Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” — Twyla Tharp
Summer months traditionally invite travel and exploration, experimentation and letting go of rigid structures. But the wanderlust that seems to take over like a magic spell doesn’t need to take on a physical form. Is there such a thing as art wanderlust? Can art serve as a portal into other and unexplored worlds? Can we escape and travel along with artists to see what lies beyond the scope of our physical space?
Let’s Escape the Ordinary invites us to step outside the mundane and the ordinary through the artistic portal into landscapes and spaces of dreams, possibilities and the extraordinary.
Featured art works in Let’s Escape the Ordinary range in materials, processes and concepts yet the artists here all follow down a path to create art that in the words of Pablo Picasso “…washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”
Annette Cords is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, weaving, installation, and sculpture. By sampling, layering, and reconfiguring materials, Cords explores how visual and textual languages intersect.
Nevil Dwek’s work explores emotional experience and perception through layered mixed media works that function as constructed windows and images that shift with light, angle, and surface, changing as the viewer moves through them.
Lucia Engstrom works across photography, textile, and sculpture. Her practice reconsiders photography as a material rather than a medium – one shaped as much by light, space, and perception as by the camera itself.
Megan Gabrielle Harris, a New York based painter, working at the intersection of memory, escapism, and self-discovery. Her paintings place Black feminine figures at their center, serene and contemplative amid lush, surrealist landscapes.
The work of Heather Hutchison is an inquiry into light and transparency. She is captivated by the movement of natural light and its play on surfaces. Her hand built, shadowboxed works are considered light sculptures or paintings.
Amanda Case Millis works between her studio in Waltham, MA, and seasonally in South Yarmouth, MA. Working with oil on canvas, panel and linen, her works are largely inspired from life and are deeply engaged with light and place.
Tanya Minhas’ work investigates unseen elemental forces and the ephemeral nature of the world around us. Primarily working with paint, ink, and textile materials, she maps the relationships between nature, memory, and states of being.
Ethan Murrow’s multidisciplinary practice—which spans drawings, paintings, murals, sculptures, and publications—delves into narrative explorations of landscape, environment, agriculture, and the subjective nature of history.
Kelsey Shwetz is inspired by abstraction that naturally emerges in the observed world. Motivated by how painting can register the experience of occupying multiple spaces at once, the work begins from conditions in which the visible world splits or doubles.
Working fluidly between figuration and abstraction, Eric Uhlir has developed a dynamic visual language that allows disparate references. Mythology, landscape, popular culture, ecological systems often coexist within a single canvas.
Margeaux Walter uses photography and performance to portray issues related to climate change, consumption, and waste. Her work features playful interactions with the land that speak to the balance between the environment and human life.
