Tides and Currents is an exhibition featuring artworks by Laura Barr, Eileen Eder, Debbie Hesse, Heather Stivison and Etty Yaniv. The artists in Tides and Currents present diverse artistic responses to the subject of Connecticut’s marine and coastal environments and waterways that manifest concerns about climate change, the visualization of scientific data, close observation, and the uses of the imagination. 

 Laura Barr exhibits oil pastels from her Ocean Elegy series, diptychs that reflect the artist’s concern for the protection and restoration of marine ecosystems. Eileen Eder captures the calm and sparkling beauty of our coastlines and waterways in her plein air oil paintings. Debbie Hesse creates large synthetic wall constructions that suggest shifting marine forms through a play of biomorphic shapes, light, and color. Etty Yaniv presents Archipelago, a series of small daily paintings composed of layered fragments of repurposed materials. In Archipelago the artist considers the power and force of water, a reflection of her “preoccupation with the urgent climate change crisis.” Heather Stivison’s oil paintings focus on capturing the mysteries of the deep ocean and the reflective surfaces of water. 

 Heather Stivison will give an artist talk at the opening reception on September 8 at 6 p.m. about her two-year artistic collaboration with Noah Germolus, a Ph.D. candidate in Chemical Oceanography in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program at Woods Hole. The paintings from that collaboration blend artistic imagination with data about the dissolved organic matter, metabolites, proteins, and nutrients within ocean water to reveal or provoke new ways of thinking about our oceans.