Opening Reception: May 2, 2025 | 6–9pm

In the main gallery celebrate the opening of Slow Loops: Luis Arnías. In the Project Room explore the work, Changing Seasons, Safe Travels: Aileen Erickson.

Next door in the BCA Artist Studios Building from 5–8 pm, current artists in the BCA Studio Residency will open their studio doors to the public in a building-wide Open House!

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Always a happy beachcomber from childhood on, for the last fifteen years or so my work has been based on objects I find on the beach. So my subject matter not only spiritually focuses on nature, but nature is its actual base.

I place the beach objects on flat, square or rectangular panels. Sometimes, these assemblages stand on their own to be glued and hung on a wall, but more often they serve solely as models for my paintings. Besides the collecting, what interests me is the objects’ three dimensionality versus the panels’ flatness; the transformation on the canvas from small to large; and the assemblages’ juxtaposition of wishful contained order with the less defined surrounding space or cosmos.

The heavy black outlines, placement, shapes, layers, color, texture, composition, and marks encompass an abstract reach, an attempted distillation focusing on mood and personal experience.

The square or rectangular shapes of the panels may be a nod to traditional windows looking out or in or to traditional art hanging on a wall. The floating in space might be in part the influence of two islands: Great Inagua in the Bahamas where I spent my early childhood and an intergenerational island in Maine where I still beach comb.

Four of the five paintings in Seasons were painted in 2025. Changing Seasons, the fifth and largest painting, was completed towards the end of 2024 and instigated a slight shift in direction. The assemblages still float in space, but discarded shapes are more visible underneath the surface. These muted mistakes now contribute more prominently to the finished whole. The palette, with some exceptions, focuses more on blacks, whites, and low-key colors. The black outlines are more informal and varied. Overall, there is more informality and looseness, more linear depiction, and fewer solid masses.

I live with my husband in Cambridge, MA where we raised a daughter (and two dogs sequentially) and where we continue to live. I am a member of the BCA Studio Residency program from mid 2022 until mid 2025.

—Aileen Erickson