November Art Exhibit- Opening Reception
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Location
DubHub
1123 Main Street, Dublin, NH, 03444, United States
Organized by DubHub
Categories
- Arts & culture
- Dublin
About this event
November Art Exhibit North Room Curious Things Fashioned from Leather and Foraged objects Donlin Foreman and Jaya Lord are Horse Hill Studio South Room Little Worlds - Dollhouses, Dioramas, and Shadow Boxes Including works by Soosen Dunholter, Susan Lunt, Rosemary Mack, Jane El Simpson and Rachel Thorne Germond Opening Reception: Friday, November 13 at 5:00-7:00pm Exhibit runs Friday, November 13 - Sunday, November 29 Available for viewing during DubHub open hours and by appointment. contact: Info@dublincommunitycenter.org NORTH ROOM Curious Things Fashioned from Leather and Foraged objects Donlin Foreman and Jaya Lord are Horse Hill Studio Jaya Lord is the Lead Leathersmith and Procurerator. Donlin Foreman is the Proprietor and Leatherographer. Two different lives arriving at a ‘Curious’ point of possibility. She the wanderer gatherer - ancestral archaic finder and he the old dancer-poet imagineer alchemist. Donlin Foreman started Horse Hill Studio in 2016. At that time he was crafting stitched and formed door and cabinet handles, building an inventory of mostly home goods “for home and barn” and taking commission orders. Jaya arrived in the fall of 2021 wanting some lessons in leather work, along with a vast history of foraging and crafting she immediately started building inventory for an upcoming event and they have been collaborating ever since. Jaya and Donlin are both members of the League of NH Craftsmen. They each have their own speciality pieces and styles, as can be seen in this exhibit, though they are conscious of cultivating and maintaining a characteristic “studio” style. They incorporated Horse Hill Studio as an LLC two years ago and became 50/50 partners. Horse Hill Studio is in the Granite Mill in Harrisville, NH. They fondly refer to the Studio as The BOTTEGA (a harkening back to the artistic studios of the renaissance masters). See their respective bios at www.horsehillstudio.com Artistic Statement Our awareness of handcrafted works as human identity allows us to see ourselves and others on the most recognizable level. We embrace ways of knowing perseverance, faith, compassion, and love through the things we craft with our hands. These indelible memories of people, cultures, and experiences become our lives. Just as physical sensation or ‘feeling’ stands at the core of human experience, the work we craft with our hands stands as a common bond in our shared humanity. SOUTH ROOM Little Worlds : Dollhouses, Dioramas & Shadow Boxes Soosen Dunholter, Rosemary Mack, Jane El Simpson, Susan Lunt, and Rachel Thorne Germond Soosen Dunholter Soosen Dunholter is a Peterborough, NH–based printmaker and mixed-media artist whose work explores color, pattern, texture, and visual storytelling. Drawing from painting, printmaking, collage, and found materials, she creates sophisticated yet whimsical works that invite curiosity, contemplation, and a sense of discovery. With roots in painting and graphic design, Soosen spent much of her career as an art director specializing in book publication. Today, she works from her eclectic studio in the woods of New England, where she combines hand-pulled prints, vintage papers, collage, and collected fragments into layered, intuitive compositions. Her inspiration often comes from everyday discoveries, nature, gardens, travel, and the stories embedded in objects and materials. Soosen’s work has been exhibited throughout New England for more than 25 years and is held in private and public collections worldwide. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2016 Ruth and James Ewing Award for Exceptional Achievement in the Creative Arts. She is also the Curator of the Healing Arts Gallery at Monadnock Community Hospital and a member of the Monotype Guild of New England and New England Wax. Artist Statement (relating to the Curiosity Boxes in this exhibit) Something changed in my studio this year. As I enter what I think of as my “third act,” I found myself wondering how to hold the thoughts, memories, and experiences that come with the passage of time. My lifelong love of storytelling through paint, paper, and ink has taken a new turn into three dimensions. I began layering, cutting, gluing, sewing, and arranging the many small treasures I’ve collected over the years—rocks, old artwork, beads, bits of metal, natural objects, and flea-market finds. These collected fragments have become my palette. Each carries a story, and together they have found new life in intimate memory and travel boxes. And so, THE BOX series began—a collection of small worlds that explore memory, collecting, holding on, and letting go. Like opening a drawer of memories, each box invites you to look closely and discover a story of its own. Jane El Simpson Winner of 2019 Ewing Arts excellence in the arts award, Jane Simpson's work incorporates diverse mediums, including mixed media and visual storytelling. She has a deep passion for