May 28 - June 23 2021
JAY CRITCHLEY | M P LANDIS | LORI SWARTZ
Opening: Friday, May 28 (4-6 masked people at a time)
Jay Critchley | Democracy of the Land: Viral Warming
"This series consists of ten banners, 3’ h x 8’ w and one 10’h x 8’ w, that broadcast the major historical viral pandemics, and their relation to the other pandemics of cultural, economic and systemic injustice. The banners are recycled vinyl banners that were displayed across Commercial Street to promote concerts and events. Each one is inscribed with singular creative lettering: Malaria, ZIKA, Cholera, HIV, Ebola, TB, Small Pox, COVID and SARS.
Beginning in the early 1980s, my work highlighted the pending climate crisis with humor and surprise, from the dominance of the automobile and fossil fuels to plastics, marine debris, nuclear power, gender and economic inequality and HIV. A recognition that the personal is planetary.
Our global health is dependent upon the dominant cultural, economic and political foundations that engage in ruthless extractive strategies that degrade the livability of individuals, communities and the global ecosystem.
In the midst of human-caused environmental carnage, Covid-19 continues its resurgence in the US, Europe and around the globe. As an artist, the isolation of the pandemic has presented the opportunity to immerse myself in developing a series of mixed media paintings on recycled vinyl street banners. This work broadcasts the major historical viral pandemics, and their relation to the other pandemics of cultural, economic and systemic injustice.
Democracy of the Land: Viral Warming is a multimedia project with opportunities to include performance, video and installation. The project will illuminate the impacts of unbridled climate change on race, gender and class. Building on other recent projects, Mobil Warming and Global Yawning, Viral Warming will continue to examine how the exploitive global economy intensifies the conflict between human equality and injustice, and past and future promise."
Viral Warming will continue exploring the promises of carbon-free climate security based on democratic ideals. As an international series, it will focus on the pandemics unleashed by Europeans on the Americas, beginning with Christopher Columbus in 1492 (which generated an environmental catastrophe in the “New World”) through to today’s global pandemics.
Jay Critchley is a longtime resident of Provincetown and the shifting dunes, landscape and the sea are his palette. He has utilized sand, Christmas trees, fish skins, plastic tampon applicators washed up on beaches, pre-demolition buildings and selected sites in his work. He is a conceptual and multi-media artist, writer and activist whose work has traversed the globe, showing across the US and in Argentina, Japan, England, Spain, France, Holland, Ireland, Germany and Columbia.
He recently gave a TEDx Talk: Portrait of the artist as a corporation.
At Jay’s two-month residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2017, he created, The Whiteness House: tarred & feathered, about race, ethnicity and whiteness Other residencies include Fundacion Valparaiso, Mojacar, Andalucia, Spain, CAMAC, Marnay-sur-Seine, France, and Harvard University where he has also lectured.
His movie, Toilet Treatments, won an HBO Award and his 2015 survey show at the Provincetown Art Association & Museum traveled to Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL. He has received awards from the Boston Society of Architects and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC for his environmental projects.
Jay was honored in 2012 by the Massachusetts State Legislature as an artist and founder and director of the Provincetown Community Compact, producer of the Swim for Life, which raises funds for AIDS and women’s health and the community. The 2020 fundraiser is a “Swimming in Place Challenge - our place, your place”, summerlong through September 12 - for a virtual event (swim4life.org).
During the pandemic he is working on a major project about pathogens with recycled, plastic, Commercial Street promotional banners, and, a performance installation project, “36 Solar Lights: reflections on nature and civic society”.
M P Landis | these past few years
these past few years - downward spirals, desecrated flags, masked faces, broken necks - i have no coherent words for any of this, i’ll let the work clumsily speak for me.
M P Landis has been working in various visual media since childhood. In 1989 he moved to Provincetown, MA to concentrate on painting and began exhibiting almost immediately in galleries there and was awarded a solo exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 1996. Soon after he moved to Brooklyn, NY where he lived and worked until 2015 when he and his family moved to Portland, Maine. Since 1990 he has been in over 30 solo exhibitions and many 2-person and group exhibits and is included in many public and private collections.
Lori Swartz | Garden of Ideas
"Lie in the grass or on a sidewalk or on your roof. Look at the sky. Feel your boots laced tight around your calves.
Pile rocks. Get dirty. Take the t.v. antenna off your forehead. Be where you are, even for a snap.
We are lured by the fastest, cheapest, biggest. We forget about authenticity. Art takes time.
We are taught that there is value in canned, pre-packaged, foil-wrapped and zip-locked. There are too many plastic things marketed as originals. We all have stories to tell. Use this work as a prompt for your own story. Be present and see. Be curious."
Lori Swartz began as a metal smith, creating sculpture, furniture and jewelry. She is also a painter, writer and a performer of circus arts (acrobatics, aerial fabric and aerial chain). Working as a multi-media artist has allowed her to express herself in ways that are both private and public. She does not have divided loyalties. She has one loyalty (art), with multiple expressions. Her work can currently be seen in galleries and boutiques across the country, on her website www.loriMetals.com and at her home studio in Madrid, NM.
