New touring art exhibition debuts at Wheaton gallery to open season
August 24, 2000
Wheaton[base ']s Watson Gallery opens the 2000-2001 season with a one-woman exhibition by Cambridge artist Prilla Smith Brackett, running from September 7 through October 5, 2000. Her environmentally oriented exhibition, Remnants: Ancient Forests and City Trees, is traveling to six venues in 2000-2001. The public is invited to the opening reception on September 7 at 8 p.m., preceded by the artist[base ']s lecture at 8 p.m.
The installation features drawings, paintings and mixed media works from four related series: Old Growth in the White Mountains (1995), Big Reed Reserve (1996-98), Communion (1997-98) and Silent Striving (1998). An illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays by Wheaton[base ']s Professor of Art History Ann Murray and Gene E. Likens, ecologist and director of the Institute of Ecosystem Sites in Millbrook, NY.
''The exhibition encourages viewers to question their relationship to a natural world facing extinction due to the irresponsible use of its forces,'' writes Murray in the exhibition catalogue. ''Brackett offers us the sensuous quality of paint and rich variety of surface marks that communicate the power and energy she associates with trees as they struggle for survival.''
Brackett says of the exhibition, ''I present barriers and fractured images as metaphors for our abuse of the environment and for our lives so removed from the natural world. In other pieces, I explore the parallels and contrasts between northern old growth forests and urban trees.''
The Boston Globe describes Brackett[base ']s work as ''the overlap of nature and civilization in lush, painterly close-ups, '' and Art New England observed that ''it was worth the viewers effort to ponder the depth of what Brackett has to say.''
Brackett, a former adjunct professor of art at the University of Massachusetts, Salem State University and Simmons College, holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska in drawing and painting. Brackett[base ']s work has been shown at The Boston Center for the Arts, the Berkshire Museum of Art, the Fitchburg Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, Gallery 57 and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, the DeCordova Museum, and the Art Complex Museum, among many others.
For directions and other information about Prilla Smith Brackett[base ']s exhibition at Wheaton College, please call the Watson Gallery at 508-286-3578.