WITCHGRASS

About the Exhibition

The four artists featured in Witchgrass respond to the intricacies, resiliency, metaphor, fantasy, and spirituality they observe in a vast botanical ecosystem. The title of the exhibit is based on Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Gluck's powerful pleading poem of love and pain from the point of view of the natural world. Like Gluck, these artists are moved by the beauty, perfection, imperfection, and poetry of the natural world and what is at stake while they simultaneously comment in their unique voices on the ravages the planet continues to endure.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Josephine Chase is a visual artist from Burlington, Vermont. Her areas of exploration include expanded field painting, art historical analysis and cultivating, capturing, and reframing domestic spaces. Chase’s work is focused on hybridity, locating function, cultural signals, and collective memory through the use of inherited readymades that are remixed into paintings and installations. In her writing, Chase interrogates the Black curatorial experience and challenges white, Euro-centric notions of representation. Chase is also the co-founder of Mama Pepper Co., a Liberian specialty food producer.

Chase graduated from the Maine College of Art in 2020 with a BFA in Painting. Her art historical research focused on the practice of West African studio portraiture as an investigative tool, positing the commodification and dissemination of imagery as an expansive ground for Black art and its discourse. Chase is a current final year candidate for a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art from the Vermont College of Fine Art. 

Karen Gelardi a Maine-based artist working across multiple mediums to model resiliency and adaptation found in nature and industry. Using handmade and industrial production techniques she creates systems of pattern, modularity, assembly / disassembly, variation and mutation. Observational and invented nature drawings appear as surface patterning on fabric sculptures and become the subject as they are translated into appliquéd fabric banners, and subsequent works. Gelardi’s work in design and manufacturing serves as research and a site for creative collaborations with other artists, often translating ideas and images from the studio into commercial products. Karen has been awarded residencies at Surf Point, Hewnoaks Artist Colony and the Quimby Colony and received grants from the Maine Arts Commission and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. Karen has exhibited her work at Coleman Burke and Curator galleries in New York, Northern-Southern in Texas, and widely throughout Maine including the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Able Baker Gallery, Perimeter, Interloc, Space Gallery, and the Map Room.

Hilary Irons is a painter who has lived and worked in Portland, Maine for the past decade. Hilary received her MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art in 2008, and maintains a studio at the Space Studios building. Her paintings deal with the visual window of the Landscape (and Nature), as seen through the competing lenses of observational realism and decorative or abstract application of form. In addition to her studio practice, Hilary is the exhibitions director for the University of New England.

Juliet Karelsen was raised in New York City and has lived in Maine for many years. She is a multi-media artist and curator who received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Based on observation of “the real,” she makes work that has magical and fantastical elements. Fabricated in fiber and man-made materials, the flowers, mosses, lichen and plants she creates allude to artificiality and human created circumstances (global warming, the greenhouse effect, climate change) while at the same time they describe through brilliant colors and textures what is at stake.