Mazmanian Gallery hosts “Shift - Space - Return”

Alexis Schlesinger / THE GATEPOST

The Mazmanian Gallery held an opening reception for “Shift - Space - Return,” a multimedia group exhibition about the use of language in art, on Oct. 6. It is on display in the gallery from Oct. 1 through Oct. 31.

The exhibition was curated by faculty Yumi Park Huntington, art history professor, Keri Straka, art professor, and Ellie Krakow, director of the Mazmanian Gallery as well as student interns Marcus Falcão and Eliza Gaston from an open call for artists based in Framingham, said Krakow.

“This is the first time we’ve ever done an open call for artists who are based in Framingham. … I had this brainstorm last year. I was like, ‘How do we get our communities to cross over?’ And I’m very much enjoying watching [that] tonight,” Krakow said.

Curators chose five artists from the open call submissions who fit well together to create and fit a theme to show off the quality of Framingham artists and did studio visits to examine their works and select specific pieces, said Falcão. 

“It was a very difficult decision, and we were delighted with how it turned out. We ended up creating a themed show with all artists who work with language in some way. 

“We thought it was a really interesting throughline that left enough openness for all the works to stand in their own meaning but also pulled everyone together in a nice way,” she added.

Ileana Doble-Hernandez, Mary Kostman, Janet Montecalvo, David Roane, and Alice Ridley all had various art pieces showcased in the gallery.

Doble-Hernandez’s “Pollage” (Political Collage) is a collection of political artworks constructed from magazine cutouts and placed in lightboxes, she said.

Her work is meant to emulate the experience of scrolling through various social media platforms, Doble-Hernandez said.

“It started during the pandemic in 2020 because I was very overwhelmed by looking at a lot of things on the screen. Experience mediates how we look at the world and a lot of the information we get, and that was the experience at the time,” she said.

She subscribed to magazines to scroll through another medium. Certain messages and images she found in magazines resonated with her, so she decided to preserve them, she said.

After making the collages, she “put them in these very thin light boxes that resemble devices like tablets, and with these, I take back that idea of how the information that may take over your opinions comes from the things that we see on the scripts,” she said.

She views every collage as a self-portrait of her own experience scrolling through social media, she said.

“What I really like about this exercise is that, … it’s like processing everything that we’re reading and putting it in a visual way in which people can see it and say either agree or disagree, but then we can start a conversation and talk about these things that are affecting everyone,” she said.

Kostman is a printmaker whose art series, “Who sees?” examined the uses of masks, veils, and face coverings and their relationship to women and played with various different textures through the printing press, she said.

“I had been in Morocco, which is a [nearly] 100% Muslim country, and so I took some chiffon fabric that was similar to what a lot of women use there for their veils. I was just experimenting, like, ‘Can I get the feeling of it?’ And I could, so then I made faces out of various materials,” she said.

Kostman incorporated Braille, the impression of corrugated cardboard, and a wedding veil as textures in her pieces. “I was using it for texture. … It’s two different languages speaking to each other,” she said.

“I had these images of robed and veiled women. … I was just exploring how head or face coverings impact people when you see them, you know? Do the people wearing them feel disempowered? Do they feel empowered? Because they don’t necessarily have to show what they’re feeling,” she said.

Montecalvo said her art is a documentation of her life experiences and surroundings, specifically signs.

“I used to be a sign painter when I first started my commercial career. … I still love signs, especially the old ones, so I tend to do just signs or a scene of the signs that kind of draw me in,” she said.

Her experience illustrating children’s books makes her add story elements to otherwise still pictures of signs, she said.

“I couldn’t just do the sign. I have to have the pigeons checking into the motel and the one pigeon over on the side jealous because he’s alone,” she said of her artwork “The Siesta.”

Montecalvo said her work brings her happiness, and she hopes others find joy in it too.

She said, “There is rust and stuff. I know people always want to paint beautiful things, but to me, there’s a history in the old things. … To me, it’s character. It’s not just a sign - it’s what the sign has been through, and I like the color.

“All these old neon signs are getting destroyed, and I just think somebody has to mention or document them because there really are artists who bend the glass and decide what gas goes in to make the colors,” she added.

Roane’s pieces are autobiographical and all revolve around the idea of selfhood and self-identity, he said.

“Since memory serves this narrative function for me, I felt like I could claim my story through the process of claiming my memories. I feel like art is just a mode for representing and communicating that story. It’s really just functioning as a language,” he said.

Roane said his primary goal through art is conveying a story, and the materials he utilizes serve that function.

He used the cloth of a canvas without the wooden bars to create one of his pieces. “I decided to leave the cloth - the canvas - hanging in order to bring attention to its material essence as a cloth because cloth serves as a perfect analogy for the structure of stories,” he said.

Roane’s artwork is his own language, and he views it like a dictionary, he said. 

“If you think about each of these as visual words, then you compare them together and group them into larger statements. Visual words, visual phrases, visual sentences, visual chapters, and ultimately, the book, which becomes the story of my life,” he added.

Ridley, a Framingham State alumna, said her art is representative of the realm between dreams and waking, calling them a “dreamspace.”

She describes her work as “kind of somber and lonely. I think I’ve been trying to fight against that a little bit. … They’re getting more abstracted,” she said. “The paintings are subtle and intentionally try to be familiar and ambiguous,” she said in her artist's statement.

Ridley said her art is developed slowly over time, and she likes to continuously add on to and build from pieces until figures begin to form from abstract shapes.

“For me, it’s really about the process. Coming back to it and then transforming the paintings as they go. … It’s more about the process of making the painting than it is about the final painting. Oftentimes, it’s just like suddenly they’re done,” she said.