Rhythms of Darkness and Light will open at the Grand Marais Art Colony on Friday, March 23. The show, a collaboration between the Art Colony and Spirit of the Wilderness Episcopal Church, features a variety of expressions, such as this vibrant fiber piece by Bonnie Gay Hedstrom.
Rhythms of Darkness and Light—the third annual collaboration between the Grand Marais Art Colony and Spirit of the Wilderness Episcopal Church, opens on March 23. Sixty artists, responding to a call, have expressed the movement from light through darkness, to spring through winter, to resurrection through death. And what a variety of expressions! Oil, acrylic, watercolor, pastel, beads, collage, engraving, photography, mixed media, etching, glass, ink, fiber, clay, poetry, gourd, stone, silk, encaustic, stitchery, and paper!
Accompanying the show will be a booklet cataloging the artwork and featuring artist’s ponderings—how their work led them in exploring a mother’s death, reflecting the light within that shines in winter, considering the soul’s response to lake and sky on a dark night, seeing branches against a sky and branches of our lives, discovering the wonder of new life. There will also be some poems by local writers in response to the theme.
Some artists were moved by the theme to try something “outside my comfort zone,” as Darnell Nelson says. Ann Ward, who usually works in open forms as a potter, experiments with the egg as a closed form. Joan Farnam speaks of pushing “the envelope in my work this year and making a completely different kind of entity.” Matt Kania says that as a painter, he tends to work directly from life, but this year’s theme demanded “a much more rarified portrayal of reality.” Marcia Casey Cushmore writes that her first artist book provided a chance for her to “visually express a continuing concept like the rhythms of seasons.”
Rhythms of Darkness and Light opens Friday, March 23 with an opening reception at 6 p.m., and guest lecture by art historian Wayne Roosa, who will use themes of darkness and light as subject matter and metaphor for beauty through historical and contemporary artists. Roosa, professor of art history at Bethel University and chair of the New York Center for Art and Media Studies, has been a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities research grant. Roosa’s presentation will be an original and mind-bending slide show and lecture— a chance to step back and look at themes of light and darkness from a bigger perspective.
On two evenings the show will stay open till 7 p.m., with music provided—on Tuesday, March 27 with music by Gina Macy and on Thursday, March 29 with music by Amanda Hand. On the 29th, Spirit of the Wilderness will provide a light supper at 5 p.m., so folks can eat, look at the art, and hear music—a feast of many kinds! For more information, contact the Art Colony at (218) 387-2737 or www.grandmaraisartcolony.org.
Leave a Reply