Heather Stivison: Borders and Boundaries
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On View: June 11-July 6
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 13, 6-8 pm
Guest Speaker: Historian and Author Tyler Anbinder Presents City of Dreams, Saturday, June 15, 3:30 pm
Poets Respond: Selected poets reading their works inspired by the exhibition, Saturday, July 6, 2:00 pm
Reserve your tickets for Tyler Anbinder’s Presentation Here
About the exhibition: The fourteen, narrative works in the exhibition are a tapestry of drawings, found objects, textiles, and paintings, including a 48” x 97” oil painting Stivison described as an “oil-sketch.” The works depend heavily on desaturated colors, primarily blacks, greys, and whites, which serves to intensify their content. The unifying feature of these interdisciplinary artworks is that they consider borders and boundaries in terms of the basic human need for a place to call home.
Like all of her previous narrative works, this subject is deeply researched. And yet, her Borders and Boundaries artworks maintain an authenticity of her perspective of race, age, class, and life experience. She prods and pokes at her comfortable life and that of her peers. A drawing of the artist’s own white picket fence emerges from a suburban real estate survey, stamped with tiny red letters stating “not my problem.” Another drawing features a conglomeration of take-out coffee cups and cell phones, while ghostly figures and bits of a Ukraine map are barely visible beneath.
Figures, when included, are predominantly female. Some reference historical immigration, some reference today’s immigration issues, some express longing, all bear questions about human dignity. Oil-Sketch: Legacy, speaks directly to the issue central to Stivison’s motivation for the series—what kind of world will we leave to our children?
Art critic Don Wilkinson said of Stivison, writing in The New Bedford Standard-Times, “Much of her imagery, although clearly rooted in reality, flirts with the abstract. It is that nexxus between the two poles where she is most comfortable as an artist. In the space of visual disruption, she opens herself up to the possibility of different narratives than simple observation might deliver.”