WITC HGRASS September 10 - October 30, 2021 1
WITC HGRASS
September 10 - October 30, 2021 featuring Josephine Chase Karen Gelardi Hilary Irons Juliet Karelsen
CURATORIAL STATEMENT The four artists featured in Witchgrass respond to the intricacies, resiliency, metaphor, fantasy, and spirituality they observe in a vast botanical ecosystem. The title of the exhibit is based on Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Glück's powerful pleading poem of love and pain from the point of view of the natural world. Like Glück, these artists are moved by the beauty, perfection, imperfection, and poetry of the natural world and what is at stake while they simultaneously comment in their unique voices on the ravages the planet continues to endure.
JOSEPHINE C HASE Josephine Chase is a visual artist from Burlington, Vermont. Her areas of exploration include expanded field painting, art historical analysis and cultivating, capturing, and reframing domestic spaces. Chase’s work is focused on hybridity, locating function, cultural signals, and collective memory through the use of inherited readymades that are remixed into paintings and installations. In her writing, Chase interrogates the Black curatorial experience and challenges white, Euro-centric notions of representation. Chase is also the co-founder of Mama Pepper Co., a Liberian specialty food producer.
Chase graduated from the Maine College of Art in 2020 with a BFA in Painting. Her art historical research focused on the practice of West African studio portraiture as an investigative tool, positing the commodification and dissemination of imagery as an expansive ground for Black art and its discourse. Chase is a current final year candidate for a Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art from the Vermont College of Fine Art.
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“Passengers are two pieces from a series of work that began in late 2019 as Chase processed the salvaged remains of an abandoned family car. Motivated by the impact that artifacts of migration and relocation have on our landscapes, the interior and exterior lives, and the poetry of wanting function where it does not exist - the artist used the intuitive and repetitive process of free-handing botanical shapes, and layering to obscure and break with pattern to allow the silent space of the car to be amplified between its previous function and its reanimation. The piece featured in the window, a 1976 MG, has been repurposed into a 3-dimensional painting. Similar to Passengers the work is a continuance on the artist’s material meditation over cars left behind as family members would migrate away, leaving the original parts without their original function. Chase, inspired by domestic fabrics and wallpapers as sources of imagery layers pattern over pattern over pattern motivated by the way the repetition of an act of mark-making signals to collective visual memories.”
- Josephine Chase
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KAREN GELARDI Karen Gelardi a Maine-based artist working across multiple mediums to model resiliency and adaptation found in nature and industry. Using handmade and industrial production techniques she creates systems of pattern, modularity, assembly / disassembly, variation and mutation. Observational and invented nature drawings appear as surface patterning on fabric sculptures and become the subject as they are translated into appliquéd fabric banners, and subsequent works. Gelardi’s work in design and manufacturing serves as research and a site for creative collaborations with other artists, often translating ideas and images from the studio into income producing products. Karen has been awarded residencies at Surf Point, Hewnoaks Artist Colony and the Quimby Colony and received grants from the Maine Arts Commission and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. Karen has exhibited her work at Coleman Burke and Curator galleries in New York, Northern-Southern in Texas, and widely throughout Maine including the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Able Baker Gallery, Perimeter, Interloc, Space Gallery, and the Map Room.
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“I am interested in resiliency— what it looks like, what it feels like, and how to promote it. By observing nature and industry, I have found that modular units, reproduction, variety, and mutation are essential elements in a resilient system. In my studio, I operate within this framework as a way of modeling or putting these observations into practice. Repeatable drawing units, handmade and industrial production techniques, acceptance of imperfection and damage as a way to reveal inherent qualities of adaptability, translating an image, technique or idea from one medium to the next— all of these strategies are used in my approach to building images, objects, and environments.”
- Karen Gelardi
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HILARY IRONS Hilary Irons is a painter who has lived and worked in Portland, Maine for the past decade. Hilary received her MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art in 2008, and maintains a studio at the Space Studios building. Her paintings deal with the visual window of the Landscape (and Nature), as seen through the competing lenses of observational realism and decorative or abstract application of form. In addition to her studio practice, Hilary is the exhibitions director for the University of New England.
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“My practice is anchored in the tradition of finding transcendent meaning in the non-verbal language of observational drawing and painting. My studio life revolves around focusing on shapes in the natural world that counter the human need for pattern and clarity, through the disruption and surprise of the non-human form. Searching for the rupture that comes when abstract pattern (or illustrational shorthand) and observation intersect is the foundation of my practice. Looking for visual forms that speak with the most intense non-verbal clarity, I return again and again to our neighbors, the plants. Plants communicate with each other— their plant family, friends, and enemies—through processes that are invisible to us. What they do offer us is shelter, medicine, nourishment, beauty, ugliness, poison, and resistance. When I am using imagery based on plant forms, I begin by working from direct observation. This ensures that the forms that only the plant can display—forms that my mind can’t generate through imagination, and that a photograph hasn’t simplified—are transmitted into the image. Through enveloping ourselves in those specific non-animal shapes, we can sometimes start to hear the message that the plants are broadcasting.”
- Hilary Irons
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JULIET KARELSEN Juliet Karelsen was raised in New York City and has lived in Maine for many years. She is a multimedia artist and curator who received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Based on observation of “the real,” she makes work that has magical and fantastical elements. Fabricated in fiber and manmade materials, the flowers, mosses, lichen and plants she creates allude to artificiality and human created circumstances (global warming, the greenhouse effect, climate change) while at the same time they describe through brilliant colors and textures what is at stake.