history and preservation, often creating new art by stitching, sewing, and using recycled materials, vintage cards, and artifacts. Outside of her studio work, she runs a professional practice as a picture framer, located in Peterborough, NH.Found materials play a leading role in my artwork. The thrill of discovery can happen on a walk or at a local swap-shop. Ideas sprout from pithy quotes or a book, from a relationship or travel, imagining a secret persona for my cat, or a season. The poet Ruth Stone once said that she could hear and feel a poem racing toward her from across a field - before it would reach her, she’d run indoors to grab a pencil and write it down, otherwise it would be lost. While I do not feel similar urgency, I am always curious, mystified and delighted when creativity takes form in paint, paper, words, notes, wood, prints, textile or thread. Artist Statement Recently, I relocated and reconfigured my artmaking space. Collections of treasured supplies were rediscovered, ideas-in-waiting rekindled. I’m eager to see where new-space energy will take my work. I feel fortunate to have lived a free range childhood in rural New Hampshire; roaming fields, forests and rural roads on two feet, two wheels or four hooves, occasionally finding youthful trouble —--like the time. A short list of inspirations: Bird nests, Lee Bountecou, Small stones, Shadow, Pine needles, Seed pods, String, Aged ephemera, Blackwing pencils, Grass. Rosemary Mack Born on Dec. 25, 1950 Rosemary Mack embodies the Capricorn trait of being old when young and young when old. Enrolled at age 64 in Frankie Brackley Tolman's painting class she discovered assemblage art and never looked back. Within five years she had made over 60 pieces, occasionally entering shows at Sharon Arts, Thorne-Sagendorph and Kendall Jenkins. In April 2020 Art New England named her as one of 10 emerging artists. From 2019 to 2020, she also began contributing to a public art project, "Tiny Pricks" by artist and activist Diana Weymar. Rosemary embroidered over 70 textiles, two being featured in Business Insider. A member of Monadnock Art, she enjoys participating in the annual Art Tour at her studio in Dublin ,NH. Artist Statement Assemblage art ushered in my second childhood. My studio is a playhouse filled with dolls, toys, board games and endless oddball bits and pieces that I collect but also sometimes just appear in my life when I need them! Shadow boxes, dioramas and goofy 3-D cartoons let me explore personal issues as well as take an off-kilter look at the world. Growing up on fairy tales, mis-guided advice and proverbs has provided endless inspiration. Contemporary life has as well. Gender issues are frequent topics and among the most popular. Being entirely self-taught, each piece teaches me something new. I love the entire process—developing an idea, having it take shape and figuring out the mechanics. The final piece is never exactly what I envisioned, and this evolution is my favorite part. Sometimes it means completely starting over, but the end result is always better than the original idea. Finding this path also just appeared when I needed it. I feel fortunate to have found something late in life that makes me laugh an eager to start the day. What I do isn’t “fine art,”but it’s definitely fun art. Susan Lunt attended art school as an adult, earning her BFA in 2011 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, MA. A painter and multimedia artist, her work frequently features ‘not quite right’ spaces that reflect emotional and cultural losses from the old millennium to the new. Her room boxes and dioramas offer a counterpoint to these themes, presenting in visual form the wry storytelling tradition of her Northern New Hampshire family. “I’ve arrived at a place in my art where it is okay to have two voices, a humorous one and a haunted one,” she explains. Born on a farm in Meredith, NH, Susan’s earliest memory of formal art were the Andrew Wyeth prints that hung in her home. Early influences were her maternal grandparents, Edward and Marjorie Bradford, both artists, and her paternal grandmother, Margaret Pynn Lunt, of Meredith, an embroidery teacher and author, and a founding member of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen. Susan’s current studio is the former Odd Fellows ballroom in Marlborough, NH, where she has pursued collaborations with other area artists. She curated multi-artist, themed shows in 2023 and 2024, featuring paintings, assemblages, drawings and sculpture. In each show she featured an emerging artist who had never been part of a show, one of whom had made a nine-foot tall mural in his barn. A Solo show, Is She Pretty?, in 2011, featured her conceptual work in drawings, multi-media and sculpture using found objects at The Studio Gallery, in Laconia NH. From 2010 to 2019, she curated biannual stand-alone window exhibits, on Canal Street in Laconia NH. Group shows in her Marlborough studio at 170 Main St Marlborough NH include Our Marble(s) , in 2023, and From That to This , in 2024. She participated in the Monadnock Art Tour Gallery Exhibition, in 2024 in Peterborough, NH, where