BRATTLEBORO — “We all have an intrinsic feeling for the places where we stage our lives and dispense our days,” said Lisa Mendelsund in explaining the premise behind a new group exhibit, “Sense of Place.”
But in the stressful blur of today's society, “we may have forgotten to look for ourselves in those very spaces.”
Mendelsund, co-curator of the show at 118 Elliot Street Gallery, which “seeks to restore our feeling” for those spaces that fall below our radar in our daily lives, said the exhibit blossomed from a simple seed.
“I saw work that I loved,” she said.
The exhibit grew around a small painting by Lauren Y. Watrous. Mendelsund and co-curator Collin Leach - herself an artist and art instructor whose work is represented in the show - developed a theme that turned out to be flexible enough to accommodate art in a number of different media (from two-dimensional paintings to plastic arts to a forthcoming catalog of essays and poetry) in a wide range of size and scale (from “the intimate portrait to cinematically scaled work,” as the news release for the exhibit describes it).
“The interpretations of this idea range from the elegiac, commemorative, and intimately scaled,” Mendelsund said, citing a “vast mural” depicting a Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico City by Brattleboro artist Jana Zeller.
An artist from farther afield is Ben Ponté. The native Australian now lives in New York City, and “his oil paintings of subway platforms and deli counters are instantly recognizable in terms of place but have the added patina of an ex-pat's lens,” Mendelsund said, comparing Ponte's urban caricature to 19th-century French artists Honoré Daumier and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Closer to home, Michaela Medina Harlow, who lives in Halifax in a cabin, “has for 20-odd years been chronicling the seasons in pastel on graphite,” Mendelsund said.
“Delving through her prodigious and accomplished archive has been deeply inspiring to me,” she added. “I can think of few things more rewarding than getting to share work of this caliber.”
Other artists represented in the show include Ross Thurber of Brattleboro, Finn Campman of Putney, Jennifer Brunton of Marlboro, and Steve Redmond.
Far-flung art shows
For the past year, Mendelsund, a yoga teacher and art historian and reviewer, has been curating shows at 118 Elliot.
Mendelsund described the themes of previous shows at 118 Elliot as “far flung,” including an “all women's show with 12 artists who showed the rawer aspects of their work, the sort of work that doesn't usually make it onto a gallery floor.”
Following that exhibit was a three-artist live-action painting show, “This Is Happening Now,” a throwback to the Happenings Movement in 1950s and 1960s New York with artists like Jackson Pollock, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Mendelsund, who studied art education at New York University, observed that she has been curating art shows beginning with “little pop-ups out of my dorm rooms in college” at age 18.
“My father was a New York sculptor and my mother, an art historian, so this was in our drinking water,” she said.
The show also includes sculpture by Mendelsund's father, Ben, whom she described on the show's Facebook event page as “an architect turned sculptor with an exceptional sense of space and also place.”
Ben Mendelsund, who died in 1991, “was not a man who traveled far and wide, preferring the pit of his studio, the steel yards, his own mind,” her post continued.
“This was something he taught by example about place,” she continued, “that whatever it is we think we need to do in our lives - we should be able to do those things anywhere.”