Review: “On Beauty” at MassoniArt By Mary McCoy

“On Beauty” is like a breath of fresh air. On view in both MassoniArt’s High Street and Cross Street galleries through October 19, it’s a beautiful and stimulating show that won’t fail to lift your spirits. In these divisive and worrying times, it might seem escapist to spend time enjoying the pleasure of beautiful art (and there’s an abundance here), but the impetus for this show has more to do with the power of beauty to open the mind and stimulate broader perspectives.

A preponderance of the color blue sets the scene. Airy and open, full of possibilities, it speaks of water, sky, freedom, and potential. Jacqui Crocetta’s astonishingly detailed paintings evoke undersea life swirling and bubbling upwards in turquoise and ultramarine. Heidi Fowler conjures clouds, forests and mist-shrouded earth with her signature combination of acrylic paint and bits of junk mail. Blue meets earthy greens and golds in Grace Mitchell’s luminous abstracted landscapes, while Katherine Cox’s trees, exquisitely drawn in silvery graphite spire toward the sky, and Susan Hostetler’s sculptured birds wing their way across a wall.

Inspired by Kahlil Gibran’s poem “On Beauty,” which speaks of the multitudinous ways beauty can be interpreted, Carla Massoni, the gallery’s director, invited nearly 20 artists, both familiar and new to the gallery, to create work about beauty, fully aware that each of them would interpret the theme differently according to their individual focus and ongoing explorations.

The strength of this show derives partly from the high quality of the art but even more from how the artists’ individual approaches interweave. There are shared subjects—blue waves, soaring clouds in radiant skies, trees reaching for light and air—and shared fascinations with the intricacy of close-up details and the interactions between layers of imagery. The extreme detail of Blake Conroy’s hand-cut metal plant forms layered one on top of another is very different from Crocetta’s thousands of tiny circles, dots and flowing washes or Simma Liebman’s stupifyingly complex tangles of vines, yet all of them entice you to look more closely and experience the worlds within worlds that nature holds always ready to be discovered.

The beauty and wonder of the natural world is a predominant theme throughout the show, and it often arises in intimate encounters. There are the intertwining shadows and reflections at the edge of a marsh in a large woodcut monoprint by Catherine Kernan, the startling encounters with brilliant sunlight and frenetic color in Kathryn O’Grady’s rural landscapes, the lonely intimacy of Mitchell’s expansive verdant yet desolate landscapes, and even the spiraling and flowing movements of plant growth and running water called to mind by Erin Daniels’s thousands of tiny stitches spreading across a vintage garment.

Interestingly, none of these artists are pursuing explorations of beauty per se but instead use beauty as a tool for investigating their individual concerns. While they occasionally touch on specific topics—climate change, stewardship, gender issues, consumerism—the works in this show maintain a sense of optimism that celebrates the wonder of life here on earth. Even Julia Clift’s paintings strewn with jarring glimpses of billboards, highways and fragments of landscapes seen while traveling have, beyond their initial sense of disorientation, an almost subliminal sense of positivity. In their eyes-wide-open recognition of the interconnecting forces shaping our world lies the suggestion of the possibilities of creating generative reinvention.

There’s much more to be discovered in this large and varied show, but if one thing stands out, it’s interconnectedness. Intimately connected by their shared relationships of color, form, subject matter and intent, these artworks readily evoke the always evolving interconnections of all life on earth. There is nothing static here, nothing stuck in sameness. There is always something radiating, flowing, welling up from within. Contrary to the current pervasive habit of thinking ourselves into a deep, dark inescapable hole, these artworks affirm the worthy possibility that by changing our way of thinking and perceiving, we will naturally open to fresh perspectives and to healing.

Through October 19, 203 High Street, 113 South Cross Street galleries

For more about MassoniArt, go here.

Lead Photo: Grace Mitchell, Old Are the Shores I, oil on panel, 24″ x 36″