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“In all its various forms and configurations, my work cross references painting, stitching, rug making, embroidery, abstract art, fantasy, landscape, textile, miniature worlds, psychedelics and even science – from botany to mycology to planetary and solar – touching on the micro and macro scales. I am interested in making work that has magical and fantastical elements that is inspired by the deep beauty and spiritual world of flowers and plants. Though not overtly political, my work addresses what is at stake. In a world where nature and science have become politicized and daily interaction with plants and trees and flowers and moss and lichen etc. is increasingly rare and disappearing, my work points to the importance of taking the time to slow down, notice and protect the magnificence of what we have. The mirrors and kaleidoscopic elements in my work create a psychedelic component that references the theory of the infinite while simultaneously pointing to the fact that an infinite reserve of our forests, flowers, plants, trees, bees, glaciers, animals, birds, seas and air is not a reality. It is indeed a fantasy.”
- Juliet Karelsen
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INSTALLATION IMAGES
FEATURED WORKS all photos by Kyle Dubay
Front Cover: Karen Gelardi, Greenbelt Pathway, Pathway, colored pencil and ink on paper, 15” x 15”, 2009 Back Cover: Juliet Karelsen, Mixed Flowers Bees Love Chair, embroidered cyanotype on painted antique wooden chair, 39” x 30” x 30”, 2021
1. Josephine Chase, Passengers I and II installed with citrus pattern in windows 2. Josephine Chase, Passengers I, I, acrylic on metal, 4’ x 4’, 2019 3. Josephine Chase, Passengers II, II, acrylic on metal, 4’ x 4’, 2019 4. Josephine Chase, Painted GM I, I, digital photograph, dimensions vary, 2021 5. Josephine Chase, Painted GM II, II, digital photograph, dimensions vary, 2021 6. Detail of Josephine Chase’s Passengers I 7. Detail of Josephine Chase’s Passengers II 8. Karen Gelardi, Ground Cover with Components, Components, ink on paper, plywood, ink on fabric, thread, denim insulation, 38” x 58” x 2”, 2021 (components 2007) 9. Installation detail of Karen Gelardi’s work 10. Karen Gelardi, Esso Esso,, Ink on paper, 30” x 40” framed, 2011 and Drawing Drawing,, Ink on fabric, rope, size variable, 2017 11. Detail of Karen Gelardi’s Drawing 12. Karen Gelardi, Esso Esso,, Ink on paper, 30” x 40” framed, 2011 13. Karen Gelardi, Greenbelt Pathway, Pathway, colored pencil and ink on paper, 15” x 15”, 2009 14. Installation detail of Karen Gelardi’s Components Components,, ink fabric, thread, denim insulation, size variable, 2007 15. Hilary Irons, The Bobcat, Bobcat, oil acrylic, and marble dust on panel, 16” x 20”, 2021 16. Hilary Irons, Haze 1, 1, colored pencil on paper, 9.5” x 9.5”, 2021 17. Hilary Irons, Haze 2, 2, colored pencil on paper, 9” x 9”, 2021 18. Hilary Irons, Depth Charges, Charges, cut paper and colored pencil, Size varies, 2021 19. Detail of Hilary Irons’ Depth Charges
20. Hilary Irons, Trout Lily and Rose, Rose, colored pencil and acrylic on paper, 11” x 14”, 2021 21. Hilary Irons, Home Is The Hunter, Hunter, oil, acrylic, and marble dust on panel, 12” x 16”, 2021
22. Hilary 22. Hilary Irons, Teasel Lantern, Lantern, oil, acrylic, and marble dust on panel, 10” x 10”, 2021 23. Installation 23. Installation of Juliet Karelsen’s work 24. Installation detail of Juliet Karelsen’s Flowers Bees Love Dome series. From left to right: Plaid Lotus Lotus,, assorted fiber under glass dome, 14” high x 12” in diameter, 2021; Monarch Blossom, Blossom, assorted fiber under glass dome, 9” high x 8” in diameter, 2020; French Knot Sunflower, Sunflower, assorted fiber under glass dome, 12” high x 14” in diameter, 2020 25. Installation of Juliet Karelsen’s work 26. Juliet Karelsen, Glitter Nose Gay, Gay, 7.5” high x 6.5” in diameter, assorted fibers under glass dome, 2020 27. Juleit Karelsen, Flowers Bees Love (Rosa Rugosa), Rugosa), photo cyanotype and embroidery on antique linen, 12” x 12”, 2021 28. Juliet Karelsen, Joe Pye Weed Chair, Chair, embroiderd cyanotype on wooden chair, 2021 29. Juliet Karelsen, Mixed Flowers Bees Love Chair, Chair, embroidered cyanotype on painted antique wooden chair, 39” x 30” x 30”, 2021
If you are interested in any of the works in this catalog, please reach out to us. We would be happy to connect you with the artists or share additional information with you. Connect with us: (207) 805-1835 | info@speedwellprojects.com
630 Forest Avenue, Portland, ME 04101 info@speedwellprojects.com | www.speedwellprojects.com
SPEEDWELL projects promotes the creative work of women who have demonstrated a lifelong commitment to their artistic practice; we support women of all races, ethnicities, sexualities, gender identities, classes, and abilities through exhibitions, residencies, publications, and documentaries.