Curated by Zelana Davis and Randi Hopkins

About The Triggering Town: Details of Subtle Significance:

BCA is an active site for both art making and art exhibition, a fact that is showcased each year when the Mills Gallery presents work by artists with studios in its Artist Studios Building. This year, work by 27 artists – working in media including painting, performance, installation, printmaking, photography and drawing – is on view in a show that highlights the individual voices as well as points of community and interplay among this varied group.

The exhibition explores and celebrates the many places that art comes from. It draws its title from an essay by poet Richard Hugo (1923-1982), who recognized a deep interconnectedness between art’s reflection on the internal region of the individual and the external region of the natural world. This resonates with our commitment to sharing the intimate spirit of art with our community.

For many artists in this exhibition, the experience and memory of place can be seen as a jumping off or triggering point for the artist’s imagination. Chelsea, MA in the 21st century, Leningrad in the early 20th, Provincetown any time and the moon light years in the future are only a few of the places that are represented here, with landscapes that remember the past, fear the worst, link geography with text or lines to field studies.

It is the landscape of personal imagination that precipitates work by other artists, places where horses balance on swings and angels smoke. Social and political concerns, fascination with the lives of found objects and dedicated exploration of media from silk to cardboard also spur some of the work on view.  For each of these artists, the studio is a point of commonality, and also a point of singular departure.

Artists:

Leika Akiyama, Jon Amburg, Edie Bowers, David Lloyd Brown, Silvia Lopez Chavez, Basil El Halwagy, Aileen O. Erickson, Ruth Ginsberg-Place, Rebecca Rose Greene, Gisela Griffith, Alex Khomski, Kathleen A. Kneeland, Alexander Korman, Georgina Lewis, Marilyn Mase, Carol Monacelli, Lazaro Montano, Selina Narovlansky, David Reichert, Robert Rovenolt, Rani Sarin, Miriam Shenitzer, Konstantin Simun, Beverly Sky, David Addison Small, Sophie Truong, and Deborah Van Auten