book-artist based in Quincy, MA. He grew up on the coast of Maine, a place from which he draws deep inspiration and often references throughout his creative process. Fascinated by the intersection between language and image comprehension, he creates bodies of work investigating the impact that photography and sequence have when compounded with the written word. His series center around intimate and honest aspects of his life as a gay man, often containing links to his childhood, his romantic and interpersonal relationships, influences from various forms of magical realism, and a deep love for the craft, history, and methodologies of photography itself. Most recently, his work has been exhibited in Richmond, Virginia; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Montgomery, Alabama; Dallas, Texas; and Boston, Massachusetts, as well as several online galleries and publications. Byrne is a leading member of the Boston-based artist collective, Recently, a group of emerging artists who meet monthly to share work, offer and receive critique, and organize opportunities for public exposure. He currently works as the Instructional Media Technologist within the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Opening Echoes is his first solo exhibition, and consists of four bodies of work that share a search for rationale, comfort, and desire in a recollection of histories which may not exist. The books, installations, and assembled photographs are contemplations on the power of nostalgia, including a longing for things that never happened; the urge to salvage a misspent adolescence; the need for reason amid romantic discordance; and the effort to reclaim ownership over a body and self when they suddenly feel foreign.

Ellen Rich | Rub for Good Luck

This work began over two years ago as the covid warnings and the political climate became increasingly threatening. I took refuge in my beloved studio of 33 years.

At a time of high alert I wanted to comfort and reassure myself as well as others. Playing with abstract shapes and high key color I hoped to show solidarity and connection with my fellow humans, to communicate the thought that we are all in this together.

Art that makes us feel good is as valid as any other.

The work is color driven. I love the infinite color choices, the additive action: putting down a shape, covering it, altering it with another shape, working, reworking, obsessing, making it better (or worse), adding but rarely subtracting until it feels right.

My approach to making work is intuitive and explorative with the goal of creating a piece that speaks with emotion to the viewer.

March - April 2022: Minoo Emami

 

Minoo Emami: Andaruni Landscapes

Checklist

With this body of work, I look back on and reconfigure the Persian Andaruni (courtyard) as an anthropological architectural living space. Courtyards are common to residencies throughout most of the Islamic world, owing as much to living traditions as climate. Typically, it is a garden that is surrounded by rooms and no window to the public space. Because the courtyard is the traditional private domain of women, I use Andaruni as a thematic element to demonstrate a meaningful continuum that makes these spaces so vital for a nuanced understanding of Islamic domestic culture and its magical beauty. Its location on the axis of the entrance is determined by notions of privacy which are prevalent in Muslim culture. Where the demand for privacy is higher, the movement to Andaruni may follow a complex pact. The architecture symbolizes the Islamic rules and moral burdens that force women to find their way out to these social and political spaces in the contemporary landscape of Iran.


Since 2000, my anti-war series addressed war and its long-term consequences, trauma, and personal identity through storytelling in multidisciplinary art projects including 50 paintings, many drawings, and 15 sculptures. In my Peace March project (submitted), each sculpture is inspired by true stories from interviews with Iranian and Iraqi women. Through the portrayal and utilization of used arm and leg prostheses, I transform trauma into objects of beauty and resilience. This project aims to highlight people’s devastation by the consequences of war in the Middle East, and especially women, whose role has always been undermined in their societies. Using Persian and Arabic traditional aesthetics, material and techniques, the project highlights the continuity of war and conflict in the Middle East.

January - March 2022: Offshoot Collaborations

Mags Harries & Thyra Heder | Offshoot Collaborations

Reflecting on their collaboration, a conversation between Mags Harries and Thyra Heder. January 2022

Mags: This is not an easy process to collaborate with one’s offspring.  

Thyra: I mean, how does one make art with your mother? When your mother is the artist you have most admired throughout your life?  We had distinct art practices, conflicting and busy schedules in separate states, and a global pandemic. It felt nearly impossible to start.

M: At first Thyra and I sent these drawings in the mail to each other

T: And that didn't work.  They only started working when we were drawing on other sides of the room in the same studio. 

M: Yes, but we stuck to the rules! We only revealed the full image when all four parts were completed. We were struck how our lines were so similar and that it was almost as if we were communicating our intentions to each other. These drawings are totally blind yet they have a cohesion and whimsy to them. We questioned whether it was art but continued anyway. 

T: The exquisite corpse game was low risk.  In fact the idea that a drawing we created would work at all seemed insane, so we were off the hook completely.  We relaxed into trying to make ourselves laugh.  We weren’t making “Art” we were simply trying to spend time together in the studio until better things emerged.  But there was a surprising synchronicity. We were drawn to similar subjects, patterns, and themes–as if we had an overlapping unconscious. 