she exhibited three of her paintings. Susan lives with her husband, pianist and composer Mark Ferguson, in Harrisville NH. Artist Statement Old things carry a sense of life; part tragic and part funny. I used to feel that the assemblages I made from them were ‘un-serious’ art, but now I know they are essential. Our planet seems chaotic to me, but in these dressed-up little worlds, the story, and the feeling of the story, are under my control. I never tire of their mystery and irony. Last year I took this mini obsession to a new level. A large dollhouse had been returned to its owner so altered and damaged she barely recognized it. Together, we explored how an object can hold meaning and memory, and what to do if those things seem lost. I am thankful to her for the loan of the now-renovated house for this show. Inspired by the resurrection of the big house, I began a series of small dioramas from a collection of 1930’s department-store Christmas boxes I found in a family trunk. After archiving their contents, I used the still-lovely papered boxes to hold a new family narrative; one with the wry family humor I remember, especially my father's. His deadpan stories about people in our ‘neck of the woods’ offered one-of-a-kind life ‘lessons,’ that you’d better believe I still refer to. “Don’t go ‘glamping’ in bear territory,” for instance. Like the doll house that once again evokes pieces of the past, a half-forgotten story —perhaps holding a memory of this lost person, is made visible in the very box that once contained his mother’s baby gown. Still image from the short dance film Shadow Box - by Rachel Thorne Germond and Charles Woodman to be screened at the November 13 opening reception Shadow Box (2020) Camera/Editing/Choreography: Rachel Thorne Germond Camera/ Editing: Charles Woodman Music: Fred Frith Dancers/Silhouettes: Larissa Asebedo and Kirsten Reynolds Length: 6 minutes 14 seconds Shadow Box is a collaboration between video artist Charles Woodman and choreographer /interdisciplinary artist Rachel Thorne Germond. This work was originally conceived as a short film version of a longer live performance work that included video projection as part of its modus operandi for the choreographic structure and development. The title refers to Victorian "shadow boxes" in which light and shadow are dramatically juxtaposed within enclosed glass-front display cases of thematic groupings of objects of personal significance. Using the silhouettes of moving dancers, the interior and exterior are collaged with images and then layered in increasingly complex ways to create a meditation on external and internal spaces and relationships. These silhouettes create ever-changing patterns of movement that break apart and reform, evoking concerns of human will, control, isolation, and even doom. NOTE: “ Shadow Box” will be viewable on a large screen at the DubHub only during the opening reception on Friday, November 13. For the rest of the run of the exhibit, a link will be provided to view the film via Vimeo. Rachel Thorne Germond Originally from Rhode Island, and the daughter of two painters, Rachel Thorne Germond is a performer, dancer, teacher, choreographer, and visual artist. Her early training in art was at RISD summer school where her father was a professor. In 1986 she achieved a BFA in Photography and Printmaking at Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art and Planning. Based in New York City from 1986-1998, she studied modern dance on scholarship with Mary Anthony and Anna Sokolow, at the Cunningham Studio, and somatic techniques with Nancy Topf, Susan Klein and Barbara Mahler. Beginning in 1990 she presented her choreography via The Field at notable venues such as St. Mark’s Church Danspace, Dixon Place, and The Joyce Soho, amongst others. In 2000 she achieved an M.F.A. in Dance and Choreography from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and then founded her Chicago-based non-profit company, RTG Dance. Upon returning to New York in 2014, she continued to perform and present multidisciplinary performances that incorporate visual art, dance, video, and photography under the auspices of Rachel Thorne Germond Performance Collage. She currently lives and works between Brooklyn, NY and the Monadnock region of New Hampshire. www.rachelthornegermond.com Charles Woodman (collaborator) Charles Woodman is a San Francisco, CA based electronic artist working in video and expanded media. His recent projects concentrate on the integration of video with live performance, often in collaboration with musicians or dancers. Exhibitions of his work include screenings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Block Museum of Art, Chicago, Black Maria Film and Video Festival, Edison, NJ, and the American Dance Festival, Raleigh, NC. Woodman was a founding member of the video performance group viDEO sAVant and a pioneer in the development of Live Cinema - real time video editing as live performance. Recent appearances by that ensemble include ENSAD, Paris, Spazio Contemporanea in Brescia, Italy, ISEA, Dubai, UAE, and the Berkeley Art Museum in CA. http://www.videosavant.net/