A Fountain Street core member exhibition hosts a talk back session
The Fountain Street Gallery in the South End opened its newest exhibit “The Space for Maybe” on Jan. 5, and it will be running until Feb. 13. Curated by Virginia Mahoney and Miller Opie, the show features artwork by core members and celebrates “moments of artistic creation.”
On Jan. 29, the space will hold a Curator Q&A, from 3-4 p.m. The exhibit is meant to tell the stories of the core members’ artistic practices, and the different forms of art on display include painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, mixed media, and video. On the gallery’s website, a description reads:
“It highlights turning points in the unique dialogue between maker and experience, in which action within and around the process of creating inspires thinking, envisioning, and new ideas. Artists are pushed and pulled by their practices, in directions that they don’t always aspire to, triggering imaginative new ideas and new work. This exhibition honors that space inhabited by artists’ minds and bodies as they research, work and think.”
Mahoney described what the name of the exhibit, “The Space for Maybe,” means, in a curator’s statement:
“Artists are pushed and pulled by their practice in directions that they don’t always aspire to, triggering imaginative new ideas and new work. As Assistant Curator Miller Opie said, the ‘…voice in the back of our heads that makes us pick up this and not that…’ often determines the course of making. ‘The Space for Maybe’ is the place and the object, the medium and the message, the thought and the action, the materials and the process in an art practice. It is a state of reverie, the origin of the artist’s ideas, and the way in which those ideas and the path to creating a painting, experience, sculpture, film, installation, poem, play, whatever – evolve into realization. As artist Denise Driscoll wrote, we are often ‘walking the fine line between being in charge and simply being present’ as the work unfolds. And for Lior Neiger, ‘every shape that I cut, the negative and the positive can have an equal impact on me and each opens the way to a different creative opportunity.’ Artists are always seeing possibilities because, as the late Virgil Abloh said, ‘You can’t mentally stay still. You can’t not challenge yourself.'”
Shira Laucharoen is a reporter based in Boston. She currently serves as the assistant director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. In the past she has written for Sampan newspaper, The Somerville Times, Scout Magazine, Boston Magazine, and WBUR.