M: We began fusing objects into each other, a hat with two brims to contain a head looking in opposite directions or garments that join two people.  These sculptures began as a conceptual way to connect two people but it is only when we tried to wear them that they took on personal resonance.  

T: Yes, by documenting ourselves trying them on without a rehearsal, the introduction of chance added richer meaning to what we were doing.  We had designed objects to represent our connection but when we wore them it brought that connection to life- Our arms were attached, we couldn’t see, we both wanted to lead, we cradled each other’s heads to get through neck openings and adjusted collars.  

M: They became about care, as we each needed to help each other dress, a dance that could be awkward and tender and very funny.

T: It was, at times, hilarious.
With many of our pieces we learned that our synchronicity could not be planned, and we must develop ways of making alongside each other, rather than force a meaning onto what we were making.

M: We both like the Doing.

T: Ha! Well, you do for sure. I had to relent my need to know the outcome. 

M: It must have been hard growing up with me jumping around to lots of different things.

T: It was sometimes. I think I needed to know the plan.  But you know I'm the same way now as an adult. If you had asked me about our personalities last year, I might have said we weren't very similar, but this process has revealed a lot of parallels.  

M: I think it has happened a lot more organically than I thought.  There was so much anxiety around it. To actually do this felt like I wouldn’t be comfortable.  You never quite quit being a mother. 

T: And I couldn’t quit pushing back.

M: I am not sure we reached a deeper understanding. 

T: I think through our various experimentations we've both gotten a sense that our connection might exist deeper than understanding.

Clara & Dedalus Wainwright | Offshoot Collaborations

What Families Talk About

3 years ago, we (Clara & Dedalus) started discussing the possibility of a collaboration. Over the years we had worked together in different ways, but this was to be the first time where we met as equals, rather than one of us contributing to an idea the other had initiated. It took us a few months to settle upon something that felt fruitful and provocative. Inspired by a fantastical family invention (developed in mirthful collaboration with dear friend Pratap Talwar) - The Elder Luge: an amusement park ride on which seniors claim their exit with style and thrill by riding a roller coaster through a ring of fire that cremates them and scatters their ashes over an ocean bay. We saw an overlap in these two stories which both take modern amusements (luxury cruises and roller coasters) and use them as an aesthetic vehicle to laugh through our end-of-life anxieties and imagine an alternate relation to the complexities of mortality.

This amusements-embodying-anxieties idea inspired Clara to propose a gallery exhibit that could include other creative families and when we invited Mags and Thyra to collaborate, they were excited to work in parallel on the project. Early discussions clarified a 4-way interest in the collaboration between generations of a family as the uniting principle. Mags & Thyra felt the Last Supper/Elder Luge idea was a Wainwright project, so we agreed to develop it on our own.

Getting to work in 2020, the two of us met for intensive sessions as often as life allowed. We searched for approaches that could be shaped from both of our creative sensibilities, and had many starts and stops, until we reexamined an old family favorite. At least since Dedalus’ childhood, after dinner drawings of Exquisite Corpses (inspired by the Surrealists) has been a family tradition shared with Bill Wainwright and Dedalus’ sister Caroline (plus any dinner guests). So the two of us started a series of expressive character portraits using the chance based “what came before is a secret until the image is complete” technique. The early portraits from 2020 closely followed the rules while the later portraits used the process for the initial generation of images that could then be re-considered and developed as a complete composition.  

Clara brought her exuberant collaged fabric methods and Dedalus introduced paper, charcoal and paint. This range of materials show up in different combinations across the images and introduce questions of unity and division in individual works. We each borrowed methods from the other, enriching the boundaries of possession. Through out the series, we found challenge and inspiration in the juxtapositions of our image making impulses, and are excited to introduce this cast of eccentric characters to the world.

When we turned our efforts to the Elder Luge, the call and response aspect of the Exquisite Corpses was an excellent momentum generator. One of us would create an environment, the other would inhabit it with some counterpoint and then we both could tune it. Over time, we reimagined and reinvented the Elder Luge, which manifests alternately as a roller coaster, a maze or a field of brass horns, with the cremating ring of fire taking the animate form of a dragon embodying its own chance like intentions. In this series, Clara introduced threshold-like fiberglass screen as a background material that expanded the Elder Luge and its existential possibilities.

The process has shown us myriad ways in which we share understandings, and many where we diverge.  At times the process has been a struggle, but both of us have found much inspiration and something solid to cultivate together during these crazy times.