“Right-sized” refers to adjusting something to an appropriate or optimal size. In Right-Sized, the third exhibition within Ways of Seeing, we explore collections through this lens. We’ve drawn inspiration from collectors who focus on intention and specificity—such as historic textiles, woven portraits, and Japanese baskets.
Herb and Dorothy Vogel, for example, a postal worker and a librarian, built a world-class collection of Minimalist and Conceptual art in their New York apartment, mindful of both affordability and space constraints. One artist noted that they would only purchase works they could transport home via subway or taxi. Similarly, Lloyd Cotsen, known for his diverse collections, including Chinese bronze mirrors, children’s books, and Noah’s arks, considered size in his creation of The Box Project, now housed at The Textile Museum at The George Washington University Museum For this project, Cotsen requested 36 artists to create three-dimensional works that fit within boxes measuring either 14 x 14 x 2 .5 inches or 23 x 14 x 2.5 inches. The goal was to observe how contemporary fiber artists navigated challenges related to physical restrictions and dimensions. In Right-Sized, we have selected works that adhere to specific parameters of small size, much like Cotsen’s project, while also considering affordability, akin to the Vogels’ approach.
Right-Sized is characterized by its diversity in materials, techniques, and approaches. The exhibition includes a variety of framed paper works—pleated, painted, printed, and collaged—alongside a salon wall of eclectic pieces, including sculptural works made from sisal, paper, linen, and hemp, a “weaving” of copper, “drawings” in stone, and a Japanese watercolor woodblock print (mokuhanga). We have assembled a grouping of cubes and spheres of everything from bark to jute to stainless steel and another of baskets of natural materials, each at least 12 inches high. Elsewhere In Right-Sized, viewers will find exquisite embroidery by Diane Itter, wood vessels by Markku Kosonen, willow sculpture by Lizzie Farey, and threads embedded in perspex by Laura Thomas.
With its eclectic assortment of more than 70 works, Right-Sized seeks to engage viewers’ impulses to classify, organize, and collect.
See what we have assembled, in person, or in the Ways of Seeing catalog:
Exhibition Details:
Ways of Seeing
exploring ways individuals envision and curate art collections
browngrotta arts
276 Ridgefield Road
Wilton, CT 06897
Gallery Dates/Hours:
Saturday, September 21st: 11am to 6pm [Opening & Artist Reception]
Sunday, September 22nd: 11am to 6pm (40 visitors/ hour)
Monday, September 23rd through Saturday,September 28th: 10am to 5pm (40 visitors/ hour)
Sunday, September 29th: 11am to 6pm [Final Day] (40 visitors/ hour)
| Schedule your visit at POSH. Safety protocols: Reservations strongly encouraged; No narrow heels please (barn floors) |
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Art & Identity: A Sense of Place
In our 2019 Art in the Barn exhibition, we asked artists to address the theme of identity. In doing so, several of the participants in Art + Identity: an international view, wrote eloquently about places that have informed their work. For Mary Merkel-Hess, that place is the plains of Iowa, which viewers can feel when viewing her windblown, bladed shapes. A recent work made a vivid red orange was an homage to noted author, Willa Cather’s plains’ description, “the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed,” a view that Merkel-Hess says she has seen.
The late Micheline Beauchemin traveled extensively from her native Montreal. Europe, Asia, the Middle East, all influenced her work but depictions of the St. Lawrence River were a constant thread throughout her career. The river, “has always fascinated me,” she admitted, calling it, “a source of constant wonder” (Micheline Beauchemin, les éditions de passage, 2009). “Under a lemon yellow sky, this river, leaded at certain times, is inhabited in winter, with ice wings without shadows, fragile and stubborn, on which a thousand glittering lights change their colors in an apparent immobility.” To replicate these effects, she incorporated unexpected materials like glass, aluminum and acrylic blocks that glitter and reflect light and metallic threads to translate light of frost and ice.
Mérida, Venezuela, the place they live, and can always come back to, has been a primary influence on Eduardo Portillo’s and Maria Davila’s way of thinking, life and work. Its geography and people have given them a strong sense of place. Mérida is deep in the Andes Mountains, and the artists have been exploring this countryside for years. Centuries-old switchback trails or “chains” that historically helped to divide farms and provide a mountain path for farm animals have recently provided inspiration and the theme for a body of work, entitled Within the Mountains. Nebula, the first work from this group of textiles, is owned by the Cooper Hewitt Museum.
Birgit Birkkjaer’s Ode for the Ocean is composed of many small woven boxes with items from the sea — stones, shells, fossils and so on — on their lids. ” It started as a diary-project when we moved to the sea some years ago,” she explains. “We moved from an area with woods, and as I have always used materials from the place where I live and where I travel, it was obvious I needed now to draw sea-related elements into my art work.”
“I am born and raised in the Northeast,” says Polly Barton, “trained to weave in Japan, and have lived most of my life in the American Southwest. These disparate places find connection in the woven fabric that is my art, the internal reflections of landscape.” In works like Continuum i, ii, iii, Barton uses woven ikat as her “paintbrush,” to study native Southwestern sandstone. Nature’s shifting elements etched into the stone’s layered fascia reveal the bands of time. “Likewise, in threads dyed and woven, my essence is set in stone.”
For Paul Furneaux, geographic influences are varied, including time spent in Mexico, at Norwegian fjords and then, Japan, where he studied Japanese woodblock, Mokuhanga “After a workshop in Tokyo,” he writes, “I found myself in a beautful hidden-away park that I had found when I first studied there, soft cherry blossom interspersed with brutal modern architecture. When I returned to Scotland, I had forms made for me in tulip wood that I sealed and painted white. I spaced them on the wall, trying to recapture the moment. The forms say something about the architecture of those buildings but also imbue the soft sensual beauty of the trees, the park, the blossom, the soft evening light touching the sides of the harsh glass and concrete blocks.”