Sponsored by BioMed Realty
November 1 – 24, 2023
Presented at CAA @ Canal, 650 E. Kendall Street, Cambridge MA
Hours: Wednesday – Friday, 12:00-4:00pm
Curated by Michael Bourque
Exhibiting Artists | Michael Bourque • Nathan Bourque • Madeleine Lord • Derrick Te Paske
The Cambridge Art Association (CAA) is pleased to announce What If… Why Not?, a Members Curatorial Exhibit, featuring Michael Bourque, Nathan Bourque, Madeleine Lord, and Derrick Te Paske. This exhibit is part of our new Members’ Curatorial Series, an annual opportunity for members of the CAA to curate an exhibit of three or more artists.
About What If… Why Not?
Two painters and two sculptors push past norms and traditional limits in their chosen media.
Michael Bourque has had a parallel award-winning career as a commercial interior designer. He has often designed spaces for corporate art collections. Locally, he designed spaces in many of the Boston landmark towers whose influence is evident in his impasto paintings with geometric designs and closely managed color palettes. He lives in the Fort Point Channel and walks daily throughout the city allowing its landscape to feed his unique muse.
Nathan Bourque defies the restrictions of being a quadriplegic, who has no use of his fingers, to paint intricate abstracts with brushes, cups or other implements taped to his hands. The results are like solar systems of spatter, circular imprint, drip and stencil lines released from an infinite supply of imagination and love of color. He is the embodiment of “Why Not”.
Madeleine Lord has worked with found steel scrap for over thirty years. Her works are alive with movement, defying the static material they are composed of. She employs a classical drawing style as well as abstraction. She composes with lines, forms and found color, all welded into an implied narrative. The Strongman was created with CAA member Bob Hesse’s collection of Rice Barton wooden forms and his wizardry with dowels and epoxy.
Derrick Te Paske roams tree removal waste yards to score black walnut, cherry or yew logs to transform by turning on a lathe or by carving. He draws from a deep well of knowledge of prehistoric art to pay homage to the works of ancient artists and artisans. Playful titles, use of contemporary hardware in surface patterns defy the usual. While the figure and grain in the source wood speak to him, the results often exude elegance, totemic importance and gentle wit.
Each artist’s body of work stands alone but together they create a lively visual conversation as they form visual bridges in metal, wood, color and pattern that leap across the gallery. There is an implied jazz ensemble taking turns with exciting extemporaneous riffs as the works take risks and applaud each other for doing so.
EVENTS AT CAA @ CANAL
- Opening Reception: Wednesday, November 1 from 5-7pm
About Michael Bourque | Michael Bourque is an artist living in Boston, MA. In his award-winning career, he has pursued coterminous interests in design, painting and photography. Today Michael is discovering new connections between all three creative media with a focus on painting.
His paintings emanate from the intersection of art and design, involving a thought-provoking mixture of abstraction, repetition, and improvisation. Lines adhere to the rules of geometry: mathematically sensible angles, and shapes that work together perfectly.
His use of color is layered and flashes of color are allowed to peek through the pattern to add visual interest. Colors are made brighter by juxtaposition to unexpected colors and strong shapes are made stronger with the heavy application of paint. The effect is to invigorate the entire work, and to create rich surface textures.
About Nathan Bourque | Nathan Bourque’s path to becoming an artist is both monumental and heroic. At age 22, he sustained a C3-4 spinal cord injury (paralysis from the chest down). He had just graduated from U-Mass Amherst and was a semi-pro soccer player.
In spite of this adversity, he redirected his life and went on to earn a Master’s in Education and become a college Math Professor. He loved working with the students and had a special gift for instruction. About 5 years ago, he began experiencing epileptic seizures, a previously dormant consequence of his injury. Almost overnight, it destroyed his teaching career.
Once again, he was faced with reinventing himself. With so many doors closed to him, it wasn’t easy but he transitioned to a new career as an artist. As evidenced by his body of work, he enjoys buddings success. Untrained in the arts (although late mom was an artist as well as his dad) his work is particularly gifted in its honesty. There is no attempt to mimic other famous artist names. His art comes straight from the heart.
About Madeleine Lord | I’ve been making sculpture with steel for over 30 years. The late Jacques Kaplan of the Caboose Gallery in Kent Connecticut included my work in an exhibit titled: Avant Garde Classicism. I accept that category whole heartedly.
My subject matter ranges from whimsey to witness. My process starts with a “treasure hunt” in a metal recycle facility near Boston. I select scraps that have interest in form, color or both.
The scraps lead the way to initial drawings then complete a work over time. Executive Director Mim Fawcett at Attleboro Arts Museum said recently: “I think you make paintings with your metal”.
About Derrick Te Paske | During my many years as a university professor of media studies, I was primarily concerned with theoretical principles and digital methods. In purposeful contrast, my art has always involved wood and other tangible materials, employs tools and processes which are decidedly low tech, and results in unique and very physical objects.
That doesn’t really surprise me, because ever since I was a boy in rural Iowa, I have enjoyed making things with my hands. So far as I can remember it’s as much fun as when I was a boy, and by now I also find such work to be ecological, therapeutic, even redemptive. If it sometimes appears to represent what I call “inefficiency in the pursuit of the unnecessary,” that’s a happily embraced perspective and an act of quiet defiance. It is deeply gratifying in ways I can’t easily explain. Some of the pleasure, though, is surely that it makes me feel connected with ancient artists and artisans–-across cultures and throughout the world—who routinely made things which were more carefully crafted and beautiful than they really needed to be.
By now, my work has come to explore the boundaries between being and meaning. Some pieces simply “are what they are”. Others suggest a narrative or invite dialogue with viewers. But all in all, as I go about making things, I feel both joy and a sort of reverence in being part of the creative continuum which our ancient ancestors started at least 300,000 years ago. My work invites others to join me in those feelings.
As a thumbnail artistic statement: “I have always been interested in classical forms, the ancient, the so-called primitive, and the strange.”
Image in header courtesy of Nathan Bourque