Geographies of a Shifting World

Kathline Carr + Vicki McKenna

September 30–October 25, 2020

SoWa First Friday Art Walk: Friday, October 2, 2020, 5–8PM (Artist Vicki McKenna will be in the gallery from 6–8PM)

“Geographies of a Shifting World,” features the work of Kathline Carr and Vicki McKenna. Carr and McKenna share an interest in elemental landforms and geological processes. Carr’s drawings, paintings, and monotypes are in conversation with McKenna’s photography-based prints. They implicitly share an interest in human interaction with the natural world. Their current work has a common focus of climate change. Carr utilizes multiples and repetitious mark-making allowing patterns, gestures, and forms to represent her feelings of despair and hopelessness about current climate. McKenna’s photo illustrations combine multiple images intended to collapse present and future into one image that suggests the result of sea level rise.

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Kathline Carr

Image: Drift (detail)

Image: Drift (detail)

Kathline Carr’s paintings, drawings and monotype prints are derived from closely observed geological features, folded into a process-based abstraction. The stylized mountain drawings on cloth and paper are drawn of small linear marks, and these refer not only to tonal gradation, but of the accumulation of steps that makes up a hike through mountainous terrain.

Carr earned a BFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, VT, with concentrations in Visual Arts and Feminist Philosophy, and holds an MFA in Visual Arts from The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. An author as well as visual artist, her recent book Miraculum Monstrum (Red Hen Press), won the Clarissa Dalloway Book Prize from the AROHO Foundation and was an Award Finalist in the "Fiction: Cross Genre" category of the 2017 and 2018 Best Book Awards. In addition to AROHO, her work has been supported by grants from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, Assets for Artists and she has exhibited her art in New York City, Boston, New England and Canada. She lives and works in the Berkshires and is a Core Member at Fountain Street.

Carr Artist Statement

Vicki McKenna

Image: Cape Hedge, Rockport, MA (detail)

Image: Cape Hedge, Rockport, MA (detail)

Vicki McKenna creates images that are meant as harbingers from the future. They present the intertwining of environments as sea level rises. The selection of locations to photograph is informed by maps of projected sea level rise of 6 feet, a possibility by 2100. Each photo illustration is a montage of two or more images with one representing the current environment and the other images representing a possible future.

McKenna earned an ALB in Natural Sciences from Harvard University and a PhD in Geological Sciences from Brown University. While teaching she started taking photographs of geologic features to use as examples in class. Soon she became challenged by the task of representing a three dimensional world with an engaging, two-dimensional image. McKenna studied photography at the New England School of Photography, the Photography Atelier at the Griffin Museum, and Maine Media Workshops. McKenna has exhibited throughout New England and along the East Coast in solo, two-person and group shows, including at the Firehouse Center for the Arts, the Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA, the Cambridge Art Association, Cambridge, MA, PhotoPlace Gallery, Burlington, VT, and the Kiernan Gallery, Lexington, VA. She has taught a freshman seminar focused on photography at M.I.T. McKenna works from Riverwandering Studio in Newton, MA. She is a Core Member at Fountain Street.

McKenna Sea Change Statement