Image in header: C.J. Lori, “Take Me With You“
April 21 – May 21, 2022
Presented at the Kathryn Schultz Gallery & Online
Participating Artists: C.J. Lori, Robin MacDonald-Foley, Beverly Rippel, Jane Sherrill
Curated by: Robin MacDonald-Foley
Closing Reception: Wednesday, May 18, 6:00-8:00pm at the Kathryn Schultz Gallery Save your spot!
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About | In the Presence of Trees
Trees play a central role in the lives of human beings collectively, sheltering and nourishing us physically and spiritually. Changing with seasonal climates, they provide vital habitats and food for wildlife, beautify our landscape, and define our living spaces. They can evoke metaphysical connections transforming all living matter, and have been worshiped in sacred rituals such as tree burials, serving as symbols of reincarnation. They die and scatter, succumb to erosion along our coasts, fall to violent storms, or are harvested for important necessities.
Some trees stand tall after decades, growing over a hundred years old, with some documented to live thousands of years. A world without trees is unimaginable—their qualities are essential to our existence. Throughout time, trees have provided powerful themes for artists. Through painting, photography, sculpture, literature and performance, artists’ connections to trees transform us through their creative interpretations.
Curated by Robin MacDonald-Foley, In the Presence of Trees, personalizes a journey into our relationships with trees through the artists’ visions. The collaboration connects individual perspectives through painting, mixed media, photography, and performance, in recreated, real, and imagined tree forms.
About the Curator | Robin MacDonald-Foley
Robin MacDonald-Foley is a multifaceted artist who prefers working outdoors and considers the natural environment her studio. She is inspired by landscape and the rhythms of nature, from close and distal views, and the endless shapes, textures, and colors along her path. The subtleties and extremes she witnesses have all been part of her reworking of visual imagery in various art forms, including stone and photography.
Climate change has had an impact on Robin’s subject matter. The Boston harbor islands, central to her life, are where she spends many hours over summers documenting the coastal trees and interior islands. In her photographic series, When Trees Cry, she depicts the tide’s encroachment of the bluffs, the shore giving way to the rising sea. Although disheartened as coastal storms add to the severity of erosion at a rapid rate, Robin conveys a sense of beauty in her arrangements of weathered stone, and images of tree decay where “bones” are what remains. Robin’s visual stories seek to reveal the past, present, and the unknown.
Robin received her BFA from The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. She is the recipient of a 2019 Boston Harbor Islands Artist in Residence, as well as Mission Hill Fenway Trust Grants for art workshops. Robin is represented by Galatea Fine Art, in Boston’s Art & Design District
In the Presence of Trees Performance: Jessi Stegall & Ilya Vidrin
Bridging together these art forms through modern sculptural-like movements, Stegall and Vidrin personify the life of trees, opening our senses to new ways of seeing and feeling art, as it unfolds in present time.
Filmed by Sue Murad