Wriston’s three galleries are human-sized and hold just enough art to not fatigue the viewer. Friday, Nov. 10, the galleries opened to the public with an opening lecture by Mark Iwinski, followed by a reception.
The smallest and most public of the galleries, the Leech Gallery, displayed the collection “Trifles from England: 18th Century Patch Boxes in the Permanent Collection.”
These petite trifles were recently donated by Barbara Wriston, wife of Lawrence’s 11th president.
Trifles are small ceramic boxes that, in this collection, commemorate historic or popular sites.
All have a print of a place or building on the cover as well as a little slogan — “A Trifle from London,” for example. Some get clever: One from Bath was titled “A Bath Toy.”
In their time, the boxes held little patches — pieces of gummed silk or taffeta that would be affixed to the face as a fake mole in order to draw attention to how pale the rest of the face was.
The patches had the added benefit of concealing smallpox marks.
Commenting on how interesting it was that the boxes had buildings on them, Domi Roberts pondered the idea of “something so fabricated to depict what’s inside.”
“Gina Litherland: Paintings” hangs in the Hoffmaster Gallery. Litherland works with the themes of “desire, femaleness, the natural world, the human/animal boundary, children’s games, ritual, intuition and memory.”
In the exhibit are warm-toned paintings focused primarily on women and animals.
Litherland attains the incredible detail in her oils by using techniques similar to the 15th-century Sienese painters and by applying paint with tools other than a paintbrush.
Greeting the viewer in the last and final gallery are large paper molds of tree stumps placed on the floor.
On the walls hang prints of cross sections of tree trunks. The artist, Mark Iwinski, sees these as “palpable manifestations of absence . memento mori for lost landscapes and ghost forests.”
In his lecture Friday night, Iwinski described how he went from sculpting wood to engraving wood prints to using the tree rings and chainsaw marks themselves as the negatives on his prints.
Always attracted to nature and forests, Iwinski noted that he was especially drawn to old-growth forests and nurse trees — stumps that are used as nutrients by saplings.
Iwinski’s artist’s statement explains, “As an artist, I see my role as communicating the absence of the primeval forest and giving presence to forms of renewal in the landscape.”
When alone with the huge stumps and prints in the gallery, the work is extremely affecting to the viewer.
The galleries are best viewed during down hours when you can be quiet and alone. Lose yourself in the intricate paintings and immense ghost trees.
The galleries are open Tuesday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, 12:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
z-art opening -hij- -pej- mcb **please keep elena in news where she can’t express any moronic personal opinions. thanks.
