The September 2024 show in Calais features 24 Vermont artists whose work on the theme of illumination ranges from outdoor sculpture to ceramics to painting.
Sep 11, 2024
by Alice Dodge
Kents Corner State Historic Site in Calais is a picture-perfect Vermont setting: a 19th-century brick tavern with four chimneys, a weathered barn, rolling hills and a 200-year-old wooden church within walking distance up the dirt road. Not exactly what most people imagine when they think of contemporary art.
Yet every September for 17 years, curators Cornelia Emlen, Allyson Evans and Vermont state curator David Schutz, all residents of Kents Corner, have assembled one of the most anticipated shows on the calendar. They have done it again with “Illuminated Worlds,” on view Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through October 6. It features dozens of works by 24 Vermont artists, none of whom have shown at the Kent before.
In choosing this year’s theme, the curators initially thought about books, Emlen said. A common suggestion they received was climate change, a dauntingly large topic for a largely volunteer-run effort. Then they visited Norwich book artist Stephanie Wolff, who talked to them about illuminated manuscripts. “The word ‘illuminated’ kept coming up with different people,” Emlen said, “which got us really excited, thinking about the intersection of books and weather and all these different threads.”
Wolff’s own works in the show include delicate artist books such as “Of the Air,” featuring approximately inch-square watercolor paintings of the sky with printed descriptors: “Tolerably cold,” “Excessively warm,” “Arcadian.” Those terms come from entries in a 19th-century woman’s diary, which Wolff also presents as embroidered text on a series of linen “pages,” illuminated with tiny quilt squares.
This work’s treatment of the weather as both quotidian and vital is an undercurrent running through the show. Weather is even embedded in the historic building: Penciled graffiti in one of the upstairs rooms reads, “Jan 18 — 1913, PM — rains hard no snow nor has there been enough for sledding, road’s all ice.”
Like blown-up versions of the skies in Wolff’s book, Michael Abrams‘ paintings are tangibly humid. “Walking Clouds,” five feet high, meets visitors as they enter the gallery and presents a deep azure sky over a hazy suggestion of landscape. Unlike Wolff’s minute descriptions, Abrams’ weather engulfs the viewer.
On the opposite wall, “Torn Curtain,” a 50-by-120-inch work by Gerry Bergstein, presents a different kind of sublime. On grommeted, pasted-together paper, a tornado of swirling black lines describes a galaxy-level apocalypse. Ultramarine blue peeks through apparent tears, as does a drawing of the universe. The occasional disintegrating duomo-like building spirals off into space, and a couple of tiny construction guys can be seen just hanging out at what looks to be the end of time.
Bergstein has a number of works in the show, including the wall-size “Dithering Machines”. It’s on the second floor, in one of two rooms over the former general store that are easy for visitors to miss but well worth seeing. Misoo Bang‘s “Giantess” paintings, each three by four feet, loom powerful and large there, near Sabine Likhite‘s spiky, deliciously dangerous-looking sculptures. Valerie Hird‘s interactive works are like miniature stage sets made from books. They light up when the viewer turns a crank — perhaps the most literal interpretation of the show’s theme.
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