Image in header courtesy of exhibiting artist, Ed Christie
January 7 – February 1, 2020
At Kathryn Schultz Gallery
Curated by Cathleen Daley, Co-Founder/Director of Room 83 Spring
Click here to download the press release
Reception: Thursday, January 9, 6-8pm RSVP
Curatorial Walkthrough: Saturday, February 1, 1-2pm RSVP
Soft Shoulder is an invited curatorial exhibit curated by Cathleen Daley (Co-Founder/Director of Room 83 Spring). As a companion to Soft Shoulder, Cathleen has also juried Broken Beauty, an exhibit of Cambridge Art Association Member work presented at CAA’s University Place Gallery.
About Soft Shoulder | Organic, unstructured, and non-conforming, Soft Shoulder artists present a flexible address of surface and structure. Engaged in informal and off-kilter strategies, the non-representational works are relational and familiar. Ambiguous and consciously awkward, the work derails notions of finished, fixed or known, on purpose — always a little off-road, yet en route. Like the unpaved patch of dirt along side the highway where macadam meets gravel loose and soft and the traveller slows to a stop, Soft Shoulder posits the state of in-between, at the interchange of becoming and spent with an emphasis on sensate materiality.
Common to all, is a prioritized sense of touch, which lends an empathic and anthropomorphized read to the work through palpably made processes. In each, a sense of presence is evoked, a posture assumed, a manner of being evoked. Draped, stuffed, slumped, or stacked, the action is performative and humorous in a forlorn sort of way. From socks to stones, shop rags to tarps, Soft Shoulder artists are invested in an expanded range of hybrid craft, fiber, painterly, and sculptural practices combining traditional and everyday materials to ends fearless, vulnerable, and decidedly human.
Featured Artists
Liza Bingham
Ed Christie
Samantha Fields
Valérie Gobeil
Hilde-Kari Guttormsen
Marta Kaemmer
Meg Lipke
Diana Jean Puglisi
Josh Richards
Jason Rohlf
About the Curator | Cathleen Daley is an artist, writer, curator and co-founder of Room 83 Spring, an artist-run project space in Watertown, MA. Established in 2014, Room 83 Spring presents thematic concept-driven group shows that entwine disciplines in fresh visual conversation.
Born and raised in Buffalo, NY, Cathleen Daley’s artistic perspective grew to include a melding of high, low, and compound aesthetics. At the time, Buffalo an industrial city in decline, was home to a reverent, hardworking and artistically tolerant people, largely immigrants and their offspring with honed skills in the trades and domestic crafts – generations of handworkers. In this environment, as a young artist, she immersed herself in formative contrasts, from the superb collection of the Albright Knox Art Gallery … to the experimental boundary-blurring and interdisciplinary Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in its inception … to the personal workshops, sewing rooms and kitchens of family and friends. Daley’s own studio practice and curatorial impulse embrace such a spectrum of expression and an ongoing commitment to vibrant inclusive exchange.
Currently Boston-based, Ms. Daley holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She has actively participated as a mentor, juror, review board panelist, and visiting artist for MassArt, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Concord, Cambridge, and Duxbury Art Associations, as well as studio visits and exhibition consulting with individual artists. Her essays and independent reviews of exhibitions have been published at Big Red + Shiny.
Represented by Provincetown’s Alden Gallery, Cathleen Daley’s paintings and installations have been presented in numerous museums, universities, and galleries, including OK Harris, NY; New Britain Museum of American Art; Fitchburg, Provincetown and Nassau County Art Museums. Reviews of her work have been published in the Boston Globe, Art New England and artscope. Her studio is in Waltham MA.
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