Culture Seen: Boston to Bratt Sculptured Images at the Brattleboro Museum

For this provocative exhibit entitled “Reshaping Reality,” Brattleboro Museum curator Carol Seitchik reached out to the cooperative Boston Sculptors Gallery in Boston’s similarly provocative South End for imaginative images by eleven of the Boston Gallery’s leading talents filling the museum’s Main Gallery and Mary Sommer Room with challenging ideas through October 24th.

Here you’ll find an exciting mix of media and ideas about space, boundaries and materials from Michelle Lougee’s enormous “Octoplas” which is just what it sounds like, woven of 500 postconsumer grocery bags to  Nancy Selvage’s “Engulf,” an elegant construction of sheet metal that I’d love to mount at home if I had 20 feet of wall space to devote to it. I guarantee Peter DeCamp Haines’s “Migration” will hold your gaze and pique your imagination with its 213 finely honed bronze shapes – whales?... dolphins?...sleek ships?... all of the above? –  slipping silently across a sea-like space.

There are many delightful surprises here including a startling flight aboard Andy Zimmerman’s “High View” in the Mary Sommer Room, a suggestion in video of the F11A Stealth Fighter Jet carrying messages that ingeniously incorporate each viewer with their own unique experience.

The Center Gallery celebrates the age of Steam and Steel with amazing silver gelatin print images of the last days of railroading. Photographer O. Winston Link is a photographic storyteller, guest Scholar Thomas H. Garver tells us in the accompanying brochure, as he captures mid-50’s images of the Norfolk and Western Railway so stunning you’ll hear the steam and smell the smoke as you traverse the carefully crafted photographs of another era. It took almost 30 years, Garver writes, for Link’s technicality to come the full circle from “old fashioned” to newly appreciated “vintage” photography.
You can enjoy them now BMAC through October 24th.

Local Talent on View at The Latchis

As usual, there’s more to see at The Latchis than movies. When the lights come up, be sure to stop by theater #1 for the Love of the Arts Festival exhibit featuring about a dozen local artists showing sculpture to oil painting to collage. My favorite is a pen and ink drawing by “M.B.,” “Shadows of Odanata.” And as a owl devotee, I couldn’t not mention Sam Philips’ hunkered “Owl” and for kicks, a rendering of Mocha Joe coffee cups. Great fun – and a hint of great talent to come!