July 28 - August 10 2017

BARBARA HADDEN | DEBORAH MARTIN | RICK WRIGLEY | SUSAN LYMAN

Opening Reception: Friday, July 28, 6-8 pm

Barbara Hadden

Unthought Known

“…Barbara Hadden’s layered northern landscapes alternate between spatial representation and flat modernist abstraction. The figures present don’t stand apart from the land but are part of it, dissolving both human and animal individuality into the natural world. Generated from photographic imagery. Generated from photographic imagery (the artist is also a photographer), Hadden’s paintings belie their origins through masterful paint handling.” – Richard Klein, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Barbara Hadden was born in 1955 in Hamburg, Germany, and spent her childhood in Europe and the Middle East. She studied painting, photography and filmmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She was awarded an Alumni Traveling Fellowship from that school for her work in photography. Hadden was a finalist in the Regional Fellowships for Visual Arts, awarded through the New England Foundation for the Arts, and has also been awarded a Fund for Individuals by the Berkshire Taconic Artist’s Resource Trust. In the last decade, she regularly attended artist residency programs, which have deepened her commitment to landscape-based painting and photography. She lives in western Massachusetts.

Deborah Martin

Portraits of Autism

This new body of work seeks to create a platform for social awareness, while opening up a discussion about available support systems and funding for both children and adults diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

A fundamental shift to Medicaid would have far-reaching consequences for people with disabilities, affecting the availability of everything from health care to home and community-based services. The fiscal sustainability of Medicaid is essential to making sure that those who depend on the program can know it will be there for them in the future.

The oil portraits in this series follow five families who are currently caring for a child or adult with ASD ranging in ages 9-46. The focus of this new body of work is to provide a public connection and “face” to bring awareness to the many challenges as well as successes in caring for both children and adults with autism.

For many families raising a child on the autistic spectrum there is a persistent fear and concern for their child’s future. This becomes increasingly disconcerting as parents begin to look at the reality of what may happen when they are no longer alive or become incapable of caring for them. Small children are the public face of autism, their appeal helping to win public understanding and educational support. Will there be public support for them as adults?

Deborah Martin is a contemporary artist and independent curator based in Sky Valley one hundred miles East of Los Angeles, CA. Her artistic work examines the complexities of individual experience particularly in relation to home, isolation and memory.

“Portrait’s of Autism” is Martin’s latest work and is a departure from what she is perhaps best known for - her paintings of the blasted communities surrounding the Salton Sea and the nether parts of Cape Cod.

Martin’s work has been featured in numerous publications including Provincetown Arts, Building Provincetown, art ltd., Palm Springs Life Arts + Culture, Angeleno Magazine and New American Paintings. Work from Martin’s “Narrow Lands” series - an architectural geography of history and time along the outer cape, is included in the Provincetown Art Association and Museum’s (PAAM) permanent collection.

Martin received her BFA and BS Masters of Arts in Teaching, Art Education from The Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University. She is a recipient of the Orlowsky Freed Foundation Grant sponsored in part by PAAM.

Rick Wrigley

Sculpture No. 5

“After 25 years as an art-furniture-maker and over 10 years designing and building houses, I am now finding new inspiration as a sculptor. Up until a few years ago, my creative process involved working within the tight constraints set by the function of the object or building I was designing. For instance, a successful design for a chair, a table, or especially a house, must meet a very particular set of functional criteria. In the case of a commission, the needs and desires of the client as well as the budget add further constraints.

For many years, I enjoyed the challenge of solving aesthetic problems within these types of strict parameters. The work required a discipline I was comfortable with — a discipline that, with time, became automatic for me. But I now feel motivated to move beyond the functional limits inherent in Craft and seek out new aesthetic challenges as an Artist, and that’s why my current focus is purely on sculpture.

I have observed a hunger for a tactile and sensuous experience with Art in our increasingly digitized world. My work is sketched and made by hand — all without the aid of computers. I believe this imbues the work with an emotional richness that would not otherwise be possible. My aim is to achieve a complementary relationship between overall form and sensuous detail. The spiral often appears in my work as well. I see it as an archetypal form that evokes a sense of mystery and intrigue.”

Rick Wrigley has shown his sculptural works in group shows at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (2013), and AMP Gallery, Provincetown (2016).

As an art-furniture designer and maker, Rick was a recipient of the Mass Cultural Council / New England Foundation for the Arts Regional Fellowship in the Visual Arts. He was a visiting instructor in the BFA program at The School for American Craftsmen, RIT, Rochester, NY. Rick has shown art-furniture in The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Renwick Gallery, Washington, DC; The American Craft Museum, New York City; The Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Montreal; The Milwaukee Art Museum; The Oakland Museum; The Flagler Museum, Palm Beach, Florida; the Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, Massachusetts, and The Cape Cod Museum of Art.

His work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Renwick Gallery, The Smith College Museum of Art, and The Boston Public Library. He has executed commissions for The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; The Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, The Legislative Office Building, Hartford, CT; The Babson College Interfaith Chapel, and the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan.

Susan Lyman

Sculpture in the Unmaking

“In 2008 I “met” a stand of 500-year-old English oak pollards in Windsor Great Park, south of Windsor Castle. The venerable trees seemed to hold a body trapped in their contorted and convoluted forms. My encounter with the body in nature there fueled my longtime fascination with the woodland landscape. Out on the tip of Cape Cod, I scavenge materials from the woods and beach, choosing fragments and shapes that I carve, assemble, deconstruct, and paint into figural “drawings” in space. Holding on to a memory of the woods, I work from this pile of shapes in the studio, juxtaposing the fragments intuitively without plan into sensuous hybrid relationships, often punctuated with color. Trunks and massed together sections of saplings assume the role of head or torso; branches, saplings, and roots posture as arms or legs.”

Lyman will be exhibiting her signature sculpture in wood evoking the body in nature, the gathered elements of sapling, root, trunk, and vine seamlessly juxtaposed and animated into sensuous hybrid relationships. Her new wood sculptures are made from found and milled wood, in large part reinvented and/or reduced from sculptures of the past 30 years.

Susan Lyman is a sculptor and a painter. She has lived and worked in Provincetown for over 35 years since arriving as a Visual Arts Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. In March 2017, she had her third solo show, “Sculpture in the Unmaking”, at Boston Sculptors Gallery where she has been a member since 2012. Her work was recently included in the international exhibition, “Branching Out: Trees as Art”, at Peabody Essex Museum. Other recent exhibitions include “Reluctant Landscapes” at Cotuit Center for the Arts, and “Second Nature: Vico Fabbris, Susan Lyman, Michael Mazur, and Nathalie Miebach” at Provincetown Art Association and Museum. In September 2015, Lyman’s work was included in “Working Women: 36 Contemporary Women Artists” at Colby-Sawyer College (catalog). Lyman has exhibited her work for over 35 years in Japan, New Zealand, and the U.S., and her work is represented in private, corporate, and museum collections.

A LIVE GALLERY SPACE