The exhibition is created by Kelly Holt, Spruce Peak Arts Curator, and features the work of artists: Mary Admasian, Kate Burnim, Renée Greenlee and Erika Senft Miller.
On view at Spruce Peak Performing Arts Center: June – September 20, 2019.
Gallery Hours: Thursday through Saturday 11:00am – 5:00pm and one hour prior to events and performances. The exhibition may be viewed by appointment. Contact Kelly Holt, curator • kholt@sprucepeakarts.org • 802.760.4634. All artwork is for sale through the Box Office.
Water is never truly idle. It is life giving to all beings – essential in its purest form. It connects us as a planet in our global community and is inside of every human body – regardless of ethnicity, gender, race or religion. Water invigorates, yet soothes.The vastness of water welcomes and anoints, propels, generates power, and is increasingly precious as we respond to climate change. Water moves us forward as we paddle past each other without a glance. Immerse yourself and experience water through all senses. While water is a medium of consciousness, like AIR it also transcends culture.
Artists in this exhibition are responding to many aspects of water – from its physical forms to its important role in the ecosystem to its personal effect on our everyday lives and stories and well-being.
Photographs by Erika Senft Miller depict ever-changing landscape of arctic glaciers “ice that holds information” suffering the impact of climate change. Through her series of photographs, the artist shows how through the collective unconscious, we “all swim in the same story”. Senft Miller takes the audience on a multi-sensory video adventure from snowmaking alongside the gondola at Mt. Mansfield to the surface of a paddle board on Lake Champlain, to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.
Mary Admasian’s mixed media pieces open a dialogue in an effort to “symbolize the emotional, psychological and physical experiences living in toxic environments” about the peril of plastics in waterways and ocean life with continued pollution in her series Peering Through Plastic. Traces of the ever-familiar six pack packaging of cans are found in the layers of her mixed media paintings.
Kate Burnim’s addition of industrial paintings reveal a landscape of hydro electric plants. Her work speaks to “harnessing the massive power of water as we direct the river…creating energy while changing landscape and habitat through incredible feats of engineering” and what it means to claim power over the environment rather than with it.
Renée Greenlee brings us home to Vermont with her delicate photographic studies titled Red Rocks Series on the edge of Lake Champlain. This personal journey is about healing “the way forward is unclear, as if walking through a fog”. Greenlee is also exhibiting a series of cyanotypes created on the shores of Lake Champlain – her process with treated paper, freezing temperatures and brilliant sunlight brings forth “a chaotic kaleidoscope of blues with sand, ice and debris…hand on the landscape”.
About the Artists
Mary Admasian
Mary Admasian is a multidisciplinary artist who explores how raw forms, layered spaces, and abstract perception can symbolize the psychological tension between our outer and inner lives. As she states, “By transforming common and found materials into conceptually stimulating images, I want my work to create a narrative that provokes insight, thought, and social awareness in the viewer.”
Admasian is the recipient of a 2016-17 grant from the Vermont Arts Endowment Fund of the Vermont Community Foundation for her sculpture “Weighted Tears” exhibited in 2017/18 at the Brattleboro Museum. Her work has been shown nationally and in the collections of colleges, institutions, and prominent art collectors. Admasian has received two fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, and she has also created site-specific work and installations in collaboration with other artists, filmmakers, musicians, and writers.
A native of Detroit, Michigan, Admasian has lived in Vermont most of her adult life. She earned a BFA with honors in painting and has worked as an artist, curator, marketing and brand communications consultant, and creative director for the visual and performing arts. The artist’s disciplines include painting, drawing, sculpture,assemblage, printmaking, and mixed media.
Kate Burnim
Kate was born in Wimbledon, England, in 1976. Most of her childhood years were spent in New England, though her formative years of adolescence found her overseas again in the heart of London, England and traveling throughout Europe and Israel. Each summer of her life has brought her to a rural New England lake. Kate studied art from a young age with her grandmother, a painter, printmaker and sculpture; and later at Silvermine Arts Center in New Canaan CT. As an adult, Kate studied at The California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA, and The Academy of Art University in San Francisco, CA.
Kate believes in the humanizing force of art and design and seeks to make that connection with each work. Currently, Kate lives with her two children and two dogs in Montpelier, Vermont. She works out of her home studio and is a member at The Front, Montpelier’s sole collective gallery.
Renée Greenlee
Born in Morgantown, WV and raised in Southwest Pennsylvania, Renee began working as a non-profit administrator in 2006 after receiving her Masters degrees in both Communication and Theology from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. She lived in Pittsburgh for 11 years, creating and managing programs for low-income communities, as well as photographing the people and places impacted by these services. In 2015, she completed the Photography Intensive Program at Pittsburgh Filmmakers and made a shift toward making work and teaching photography full-time. She now lives in Burlington, VT and is a teaching artist through Burlington City Arts. She envisions the practice of photography as a means of communication; a dialogue between light, memory and the meaning of making an image.
Erika Senft Miller
Erika Senft Miller is an interdisciplinary performance artist and creator of collaborative multi-sensory experiences. Her work, set in unique physical sites, employs a complement of art forms that collectively foster exploration, and invite empathy and connection within the context of installation and large-scale performance. Senft Miller speaks five languages and has relocated seventeen times, factors that inform her process of interacting with both people and sites. She has performed in the United States and Europe, and has spent over twenty years teaching in universities, theaters, businesses, and community centers. She trained in dance theater with Fe Reichelt, and holds a doctorate in Dance Education, a masters in Physical Therapy as well as a bachelors in communication. Erika is also a certified teacher of The Alexander Technique.